| steven787 said: It's not idealism in the rhetorical sense. It's an ideal, sure. But it's a realistic one. We can choose our behavior. We choose to torture or not to torture. From John Winthrop to Presidents Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy, George W. Bush and every president in between says that we should be an example to others (in one way or another), that we are the greatest, a people of ideals. By the US using waterboarding we are then saying that that is our example. Will the United States still exist? Yes, of course it will. It will just be doing evil things. The idea of the United States started as a way to eliminate Tyranny. |
I hate to sound like a broken record, but I think this is again a fallacious proposition. It's not a case of evil or no evil. I see it as a case of the lesser of two evils. By choosing not to torture you condemn people to die, by choosing to do it, you can save lives. Either choice is evil to me, even in the scenario where you're rushing left or right to save one of two lives I would say the person is left with a no-win proposition because either way they are choosing death for one person, or at worst making no choice and both die. But in the case of an imbalance of say 500 to 1, or 5 million to 1, you can certainly say one decision is better than another.
That's really what it boils down to for me, the one true or false proposition of would you choose to save the 1 person or the 5 million people? You're correct to avoid answering because there is only one answer, you save the 5 million people, but to actually say that concedes the point that many lives have more value than a few lives. Is that callous to say? Yes, but it is true. Should you try to acheive both? Absolutely, I am all for an effective alternative if anyone has one.
The reason I think it was idealistic is because I don't think it is possible, let alone reasonable, for a nation to be guilty of no evil. And not from a "well they do it so we can too" perspective, just intrinsicly the choices a country makes will leave it choosing between the lesser of two evils like this situation. It's idealistic to think a country can completely avoid it, life has catch 22 situations, because it isn't fair. The question is whether you do the best you can and walk the straightest path your "moral compass" (hate that phrase actually) sets for you. I think waterboarding is that straightest path and I think allowing people to die through inaction is the more evil path of the two paths.
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| To Each Man, Responsibility |
