The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy discusses a real case where a car thief stole a car with a child in the backseat. The car thief had abandoned the car somewhere, and, as it was summer and daytime, the child was going to cook to death in the car. The police detain the thief and ask him where the car and child is, they offer to reduce his charges, and he denies it was him though they have him on video stealing the car. The police decide to beat the guy until he reveals where the car is. They do and he does. Would you say the police did anything wrong?
There's always this. "Is it okay in this highly unusual circumstance where I set it up so that obviously the right answer is to behave terribly?". The world is replete with these questions.
The problem is that these quandaries are then used to justify shitty behavior in other circumstances. What percentage of cop beatings save lives versus total cop beatings? 0.2%? 0.02%? What's the point of your question? What does the knowledge that you will be beaten if a cop suspects you of a terrible crime do to your state of mind? To the safety of police officers? To society?
I'm concocting a situation that I would like you to consider. Answer, please, with just as much gravitas. Let us imagine a society where beating or harassing anyone is absolutely taboo. In this society, no one need ever worry about physical violence. A woman could walk naked from Chicago to California never once being harassed. An elderly man could walk anywhere carrying a fat wallet of cash without fear of physical violence.
There is the rare and occasional thief, however. Now, one of these thieves steals a car and leaves a child baking in the sun in much the circumstances you describe. Beating the thief is the only possible way to save the child from a grizzly, horrendous, agonizing death, screaming alone for her mother.
But, once done, the beating breaks that taboo. Those police officers are a bit more likely to use violence to get what they want. It's a bit contagious, too. Other people begin to use violence. Bear with me, here. Let's say, because that taboo is broken, 100 more people are beaten over the next decade, and 1 or 2 of them die from their injuries. None of them "deserve" it.
Would you say it was worth it, to beat the man to save the life of that child, knowing that 1 or 2 people die and 100 are beaten, directly because of that?
We've each posed a scenario to the other. There is a difference though. My scenario is a real life event that actually happened. My scenario is a realistic and common sense instance about a moral choice with straightforward consequences. Beat a man to save a child. Your scenario, by contrast, is an unrealistic fantasy with magic consequences. You are asking "Would you do something good, if, by magic, doing something good caused something bad to happen?"
> My scenario is a real life event that actually happened.
Not really. It was a story that a philosophy book used to illustrate a conundrum. It bore resemblance to "actually happened" like a film "based on true events". Are we taking the word of the cops and philosophers or does the man himself have something to say about it? What would have happened if the cops didn't beat the man? We will never know.
But ok, let's grant it, for the sake of argument. For our purposes, it is the unvarnished reality, precisely as the book said. The cops had to beat the man or the child would have died.
The beating of the man had unknown consequences, however, and the construction of the scenario elides them. Is it worth it to live in a society where cops beat thieves to extract information from them? We don't have to guess. Look around you (I mean, assuming you live in the US or similar country in that respect). Do cops only beat men to extract life-saving information from them? The unintended consequence of "it's okay to beat this man just this once" is readily apparent. It never is just the once in that exceedingly rare scenario, is it?
Now, you can answer my question. In the magical society where cops do not beat people, but then do, is 100 beatings and 1 or 2 deaths worth the life of 1 child?
It's a real case that went to trial in New Zealand. The car thief was on video stealing the car, he confessed to stealing the car (admittedly under torture), and he was able to locate the stolen car and child.
As it happens, we know what would've happened had the police not beat him, because they tried that first. The man refused to say where the car was. He would rather let a child die than admit to car theft. Of course, maybe, if they had let the child die a magic genie would've prevented all future crime - it's as plausible as your hypothetical - so maybe the police did wrong after all...
As for your question my moral judgements are tuned to reality, not nonsense fantasy land. I don't have a strong sense of what is right and wrong in a universe that does not obey causality as I know it. I would, however, be willing to beat the thief if it were my child in the car.
Cops beat people quite often in the US, and exactly zero-point-never times is it to save the life of a child. Yet for some reason, you find it necessary to bring up that one time in New Zealand to justify torture. I'm sorry, but I find that baffling. Seems to me very much not tuned to reality, but maybe we should just agree to disagree here.
The original comment of yours that I replied to says that "torture = bad" and that all that separates good and bad people is principle. I have two reasons for challenging this. First, it's just not true. Torture, in some cases, is completely justified. These cases are both hypothetical (you need to find the dirty bomb going to kill millions) and real (beat a car thief to save a child). Second is to question the underlying principle that makes torture usually immoral.
I can ask it no clearer: Given that your counterfactual is an exceedingly rare edge case, why do you feel it is important to counter the valuable moral heuristic of "torture=bad"? What are you gaining by doing that?
Yes, obviously. At the very least, they very obviously broke a law. They should file charges against themselves. The legal system is not absolute and a court / jury can decide about extenuating circumstances.
I can think of few laws that don't allow me to construct some extremely hare-brained counterexample where it might be morally justified to break them.
It's not obviously wrong to break a law to save a child's life though. In an extreme example, would you speed to take a dying child to the hospital? I think it would be wrong if you would refuse to (unless you had some calculation that speeding would make you less likely to save the child).
Laws are ethics - they are rules that tell us how to act. Right and wrong are descriptions of morality - which is about good and bad. It's certainly a violation of the clearly established rules to beat a man to save a child, but it's not obviously wrong to do so. I would say it's not wrong at all.
>It's not obviously wrong to break a law to save a child's life though.
I don't think that's a fair interpretation of what was said. The claim made was that they broke the law, which is wrong to do on deontological grounds, especially for the institution tasked by society with enforcing the law. They may be justified by utilitarian ethics, but a police department setting the precedent of "if we believe the need is great enough, we are free to ignore the law" is both wrong and illegal. That's the fundamental principle at stake here - the same base argument that leads governments to suspend civil rights for the sake of security. "It is terrible for these people to die, so we need more power to prevent it." A ratcheting system that cedes ever more ground to autocratic forces. It's not like this process has been particularly hidden from us; there are many here who remember the US before the PATRIOT Act was put in place, after all.
The cost of not beating this thief might have been a child's death. The cost of beating him is instilling a norm that police have the right to beat prisoners. And because the change in societal norms is so slow, and the grief of a dead child so sudden, this always seems like a good trade. You would be a monster for saying that the rights of a car thief are worth a dead child. Until police prisoners have no rights. Until political prisoners have no rights. Until people have no rights.
End-to-end encryption is evil! Only a criminal would want to hide their activities from the police! A social credit system rewards pro-social activity and prevents instability! This state of emergency is only temporary - life will return to normal very soon! A surveillance state is much safer than a free one. As long as you have no issue with the state.
The civil rights we benefit from are measured in the blood of innocents. As cold-hearted as it is to say, if we are not willing to allow innocent people to die to protect civil rights, we will not have them for long.
> The claim made was that they broke the law, which is wrong to do on deontological grounds
That...depends on your chosen deontological framework. In deontological ethics some acts are morally obligatory (or prohibited) independent of their effects on human welfare, but which acts are obligatory or prohibited depends on the deontological framework selected.
You could select a deontological framework where “obedience to the letter of the law” is always morally obligatory, but I think most people who subscribe to deontological ethics would nonetheless reject that framework.
Certainly, but it appeared to me that the post claiming that what the police did was wrong was indeed operating from the framework that a police department not subjecting itself to the laws it upheld was wrong in the deontological sense. Hence the claim "Yes, obviously. At the very least, they very obviously broke a law. They should file charges against themselves." That's not a utilitarian statement - it operates from the framework that the action itself regardless of circumstances was wrong, and while a jury or judge could exonerate them, they still have the duty to place themselves under arrest.
As long as the police are willing to face a jury for their crimes, it is fine. A jury will probably let them off but the police can not be judge and jury because the line keeps moving.
I feel like these situations make the implicit assumption that violence is the ONLY possible way when it is in fact just the easiest and fastest way, with very mixed and inconsistent results. In the given situation wouldn't the obvious thing be to offer him total immunity? Was making sure he was punished for something worth the life of the child? What if he had given them incorrect info just to make the beating stop?
I would say yes they were in the wrong. It was a bad choice even if its one I would likely make myself. Maybe the insistence that morality is strictly on a continuum from "good" to "bad" is part of the issue.
This is very different and clear cut case. I will leave it to legal scholars to debate whether the police was justified. Trying to compare this to a case when the guy is being tortured for training purposes is sick.
In theory since the case is so trivial they could be convicted and immediately given complete presidential pardon with clean record or whatever is the equivalent.
Or jury nullification can be used. There would be no way I as a juror would declare them guilty.
My comment was in response to the "torture = bad" part of the parent comment, not an attempt to justify using detainees to practice your torture techniques.
He was also tortured in a "regular" way on a basis of being relative. And he is still tortured - what else do you want to call keeping him in for so many years without charges and trial. Any way you spin it it is sick. And what good did it do? Care to share accounts of people saved from an imminent death by torturing this guy?
That's one viewpoint. In some situations, it allows innocent people to die in large numbers. That's part of the moral situation too. Ignoring it, insisting it's all black-and-white, is easy from an armchair.
Yes the police are in the wrong for torturing him. If the thief says nothing and the police find the car with a dead child inside he gets murder charges added to his grand theft auto charges. This is already the established law when a death occurs during the commission of a felony. It's why get away drivers for a bank robbery can be charged as well with the murders that happened at others' hands inside the bank.
You attack the problem with the rule of law, not unleashing your justice system from the reins of lawful behavior whenever they internally deem it convenient.
Literally our entire justice system is built on the idea that the only ethical option is that victims and families of victims don't decide the flow of our justice process, and in fact require anyone who is too close to the victims to recuse themselves.
Turning it around, how would you like if the police tortured your child in a case of mistaken identity? Looking at the members of my high school class who became cops, they weren't exactly known for being the brightest bulbs in the box, but always acted with confidence despite that.
> Literally our entire justice system is built on the idea that the only ethical option is that victims and families of victims don't decide the flow of our justice process
No, it's not, and the divergence between reality and this description is increasing, essentially monotonically, over time, with legal incorporation of “victim’s rights” into the criminal justice process.
That's not to say it shouldn't be as you describe, just that it isn't.
Victims rights stop at the boundaries of the rights of the accused. They boil down to being explicitly notified of changes of public information like court dates and release dates, the ability to be present for public proceedings, and reaffirming their protection from the accused WRT instruments like restraining orders.
No, actually the entire point. Feeling specially protective of children is built into parents. Non-parents may not feel the same way. Its obvious really.
Interesting. Imagine that you were the car thief, and did not know about a child, what reason would you have to believe the police? They lie and apply torture to get confessions after all.
Saving the child would be the consequence of the wrong action. It just happens that this particular consequence is the desired one. This doesn't magically transform the ethical value of an action. Thinking otherwise ("Finis sanctificat media") is the root of all kinds of evil in the world.
Should they have done it (acted wrongly)? I don't know, they have their own free will.
