Can I call the person who's against torturing terrorist
prisoners "humane"?
It depends. If by that torture others could be saved from a
worse torture, death, then if I use my compliment-word I'm saying that more
torturing is better than less torturing. The world won't let me talk that way.
Suppose that torture won't
save anybody from death. If a person is for it is he "inhumane"?
No, not if he thinks it will save
lives. The right word for him is "mistaken" — or
"uninformed" or "misguided," or, at a lower level,
"stupid."
There are many vital questions here — whether the imprisoned
terrorist's suffering will in fact save others, what the probabilities are, how
high they have to be — that don't test for humanity or inhumanity. They test
for knowledge and intelligence.
Thus as others are calling President Bush "cruel"
and "bloodthirsty" for his support of water-boarding I can call him
"humane." I am saying nothing about his knowledge and intelligence.
I was just thinking about this the other day. What if you can't get info any other way? What if the info is critical for avoiding future deaths? But can you trust the information? Yikes. I found I really don't know how to think about it.
ReplyDeleteThere are so many ifs. You don't want go around torturing without a pretty good chance of a payoff, but the payoffs are so hard to figure. Can you trust the information, that's a big question. Ron Kroutel raised it too. To test for use of words I just assume "yes" answers and go ahead.
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