[ rofl no it doesn't. Torture is both wrong and unreliable. These are facts.

It always astonishes me that there are people willing to argue in favour of it. All this "would you torture to save this" nonsense is a ludicrous strawman argument. Would you violently rape a woman to save your mother's life? Would you torture a child to death to save your own? It's ridiculous. There's absolutely no justification for torture, ever. ]

And yes, if it meant saving innocent lives, I would do immoral things. Compromising my own sense of morality or innocence to prevent others from a horrible fate is something I could live with, however painful it may be

So policemen torture all the time when they made threats they never intend to make good on to people in the interrogation room. And don't tell me that doesn't happen, because I have several family members who have made lifelong careers out of police work that can testify that it and similar things happen fairly routinely.

Torture demands certainty of results to be even remotely justifiable; though it's still wrong.

Why does it demand certainty? Nothing in life is ever 100% certain, no police sting, no military raid, no arrest, no anything. Why is torture any different? As long as we're reasonably sure and the stakes are too high to ignore, why must we sit there and let people die for no reason?

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[ Morality aside? Morality should never be swept aside.It was swept aside during the previous administration years. It should be something they should always be held accountable for. And NEVER forgiven.Using torture is inexcusable. It is no better than the crimes they were being accused of. ]

So when your life depends on someone being tortured for information, I would like you to go up to the person due to be interrogated and tell them how much you're looking forward to dying because his captors will not torture.

[ Hence my point. In order to be willing to torture, you have to be willing to torture an innocent. If we are talking about the "ticking time bomb" scenario everyone throws out. It's going to look like a MacGruber sketch if you've got the wrong person. Torture is pointless unless you already know what the person you are torturing knows ]

Yes, just like there are innocent people thrown in jail or put to death in every country in the world every day. It's a risk we have to take, but of course we try to minimize the chances that such a person would ever be subjected to that

[ How does the interrogator "miminize" the risk of torturing an innocent if they don't know what the person to be tortured knows before they torture them ]

We need to have a good idea that the person in question has the information we need to know, of course, same as we'd like to be reasonably sure the person we're sending to jail or putting to death actually committed the crime we say they did. I don't see what you're arguing

I'm definitely someone who thinks war is a sad state for humanity to be in, and if it was possible in this world, I'd want us all to be pacifists. But since that's out of the question, we need to accept reality for what it is and work with that. Warping how things really are for the sake of your argument doesn't create anything but an illusion.

[ All you need to do is substitute the word paedophilia for the word torture in this thread to see what I'm saying. There is, after all, a section of society that says paedophilia is okay. ]

One is a sexual act that achieves nothing substantial, one is an intelligence-gathering act that can provide information to save lives. Completely different circumstances, and you bringing it up is no different from opponents of same-sex marriage comparing said institution to incest to drive a debate off track.

[ Okay, so, if someone says paedophilia is wrong and someone else says it's right, that's just a meaningless social construction. ]

Technically, yes. But of course we're from the society that says it's sickening and perverted, so it's not as if we're going to spring to its defense. Torture is a different issue entirely

[ It's proven that people will lie when tortured, that if they don't have the information wanted that they'll make it up in order to make the pain stop.]

And the same for normal interrogation to avoid being thrown in jail.

[ and what value do you put on a life. How many people have to be in danger to justify torturing someone? How many people do you torture to get the information? After all, one person rarely knows everything. Wouldn't you logically need someone to back up the intel? ]

Any more than the amount of people I'm torturing. Reverse of the one before. True. Possibly, depends on how much time we have to work with.
me with any other case in life where an innocent is wrongly subjected to something, yes.

[ Furthermore, what exactly do you do when you figure out it's an innocent you've tortured? Do you compensate them or say, "opps my bad" and let 'em go? ]

same with any other case in life where an innocent is wrongly subjected to something, yes.

[ A lot of people are jumping on a moral stance of torture being bad simply because on face value it appears to be a bad thing to do. Unfortunately, in this place we live in called reality, sometimes bad things have to be done to stop much worse things happening. ]
What I find stranger is that people don't bat an eyelash at all the killing done along the same lines and for the same reasons as torture, but find torture itself to be irredeemably reprehensible in every and all situations.