TWO POINTS ON TORTURE

1) Kieran Healy writes:

It’s a lot easier to speculate about the pros and cons of torture in the abstract than when it’s clear to all that your government has actually been torturing people to no great purpose and its legal staff has been looking for ways to rationalize its actions. While “ticking bomb cases” are all very well for uncovering your own moral intuitions about torture, they have essentially nothing to say about the institutionalization of torture within the machinery of the state.

2) And Zack writes:

This ["ticking time bomb"] hypothetical has been invoked lots of times by supporters of torture. However, it assumes perfect information: We know an attack is coming, but not when, where, what; we have a guy in custody who we know that he definitely knows about the attack; and he’ll tell us about the attack when tortured. In the real world, we never have that information. The guy we have in custody might be innocent or our intelligence about a terrorist attack might be wrong, etc.

(once again, via the Poor Man)

There's a strange parallel between the limits on the applicability of hypotheticals and the limits on the desirability of promulgating rules that specify when the executive might act counter to established rules of law.