Tortured Logic

So, I have to admit that I'm a bit confused at Scott Adam's take on discussions about torture. He posted a question, would you sacrifice an entire city to avoid torturing one man, and then declared some sort of "knockout" victory when people didn't want to answer that question.

Why must that question be answered "honestly" before any other discussions can occur, other than it's his blog and he can play that way if he wishes? It does nothing to establish anything about torture other than perhaps the person answering is willing, or is not, to go exactly that far. It's a useless metric in my mind and the fact that he declares victory when you don't answer makes no sense to me. The question is loaded like a semi-automatic shotgun with the magazine restrictor removed since it implies that torture "works." In Scott's case it would "save" a city.

Why don't we ask if torture works before we ask people how far they will go with it? If it doesn't, the question almost answers itself, no? If it does, which by all accounts it doesn't (even the crooks in Reservoir Dogs know what you get from a torture subject), should we first ask why we don't already do it? I mean if we want to have real, honest debates about a topic why start out with all these assumptions? Cart? Horse? Any order will do these days?

If Scott is doing what I think he's doing, this is all just another of his "thought experiments," as I doubt that he isn any more capable of killing a man with a power drill than I am. Maybe Scott should just ask people if torture is an acceptable form of vengeance, since that seems to be the only thing that it has proven itself effective at. I think that would get a lot more honest answers and provoke a "debate" as heated as his one about it magically working to save entire cities.

Better still, Scott can start a "modest proposal" category on his blog. I suggest the first post be about eating babies. D'oh! Scott just scored a knockout on me...