Tick Tock

I know we've covered this plenty already, but Kieran Healey puts some more nails in the coffin of the ticking time-bomb excuse for torture:

[I]t’s because it’s an effective slippery-slope. If you get me to agree to torturing someone when there’s a ticking bomb, then how hard is it to get me to agree to the following case: we’ve picked up ten guys for questioning but only one of them has the true information. We don’t know which one, so we have to torture the lot. Isn’t torture still justified? Think of the children who’ll be incinerated in that nuclear explosion. Preventing that is surely as close to an infinite payoff as we can manage. Now, it has to be true that the more suspected terrorists we pick up, the greater the certainty we have that at least one of them has the relevant vital information. And maybe the bomb won’t go off this afternoon, but they’re certainly building it. At least, they certainly want to build it. Pretty soon you have me agreeing to just rounding people up on the off chance that they know something unspecified—or know someone who might know something—about an unspecified plan to harm us all. And this is what the systematic practice of torture looks like in actual practice anyway.

What just about about every torture excuse has in common is this: If the groundrules are such that any stipulative tinkering with the ontological and ethical scales is permissible, then virtually any outcome can be justified. If that sounds like a definition of sophistry, it's because it is.