Torture & War: Ethics vs. Excuses vs. Idiocy.

previously on x-men torture the military
and the police using torture is it ethically acceptable to torture one person in order to extract information in order to compel a confession that could save the lives of 100 people so typical scenario still today in 2019 the police or the military are asking themselves whether or not they should torture someone who is this a suspected terrorist because there is the possibility that this will reveal information that will save a hundred people's lives that will prevent a terrorist attack this is an ethical question this is a matter of de ontology this is a matter of right and wrong this is a matter of doing the right thing because the right thing to do so from my perspective this kind of pleasure pain and calculus just the original terms used by John Stuart Mill this idea of net happiness is totally irrelevant okay either procedurally torture is correct or incorrect okay okay I think he is making this conflation so we have to talk a little bit about like ethical theory in general you just accused me of making a conflation guess what Erin in the rest of the video that follows you utterly failed to demonstrate that I conflated anything with anything else I think before we do that though I think what he's doing is is something like this I think he's saying I think he's making the following argument calculating overall overall happiness is irrelevant to deontological assessments my argument is not that it's irrelevant my argument is that it's impossible so we could turn this around and we could summarize your position Aaron as being it's relevant to ethics only in as much as it's possible but oh wait you actually conceded the point at several different stages in this discussion that you agree with me that it's not possible because we can't know future outcomes we can't quantify happiness we definitely can't quantify happiness or pleasure in the same units that we quantify harm being done quick example Vietnam War was it justified was it a good idea was it a good plan to propose the United States invade and conquer Vietnam well if you do this [ __ ] pleasure or pain calculus if you look at it from an a utilitarian perspective you would have to compare the unit values of farmers being shot dead in their fields by Apache attack helicopters helicopters mowing down and massacring civilians you have to quantify that relative to the value of things like democracy and freedom of speech and happiness and pleasure in other vague senses sure wealth versus poverty the different socio-economic side effects having a communist versus capitalist regime that's real hard to quantify even in a situation that extreme I've never heard anyone seriously suggest that the utilitarian calculus is possible let alone plausible let alone philosophically or ethically important let alone politically useful in determining the rightness or wrong as the decision to commence the Vietnam War and why two reasons let me repeat myself one you cannot know the consequences of your actions and you already conceded this point you already agreed with me we're not talking with the situation of a hypothetical time traveler in a science fiction novel who comes back into the past in the future and knows exactly what's gonna happen if result of he's out of each action and therefore can speak to the good and evil the amount of pleasure and pain generated from each decision made in history tons of people began the war in Iraq thinking as soon as the United States and conquered Iraq there'd be regime change similar to what happened the Japan bird meat in Japan at the end of World War two similar would happen in the creation of the South Korean Democratic regime but all the Americans would have to do was march conquer and then let the local people take over and run their own democracy that's not what happened in Iraq that's not what happened in Afghanistan that may be incredibly jejune or naive but an imbecilic george w bush really believe it george w bush was surrounded by counselors and advisors who foresaw consequences that turned out to be completely fictional that from my perspective were irrational but from their perspective it was rational and made sense therefore a utilitarian style pleasure pain calculus is never going to be useful in determining whether or not the United States should invade Iraq Afghanistan or Vietnam it does not work and the other point that I think you have conceded also is that you can never quantify pleasure and this is a problem already for John Stuart Mill what does pleasure mean in what sense can human enjoyment or Felicity it will be compared to palpable physical harm you never return to the one example that is set out here that you're answering you're supposedly answering the question of whether or not it can be justified to torture someone to death in order to gain military intelligence now if you could see the future if you knew for a fact that the military intelligence you'd gain by torturing someone to death would lead to defusing a bomb and saving exactly 10,000 people's lives that would be different but you don't know that you concede at this point you could torture someone and you could get intelligence that's entirely false you could torture someone and get intelligence that's truthful but useless the one thing you know for certain is if you torture someone you're doing very real harm and what you're comparing it to is a very unreal and hypothetical benefit but we have the further fundamental profound problem that the benefits you're talking about pleasure and happiness really are things like the enjoyment human beings find in eating meat they enjoy eating steak they enjoy eating beef and it's very different to contrast and compare that enjoyment with any unit value with any number assigned to it compared to the ecological harm done compared to the torment the animal has to endure so on and so forth okay the question is not whether or not it is relevant or irrelevant to consider utilitarian pleasure pain calculus in ethics and in politics the question is whether it's possible or impossible and you already conceded that I'm right on this and you agree 90% if not a hundred percent overall overall happiness is irrelevant to deontological assessments of the rightness or wrongness of an act 2,000 years later chuckling overall happiness is irrelevant to ethics so first thing we need to notice that this argument is invalid even if this premise is true that's not enough to guarantee that this premise is true do you believe we live in a world in which that calculus is possible do you believe we live in a world where there is a falsifiable objectively real number that governments can assign to the value of torturing someone to death and the government of Switzerland and the government United States and the government of Canada and the government of Scotland and the government of Saudi Arabia when they do the math they all come up with the same number do you really believe that this calculus exists do you really believe that I am in the position of denying the relevance of this calculus to moral ethical and political questions or are you conceding the point that this calculation this equation never has exists it never has been possible it never has been useful in political debates including when different nations debate their policy on torture and extraordinary rendition and what intelligence services do that in fact this is only a notion that has existed in the libraries of academic philosophy and in the chalkboards of university classrooms do you concede that point or not I think you do I think you're just being an [ __ ] I think you're just trying to impress the audience with your knowledge of textbook philosophy that is completely unrelated to the argument I'm really making because you never come back to the fundamental question you never commit to saying that yes you believe you should torture a person to death that yes you believe you should launch a war on the basis of this kind of imaginary calculus you never come forward and say that you think there's something real and true and quantifiable and verifiable that's revealed by creating this kind of equation that this kind of equation is not just an exercise in self-defense and that's my position that's what it is if someone tells you don't worry about the harm done by opening a new casino don't worry about the harm done to people's lives by opening a new casino because I'm confident but the pleasure created by the casino the value of the entertainment is greater than the harm being done there is no way for that claim to be anything other than hollow propaganda if someone tells you don't worry about the harm done by torturing people to death because I'm confident the number of lives saved the amount of enjoyment pleasure the the benefits of Western society the greatness of America I'm sure that the benefits are quantifiably so much greater you know it's a lie you know it must be propaganda it never can be true both because the consequences are unknowable and because as I've said what you call happiness what you call pleasure what you call benefit in these scenarios has no unit it cannot be counted and the reason is that he we haven't been told that the ontology is the correct theory there are other theories of how ethics works so for example let's say here's rush Schaefer Landau's book he then rambles on to basically say that he knows the names of some books and some authors and he makes absolutely zero effort to relate these authors that he's citing to the argument I made or to any of the problems I've presented but he doesn't say oh and this is relevant to solving the problem of governments committing torture in a democratic society or governments deciding to build casinos even though they know cosima casinos do real harm and the benefits of the casino are much more debatable like what is the meaning of happiness and entertainment in the context of gambling building a casino is not really comparable to building a sewage treatment plant but governments elect to do these things so again sincerity is a problem salience is a problem and he never does back up his claim or his threat that I'm guilty of conflating something he started this by saying that I was guilty of a conflation error there was no conflation in my argument and your argument it's worse than true or false it's just irrelevant the only positive thing I can say about this interaction with Aaron Yarnell the only positive thing I can say is that it reminds me of the reasons why I'm glad that I haven't been stuck in an academic career for all these years I'm glad that I'm not in a ph.d program right now because I don't have to put up with morons like you Aaron I don't have to be flattering and obsequious towards you I don't have to treat you as a colleague I can tell you straight to your face you were too stupid to play this game you sound like you're on psych meds I hope that you are I hope that you're on neuroleptics I hope that you're on heavy antidepressants or anti-psychotic drugs I hope because then you can quit and you can get better if you're not on psych meds homie I'm sorry you're stuck with this this is who you are for the rest of your life enjoy your PhD enjoy your MA enjoy your mysterious charitable foundation you've graded for the teaching of public philosophy because you suck at it you're a great example of someone who's chosen to focus on your own area of greatest weakness I mean really people like to disrespect my truth but the fact is that you know my name is I don't know