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These kinds of conversations always devolve.

"Torture is bad and should be abolished".

"Well, what about this other, very contrived situation where it's good?"

You can use that non-sequitur to justify literally anything. "Murder, slavery and rape is bad". "Well, what about this situation where it did good?"



That's why law is hard. Even the contrived situations occur.


No. There is no "difficult moral conundrum" about torture, nor slavery, nor rape, nor genocide.

There are only people who inexplicably insist that a tortured non-sequitur is a pro-torture counterfactual.


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.




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