"[I]t turns out to be the case that torture's not very effective. And so if you're dealing with someone who has no moral qualms whatsoever, like Donald Rumsfeld, it might be worth pointing out that its not in his interests to continue a policy that's simply feeding us false information. I mean, somebody where you know that the moral - whatever part of the brain that deals with moral reactions, they're defunct at some point - but … it’s a good thing that we found that out. It’s a bit or argument that we can use to make abolishing torture more appealing to people. But supposing it did... I mean the whole point is... I mean you're talking about two very very different levels of objection, right? Supposing it were true that every time you tortured someone, they actually revealed what you couldn't get revealed in some other way. Would you then continue torturing? One of the problems with those arguments is that someone like Rumsfeld or whomever will be able to come up with a case - somebody who was tortured and did reveal information that intelligence wanted to know (there'll be 70 other cases where it didn't). But they'll be able to come up with one. And then what do you say? Well it's alright??"
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Philosophers from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesJews from the United StatesWomen academics from the United StatesPeople from Atlanta
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Susan_Neiman
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Susan Neiman
21 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Susan Neiman →
Related Quotes
"[On members of the Nazi Party] [T]he most shocking, but also important thing, is they were not the uneducated masses.…"
"Whenever you say anything good about East Germany [...] immediately somebody jumps up and says, "My God, you’re a Sta…"
"It took Germans some time to learn this after the second world war, but they finally invented a concept for it: Verga…"
"How do we remember the parts of our histories we'd rather forget? Repression and revision are always options."
"French schoolchildren can be proud to become citizens of the country that gave the world the Declaration of the Right…"
"There's no question that the right-wing campaign to ban from American classrooms anything that might cause discomfort…"
"The picture of modern philosophy as centered in epistemology and driven by the desire to ground our representations i…"
"Like many others, I came to philosophy to study matters of life and death, and was taught that professionalization re…"
"However long Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians struggle to find multiple meanings in this text, the dominant s…"
"Statues are not about history. We don't memorialize each piece of history. We memorialize things that we want to valu…"