Tony Hatfield's Retired Ramblings

Is Dr Pangloss really dead?

François-Marie Arouet-Voltaire

Voltaire wrote this letter shortly after the Lisbon earthquake. This “Act of God” killed an estimated 70,000 out of a population of 185,000, many of whom were attending the mass. It occurred on All Saints Day 1755.

Les Délices, November 24, 1755

This is indeed a cruel piece of natural philosophy! We shall find it difficult to discover how the laws of movement operate in such fearful disasters in the best of all possible worlds-- where a hundred thousand ants, our neighbours, are crushed in a second on our ant-heaps, half, dying undoubtedly in inexpressible agonies, beneath débris from which it was impossible to extricate them, families all over Europe reduced to beggary, and the fortunes of a hundred merchants -- Swiss, like yourself -- swallowed up in the ruins of Lisbon. What a game of chance human life is! What will the preachers say -- especially if the Palace of the Inquisition is left standing! I flatter myself that those reverend fathers, the Inquisitors, will have been crushed just like other people. That ought to teach men not to persecute men: for, while a few sanctimonious humbugs are burning a few fanatics, the earth opens and swallows up all alike. I believe it is our mountains which save us from earthquakes.

Tout est pour le mieux indeed.

Thought for the Day-13th November 2009

'Apart from  logical cogency, there is to me something a little odd about the ethical valuations of those who think that an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent Deity, after preparing the ground by many millions of years of lifeless nebulae, would consider Himself adequately rewarded by the final emergence of Hitler and Stalin and the H-Bomb'

Bertrand Russell-Why I am not a Christian ed P Edwards 1957

Intelligent Design Zoo

Nothing to stop you from putting one of these in your garage!

The Root of all Evil

I've just finished watching the second part of Richard Dawkins' two parter on Channel 4 The Root of All Evil".
I came across Dan Jones' magisterial critique if the first part here
He promises to complete his dissection of  Part 2 -it's worth bookmarking the blog.

The Ticking time-bomb.

For those members of Opus Dei who aren’t brave enough to tie the piece of barbed wire to their thighs can I suggest the Moral Maze   as a suitable alternative to corporal mortification ?
This week the issue was torture. And it wasn’t long before the Saintly Mel P charged into the “ticking time bomb" hypothesis.
It’s comes direct from a 24 hour script. Jack-Ends Justifies the Means- Bauer has just captured the terrorist who has planted a nuke in New York-somewhere- the clock is ticking down. When it explodes it would wipe out tens of thousands. Would you use torture to extract the information to stop the massacre?

No such scenario has existed in the world outside Jack Bauer’s. But m/s Phillips was let off too easily.

When the ticking time-bomb challenge is offered to you, just ask exactly what torture is intended. It’s no good chucking out torture without defining the word. To what lengths would the torturer be prepared to go to extract the information? How about amputating the right leg without any anaesthetic, and then pouring a bottle of nitric acid into the stump? Then do the same with the left leg? Imagine your captive suffers from congenital analgesia, a rare condition that leaves him unable to feel pain. Why not wheel in his wife and kids threaten, then perform, the same surgery on each in turn? What about gathering his entire village together- remember the bomb would kill thousands of innocent people-and get the knives ready for them all?  In order to save the lives there must be no limit to the level of cruelty you are prepared to reach, providing your intention is to save more lives than you will destroy;more pain will be prevented than you inflict.

Both the hypothesis and the counter hypothesis are loopy. The ticking time bomb does not exist outside fiction. Using torture does not end up in saving tens of thousands of innocent lives. It ends up with the squalid business conducted  in Abu Ghraib  and Guantánamo. And with the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice flitting  around European capitals, employing, according to the Washington Post via  LA Times ,"the same legalistic jujitsu and morally obtuse double talk that led the Bush Administration into a swamp of human rights abuses in the first place".

Torture- The philospher's view

I’ve posted here a few times about the legalities of torture.  I’ve mentioned nothing about about the philosophical issues torture raises- perhaps that only refllects thirty odd years as a lawyer.

Last month The Philosphers’ Magazine website contained a piece in the Provocations section titled  “Torture and Terror” by Michael LaBossiere. Having reviewed the evidence for and against the effectivemess of torture, he concludes: 

“From a moral standpoint, if torture were to prove effective as a means of reducing terrorist activity then it could be argued that the use of torture is morally acceptable. The gist of the argument is that the moral harms of threatening and utilizing torture are outweighed by the moral consequences-namely a reduction in terrorist activity.

While this argument has a certain appeal, it faces three problems. First, it seems likely that adopting torture and the threat of torture as weapons would be morally harmful to the society in question. To see that this is likely, one needs to merely consider the nature of societies that have already embraced the use of torture. Second, the use of torture as a means of coercion and intimidation certainly seems to be a form of terrorism. As such, the reduction in one type of terrorism would be, ironically, offset by the increase in another. Third, terrorism is denounced as a moral evil and its alleged opponents, such as George Bush, seem to revel in claiming the moral high ground. However, a society that accepts the use of torture cannot claim the moral high ground-they are walking the same ground as the terrorists. Thus, it would seem that the use of torture is not morally acceptable.”

The entire article can be found here