It's very disappointing that you don't believe in the right of secession.
"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them... it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." - Declaration of Independence

You are clearly advocating some kind of intrinsic goodness to laws, rights, etc. Something like a Kantian picture emerges, where these rights or codes are analogous to laws of nature. Which is where your treatment of the doomsday scenario is really intriguing. You say: "in the limiting case, the very institutional fabric that supports the law and morality of which the absolute prohibitions are a part will be destroyed." I wonder if this could be formalized in a way that would pin the consequentialist of focusing solely on limiting cases. It seems that there remains an issue about what basis we find for our values: are they valuable simply because of their nature, or are they valuable because they are so beneficial for society?

A fine article -- and thanks for using "torture" instead of one of the familiar euphemisms for it. But I quibble over one point: John assumes that, like Lincoln, Bush/Cheney acted "under the fear of incredible immanent [sic] danger." It's becoming increasingly clear that the real purpose of the torture regime was to extract "evidence" that Iraq had ties to Al Qaida and/or was building WMD's. The reliability of that evidence was seemingly of no concern as long as it supported the case for an invasion that was already planned.

"It's very disappointing that you don't believe in the right of secession."
The writer of this comment to the torture topic has taken the Declaration of Independence out of context. The Declaration was written by Jefferson (and edited by Franklin and Adams) as a letter to the King of England to justify their desire to break from the English Crown. You could not apply the Declaration literally to the right of people to separate from the government. Just like you can't take the statements in the constitution of Free Speech, The Right To Bear Arms etc literally. There are exceptions to the rule.
I enjoyed the blog about torture. First, however, I take exception to the end where the author is confused as to why "Smart" people like Rice and Powell were involved in a "Disastrous" Bush administration. This is a personal attack and it it bias. Since there is no way (at least I can think of) of measuring "Disastrous" it is purely a subjective word. That maybe your opinion but it is hardly a demonsratable fact. For every disaster a person could think of; another could find a positive.
现在，我想到了这一点。我不支持酷刑，但我相信伊拉克战争和反恐战争。自第一次海湾战争结束以来，我们一直与萨达姆·侯赛因处于战争状态。我们一直在执行禁飞区，并不时与他的军队发生冲突。包括克林顿政府时期乔治·布什总统访问科威特时企图暗杀事件。我还可以举出几个其他的理由，为什么我相信这场战争是正当的，为什么推翻了萨达姆?对伊拉克人、库尔德人、伊朗人和科威特人来说，30年的独裁者统治真是一场灾难!根据联合国的定义，萨达姆·侯赛因对库尔德人民犯下了种族灭绝行为。也许比不上希特勒或波尔布特;但他就在那里。此外，在过去的30年里，他对邻国和自己的人民发动了一场涉及酷刑的内战。 So, if I am not a hypocrite, then I can't justify our use of torture but not Saddam's. I don't consider myself an expert; however, from what I know, Torture is not an effective interrogation tool. There will always be anecdotes to when it was used successfully; but overall it does not have the same consistency as other methods. We should, however, be careful in how we define torture. Is waterboarding torture, well, yeah! Is making someone stand for a long time to weaken their resistance to interrogation? Well, maybe not. We need to include that in the debate as well.

It's not self-evident that Dubya violated the Constitution. Yoo's position was that Dubya was empowered as commander-in-chief---obliged---to do what he must outside the boundaries of the United States. Further, it argued that as the al-Qaeders were un-uniformed "illegal combatants," Geneva didn't apply, and that it is the president whom the constitution empowers to interpret treaties.
Perhaps Geneva does apply anyway---or the Supreme Court will rule in a split decision that it does---but regardless, this will not make for a self-evident or philosophical truth.
布什政府在联邦法院的败诉很少(哈姆迪诉拉姆斯菲尔德案有国内影响，因为哈姆迪是美国公民——布什败诉的原因是法律上的一个不明确点，这是独一无二的)。
Now the Obama Administration asks Congress for legislative authorization to hold the Gitmo detainees in a similar "preventive detention" on US soil instead of Gitmo. However, this fig leaf of law will not speak to the underlying constitutionality and indeed, may be less defensible constitutionally than Gitmo with the US soil angle.
As for waterboarding being a war crime that the US itself has prosecuted, a poke through the books will show that large quantities of water were poured down the throats of the prisoners in those cases---not the same thing.
Your final argument, that the chief executive should [must] announce he's suspending the Constitution in times of emergency, well, the president is authorized to do that, but I believe only on American soil. The Yoo position was that the C-in-C is not bound by the same restrictions in war, or in a foreign theater. This is why the military codes of justice have been and are being invoked, and not the much stricter domestic ones.
Indeed this is the nexus of the muddle of the popular discussion---whether this is a C-in-C issue or a law enforcement one, as the rules are different.
As for torture as a philosophical question, it will come down to values; even if values aren't subjective in nature, they are certainly subjective in a practical sense in a democracy such as ours. As much as one side or the other tries to obviate the other side's arguments [that torture doesn't work will never be proved to the sincere satisfaction of all], there exists a genuine moral dilemma, weighing the infliction of suffering on one hand and the possible or probable deaths on the other [unprovable to the satisfaction of all either].
And while I appreciate the arguments on all sides---many of them valid---the denial of the existence of a genuine moral dilemma has been the greatest casualty of the search for truth in all this.
I did like the observation that we digitize truth these days---and law is a digitalization of truth---although truth will always remain in the analog realm. Digitalization yields only ones and zeroes, black and white, as it were. It is wise for us to remember that.

酷刑的奇怪之处在于，你可以强迫人们说出可能被证明是错误的事情。
It is not even a reliable method.
We should also reflect on psychological torture that is imposed on people within the family or the working environment.

我要质疑约翰·佩里关于银行抢劫是错误的说法。虽然“错误”经常用于犯罪，但它是不准确的，至少是模糊的。抢劫银行肯定是违法的。这是非法的，但为了称之为“错误的”，人们必须首先把这种情况放在他们的道德框架的背景下。伦理框架是一个人的文化的功能，这是高度可变的。但让我们假设人类应该如何对待彼此存在普遍的法则。那么，我们不得不问，在抢劫银行的行为中，究竟违反了这些道德准则中的哪一条(或哪一条)?另一方面，也许约翰·佩里只是忘了把副词“非法的”放在“错误的”之前。"

Ethical, schethical. Here's an ethical framework: "A species survives based upon how much future usefulness it creates vs. how many resources it consumes." I call this "Net Usefulness" or "Net Creativity".
Human behavior can be classified in two types: Utilitarian (basic needs and future needs) vs. Imaginary (societal mores, individual rights vs. societal agreements (laws and whether or not we obey them), and perceived realities/fears/emotions (lizard brain actions)).
What separates humans from other animals is our imagination. Everything else (toolmaking, talking, etc) comes out of the imagination generator of our nervous system responding to circumstances).
Torture is a social construct which violates another social construct. Individuals in particular circumstances may decide to ignore or obey those constructs as they respond to their senses in the Now.
Prison itself is a death sentence in a social species: an individual is removed from 'life' either temporarily or permanently. Once you put someone in prison, they don't exist and so, it doesn't matter what is done to them (from a societal standpoint). War is an expanded social construct version of prison, where another group is 'taken out' of the aggressor group's social circle by technical and/or propaganda means.
人类的行为远没有我们大多数人相信的那么故意。典型的行动是基于局部的敏感性和刺激反应。如果我们真的能读懂大脑的活动，我们就会发现，思维的“高峰”大部分时间是在我们行动之后，而不是之前。我们所做的东西。我们为做某件事找理由。这个顺序。
Instead of discussing torture, we should be discussing the waste of resources on prisons. Just give everyone a gun and let them shoot whomever pisses them off. Everyone would either be a better neighbor or a better shot. Social Progress is overrated and usually more consumptive than useful.

??? ???? ?????Now, that brings me to this point. I don't support Torture but I am a believer in the Iraq War and the war on Terror. We have been in a state of war with Saddam Hussein since the end of the first Gulf War. We have been enforcing a no-fly zone and have had periodic flare ups with his military...including the attempted assassination of President George Bush during his visit to Kuwait during the Clinton

philosophical writing blog

很棒的文章，很高兴看到一个强有力的哲学理由来谴责酷刑。

我要质疑约翰·佩里关于银行抢劫是错误的说法。虽然“错误”经常用于犯罪，但它是不准确的，至少是模糊的。抢劫银行肯定是违法的。这是非法的，但为了称之为“错误的”，人们必须首先把这种情况放在他们的道德框架的背景下。伦理框架是一个人的文化的功能，这是高度可变的。但让我们假设人类应该如何对待彼此存在普遍的法则。那么，我们不得不问，在抢劫银行的行为中，究竟违反了这些道德准则中的哪一条(或哪一条)?另一方面，也许约翰·佩里只是忘了把副词“非法的”放在“错误的”之前。"
It's wrong to steal other peoples money. It's wrong to stick a gun in someones face and demand money or they will be killed.

philosophical inquiry ~~~http://spectropoetics.com

“银行抢劫”和“酷刑”的类比并不恰当。前者完全是为了自己的利益，与后者形成鲜明的对比。偷钱给孩子做手术也不例外;“罗宾汉”的论点也是如此——我们的社会已经就财富再分配的方法达成了一致。此外，银行抢劫的错误之处在于它绝对违反了现代社会的基本原则——公民(银行、股东和储户)的财产权无缘无故受到侵犯。
Torture, and here I use this only in the context of attempting to extract information from someone who is uncooperative and strongly suspected to possess critical information, certainly violates the individual's rights. But that person has committed an egregious act and refused to cooperate.
Certainly, some people who are innocent or truly do not have information could be tortured. My point above is merely that on several levels, bank robbery and torture are radically different.
As to whether water-boarding is torture or not, consider that water-boarding does not cause permanent physical harm unlike other techniques. Medical ethics distinguish between passively and actively causing death -- between withdrawing life support or not using heroic measures, and administering a lethal dose of drugs. The former is letting Nature take its course, unlike the latter. What makes water-boarding difficult is that, unlike sleep deprivation (letting Nature take its course) or chopping fingers (actively causing permanent harm), water-boarding is active but temporary. As an aside, another key difference regarding the use of water-boarding in the Bush administration, a doctor was nearby at the ready.
That said, consider the following analogy: a police officer is walking by a house when he hears a gunshot from within. Under normal circumstances, the officer cannot enter the house without a warrant or without the permission of the home owner. Upon hearing a gunshot, exigent circumstances REQUIRE that the officer enter the house (a violation of 4th amendment in normal circumstances) rather than obtain a warrant. The onus falls on the officer ex post to verify that he had "probable cause."
Why can't we treat torture the same way? Let it be wrong all but epsilon percent of the time. When an interrogator uses torture, he will face severe penalties himself unless he demonstrates: (i) circumstances required immediate action; (ii) there was strong suspicion that the suspect had information; and (iii) other methods to obtain that information either had been tried or would not succeed in time to act on the information obtained.
Finally, it is imperative to keep in mind that any system operates within a larger framework. Having a set of policies as I just described or a set of policies as John Perry delineated each: (i) impact the moral authority (soft power) of the U.S.; (ii) they can deter or incite others to attack; and (iii) they change the behavior of those who are detained (prisoners who merely believe that they may be tortured may more readily divulge their private information than prisoners who know that they cannot be tortured).

Strict deductive logic involves a set of premises or postulates and deriving conclusions from same. The conclusions are in effect the necessary outcome of the premises taken together. The sticky part is invariably what are to be premises for the argument. Essentially by definitiion the premises cannot themselves be proven, certainly not from each other. Moral or ethical arguments, which presumably include the subject of torture, are best presented by explicitly stating the foundational premises and going from there. The conclusions tend to often be immediately evident at that point, especially if quantities and numbers can be introduced.
There is the common tendency however to fuzzy the line between deduction and premise and attempt to "prove the premise".
一种有助于理清这一切的方法可能是注意前提的特征:特别要区分实用主义和“原则”，前者是经验数据的问题，而后者总是武断的，除非诉诸于引用超自然的权威。
I suggest the following: Pragmatically, empirical statistics indicate that chopping 3 fingers has an 80% chance of deriving truth. The truth in quesion will absolutely affect eradication of 1000 innocent children. Principle: Greater than 695 children's lives are more valuable than 2 choped fingers but not more than 4 chopped fingers, provided likelihood of certainty of truth exceeds 55.8%.
It's possible these postulates can themselves be broken down into other ones, but eventually the premise buck has to stop.

毫无疑问，我同意这些结论实际上是综合所有前提的必然结果。你的博客信息量很大。
florence

在阅读了所有这些关于酷刑的有趣帖子后，我从来没有读到过对我们自己的士兵的对等待遇。我个人坚持的一个基本伦理观点是，以我希望被对待的方式对待别人(不是因为我是一个极端的宗教狂热分子)。如果我们纵容我们自己的政府这样对待我们，那么反过来，我们基本上同意其他国家在俘虏我们的士兵时也可以使用同样的待遇(假借战时需要的名义)。
就我个人而言，我花了9年的时间被各种各样的折磨，不是为了获取信息，而是试图操纵和控制我的思想和行为。这并没有使我更加合作，相反，我养成了一种强烈的固执，无论我经历了什么，我永远不会屈服，即使这意味着死亡。
The people we are dealing with in this war, welcome death, our soldiers do not. It is difficult enough on their families, having them coming home in caskets, how much worse would it be for them, if they knew that their loved ones had been tortured for months or held in captivity for years, before or if, their remains were brought back.
这是我们想要传达的信息吗?“如果你们需要能够拯救生命的信息，请不惜一切代价帮助我们的男女军人，因为我们肯定会帮助你们的。”我们是否可以用感知到的利益来为不人道的行为辩护?这就是我们希望被世界其他地方感知的方式吗?
The United States has stood strong and proud for generations, with good reason. Dare we begin to look at the reason's we are losing the respect of so many countries that once stood by us?
就我个人而言，我认为我们可以从我们的祖先(他们建立了这个国家)的梦想中学到很多东西，以开放的态度看待我们作为个人、国家和世界所面临的当前问题。
Torture is normally viewed with criticism, even when it pertains to animals, and is illegal and punishable by law. When I see the ravaged areas of Africa and how the woman and children have been tortured in the name of "War," my stomach turns. The roads to brutality, immorality, and lawlessness begin with one step, as with any other path. What path are we on?

也许这是一条“铁律”:“己所不欲，勿施于人”。很明显，虐待囚犯会增加报复的可能性。
人们应该根据这样的考虑来决定原则:对一个人的绝对权力，无论出于何种原因，要么意味着对这种权力的行使加以限制，要么不加以限制。
Speaking of numbers, it's like the Drake factor for other life in the universe: One must estimate not only the likelihood of torture to elicit infomation, but also speculate about someone actually knowing enough to justify attempting to ream even a fully "doomsday" revelation out of them.

rlh说得好。当我写道，我们实施的任何政策都是在更大的框架内实施的时候，煽动其他人报复美国是一个可能的后果。政策也会影响道德权威(也提到了)。
这一政策或任何政策都需要明确说明，并应在国际上达成一致——即新一轮的《日内瓦公约》。《日内瓦公约》中有一个漏洞，在经济学上通常被称为不完整的合同。该政策不适用于士兵，因此“另一方”不能合法地利用该政策对美国士兵犯下同样的行为。
上一轮日内瓦公约达成时，非国家战斗人员的能力有限，而且很少(如果有的话)对另一个国家的平民采取行动。伦敦、马德里、巴厘岛、雅加达、伊斯坦布尔和其他地方发生的袭击并非国内恐怖分子所为(如爱尔兰共和军、埃塔……)，他们是出于内部不满而反对政府;相反，它们本质上是跨国的——犯下这些罪行的人通常没有什么民族主义身份，他们针对另一个国家的平民，以影响外交政策的改变。
The Geneva Conventions cover these people in the same way that an insurance policy covers a person in the "acts of God" clause. It is a catch-all because it was a situation that either leaders felt was too unlikely or too difficult to conceive of or rendered the entire document too complex. These are the causes of incomplete contracts -- at what point do the negotiators cease determining rules of conduct and allocations of resources and reparations for low probability events?
It is morally repugnant to commit torture; it is also morally repugnant, and even irresponsible, for a state to refrain from judiciously using its power to protect its citizenry. A true moral dilemma.

A comment on the opinion on Mr. Slater (as quoted by John Perry) who writes:
"we should try to have Condi Rice on Philosophy Talk to talk about torture"
Yes, this is a very good idea, but only on condition that Ms. Rice speaks as a scholar, not as a former active policy-maker. I do not think that Philosophy Talk is an appropriate forum for politicians (failed or otherise) to defend their achievements. An objective discussion on torture with a distinguished scholar like Ms. Rice is worth taking the risk, but this requires some discipline from the callers, who should refrain from any intentions they might otherwise have of taunting Ms Rise with epithets like "torturer" or some equally polite appellations. Equally Ms Rice must not be too defensive about her political role and preferably make no reference to it at all.
幸运的是，我们有很棒的版主，泰勒和佩里，他们可以很好地处理这些事情。与德索维茨的讨论是这种讨论的一个很好的模型。还记得那个打电话的人吗，他说哈佛应该为教职工中有一个酷刑倡导者而感到羞耻。他没有得到太多的播出时间。他的评论在脱口秀节目上可能再合适不过了，但在广播哲学研讨会上就不合适了。事实上，他的评论实际上可能是正确的，但一旦一位有争议的思想家被邀请到哲学电台，他的观点就必须在演播室里被对待。干得好，肯和约翰。
Squabbling is not always the best method of philosophising. In Plato's Symposium Socrates and Aristophanes (supposedly not very friendly with each other) did not join the same table to squable, but discover the essence of love
Marek Witkowski
Warsaw
Sorry for my bad English

Really awesome posting..Law is strong and it should be maintained through out. Then only we can get good results..
http://legallaw.sosblog.com/llblog-b1/History-of-Law-Secretly-Unfolding-...

例如，当我考虑哈立德·谢赫·穆罕默德(Khalid Sheik Mohammad)的水刑在道德上是否被允许时，我发现它显然是被允许的。
我知道这是脱口秀的博客，虽然是哲学脱口秀，但我们真的要掩盖每一个重要的区别吗?中国伊朗亚洲杯比赛直播比如，我们把法律问题和道德问题分开。让我们把水刑问题和酷刑问题分开…至少在有人有力地论证水刑是一种酷刑之前是这样。但更奇怪的是，那些说水刑KSM是不道德的人甚至不能提出一个不援引“酷刑”的论点。我对折磨这个概念的神奇力量并不熟悉，以至于仅仅在一个人不好的论点中援引它就能把它变成一个好的论点。
Given what we know now, after the publication of Courting Disaster by Mark Thiessen, after all the attacks after Obama took office, how does hindsight not tell you that Bush was prescient about the danger that awaited us? Waterboarding works. That's a stubborn empirical fact. We saved hundreds, if not thousands of people, because we waterboarded KSM and others.
对一个参与了另一个恐怖阴谋的已知恐怖分子实施水刑——注意，这个阴谋已经开始了——怎么会侵犯人权或尊严?它是如何破坏民主结构的?它是如何败坏个人尊严的?当人们缺乏论据时，就会表现出这种空洞的观点。告诉我，在人们的实际生命受到威胁的情况下，有什么宝贵的哲学观念比他们无辜的生命更重要?布什政府做了应该做的事情。关于水刑，康迪·赖斯不需要道歉。我们应该感谢布什和他的整个政府，而不是我们对酷刑的无聊思考。