Kill 99, Save 100 (revision 5-22, the Dershowitz warrant)

You're in charge of an interrogation wing at an offshore military prison. You've been informed that terrorists are planning a bomb attack that will kill 100 people. You have identified 99 prisoners, each of whom, you believe, possesses a tidbit of information that, taken together, will allow you to sucessfully thwart the bomb plot. Your assistant has obtained a Dershowitz warrant to torture the prisoners as mercilessily as you please. In fact, you are almost certain that if you instruct your crack torturers to extract information from these 99 prisoners, they will kill them in the course of their investigations.

Do you have a moral objection to brutally torturing 99 people in order to save 100?

and then decide

of justice, and if we've got a warrant, who cares what he thinks?

But I might object to it on principle anyway. It's quite the ethical catch-22. In order to warrant being tortured, one must reveal oneself to be a genuine Robespierre....

legal thinking from Alan and expand his perspective on the issues.

It's always easy to propose torturing other people for the greater good.

But it's hard to argue against education.

Maybe Berkeley Law School can offer a course. Torture: How does it Feel? A practicum for 3 credits with Professor Yoo.

Fact is there are a lot of groups here in the US and our allies that have been using torture. Just last week a massive number of documents were declassified. Dershowitz is just "starting a necessary discussion" about torture to "put the behavior in context".

The above Kill 99 scenario is just that. Torture does not work, and it does not provide information. But scumbags are always fanatizing about ways they can justify. Any excuse will do.

Mine is a reducto ad absurdum on the theme of n-1 where n is how much human misery you expect to result from inaction. So, yeah, I mock Dershowitz's argument.

But I'm curious about the minority view here, those who feel that it would justifiable to kill 99 to save 100.

:shrug:

Dershowitz is sleazier than dog shit...

How about: Knowing there's a threat, you've gone out and detained 100 suspects. Do you torture all of them in the hopes that one will know something and will crack? If one swears he doesn't know anything, do you accept that or do you keep torturing? If he starts singing, can you trust a word he says or is it possible he's just saying it to stop the torture? If you don't trust him, do you keep torturing him to see if you can get to admit that he's lying get you to stop torturing him?

One problem with Dershowitz's idea of torture warrents is that cases where you *know* you have a guilty party and *know* that person has the information you're after have got to be as rare as hen's teeth. Give a government the power to torture people, and you end up with a situation like Iraq, where's they're pulling in the brother of the cousin of the next door neighbor of the possible suspect and jamming glowlights up his ass.

I may have just a little touch of Republican in me, but I've got this nasty suspicion that anytime you give the government a particular power, you have to expect that the power will be abused. Frankly, I'd rather take my chances with the (hypothetical) terrorists.

Whatever else Zacarias Moussaoui did that was criminally wrong, one thing he did not do was hijack an airplane and fly it into a building. It's a foolish conciet to believe you can prosecute and punish criminal acts before they have been committed. It's shocking to hear lawyers argue that the state can and should do exactly that.

if you know how many people are going to die, you would presumably also know the details of the attack, why not just move people away from the effected area?


but, ultimately...i think it is appropriate to kill 99 prisoners to save 100 innocents.
For me, it has to do with potential, as well. Prisoners presumably have little potential to advance humankind, while some innocents might, might not.

that's your presumption.

I think the same holds for their potential to do good. Of course, if you presume that they're worthless and treat them accordingly, that quickly becomes self-fulfilling. If you presume they have great potential and treat them accordingly, they may fail to meet your expectations, they may exceed them.

:shrug:

One way to think of it is that you're responsible for 199 lives, plus your own, naturally.

"You've been informed that terrorists are planning a bomb attack that will kill 100 people."

Clearly in the most recent case in point - intelligence itself is often faulty and subject to the interpretation of the one in charge. So this "what if" game can be played ad infinitem on both sides.

We can't use suductive fantasies to affect judgement and action when we have the real world facts available.

Shame on Alan Dershowitz.

(This is ONLY Hypothetical, and in no way is an endorsement of the idea, or a threat of any kind)

If someone were attempting to use hypothetical scenarios in an effort to excuse and rationalize torture by giving flimsy justification for the murder of some people to POSSIBLY prevent the murder of other people, thereby creating a dangerous environment not only for those involved, but for those who are close to the victims of the torture, the torturers, and other possible innocents, would that person be considered a dangerous enough propagandist to be jailed or killed to protect all of those who could suffer from using these poorly thought out tactics?

I don't think so, but they would be an incredible idiot.

Dershowitz is a moron.