Jonah: I took the point of the invocation of the ticking time-bomb scenario to be to respond to people who favor a flat moral prohibition on a certain class of techniques in an interrogation. The response runs: Well, if that’s your view, then you’d have to be willing to give up New York City rather than torture a terrorist when that torture would make it possible for you to avoid its destruction. And it seems to me that it’s the extreme nature of the hypothetical loss that does most of the work here. The scenario isn’t being used directly to justify the torture of terrorists in less extreme circumstances.
The hypothetical is designed to get the prohibitionist to see that he can’t really accept all the implications of his principle. The point of my hypothetical, about torturing innocents, was to show the anti-prohibitionist that he might not like the implications of his principle, either, or at least that he might have to refine his principle to avoid it. You write that I “should not assume” that anti-prohibitionists would support the torture of innocents. I don’t think I did that. I merely noted that to the extent their argument is that we should do whatever it takes to avoid losing a city, they would have to be willing to support it.
(You also write that “it becomes difficult to come up with a scenario where the torture of an innocent might be required” to stop a terrorist plot. Really? Your discussion of the topic assumes that the only purpose of such torture would be to extract information from the innocent party. But it is not at all hard to imagine guilty parties who would not break under torture but would break under the threat of someone else’s torture. This kind of scenario is not exactly unknown to the history of torture.)
Neither Andy McCarthy nor, I take it, you would countenance the torture of an innocent person under any circumstances, even if that means New York has to go. If that’s not an absurd conclusion–and it isn’t–then why is it absurd to conclude that while there are a great many things we can do to a terrorist who is withholding life-saving information, and we can do more to that terrorist than to an innocent party, there are nevertheless some things we cannot do, even at the cost of New York? And if that’s the case, what’s left of the usefulness of invoking the ticking time-bomb?
That is: There may be reasons to deny that there should be a flat moral ban on doing certain types of things even to terrorists. The argument that McCarthy and you make about torture vs. killing is one that I will have to think about. But the ticking time-bomb illustration doesn’t have the force that it is presented as having.
Rick Brookhiser, meanwhile, is quite right that the actual practice of torture, in likely real-world scenarios, is likely to lead to greater evils than the ones interrogators might commit in the ticking time-bomb scenario.