This statement contains at least three assumptions that need to be unpacked before it is of any use.
What do you mean by ethically justifiable?
What do you mean by temporary and torture?
2a. To reduce it to absurdity, I would rather be slapped than lose my hand painlessly. Where do you draw the lines on temporariness and tortureness? Is living without magic after having it a form of torture? How much life expectancy does it take before a permanent disability is worse than a temporary pain?
Why is “probably much more ethically justifiable” a fact about either of these things rather than a fact about how you feel about them?
How deep of an analysis do you want? Ultimately, what I mean is that torture tends to foreseeably decrease the net positive valence of all experience to a greater extent than does incapacitation.
We both know those are fuzzy terms. And as a utilitarian I acknowledge that some extremely minimal torture could in principle be more justifiable than an especially severe incapacitation. But everyday cases of what we call ‘torture’ are intuitively much more painful and dehumanizing than, say, permanently depriving a person of a firearms or automobile license. Do you think that one’s long-term ability to use magic would tend to cluster on the other side of torture, on a scale of resultant human suffering?
Descriptively, most ethical systems would, I think, agree with my assessment; so if ‘ethically justifiable’ just means ‘able to be justified under what various people take to be the right ethical principles,’ it is an empirical statement. But I’ll instead take the approach of stipulating what I mean by ethical justifiability in psychological terms, the felt positive and negative valence of experiences. If this is a real property of mental states, what I call ‘ethical justifiability’ will rest on the distribution of those states. I am responsible for how I use my words, but my words are not on that account ‘about me.’
Based on your description it seems more sensible to put torture on a continuum with incapacitation rather than holding it separate, as if it decreases future positive utility it seems like another sort of incapacitation to me. At this point I think we’re down to math/data on happiness of post torture experiences versus post incapacitating experiences, which because it is 1 am and I have already taken melatonin I am too sleepy to want to look into. My intuitive leaning is that the effects of torture fade with time more than the effects of incapicitation, eg because I might eventually begin to forget how bad being tortured was but can never forget how I have one fewer limb, but this is only an intuition.
Our ability to fruitfully debate this issue, while we remain in fiction, is probably very limited. It may be underdetermined whether losing one’s magic feels more like losing a driver’s license or like losing a limb. If I’m conceiving of magic loss more in the former terms (magic as a toolbox), you more in the latter terms (magic as an intimate part of the magician), then it’s unsurprising that we’ll arrive at different intuitions.
That said, I’m unclear on what your argument is for treating torture and incapacitation as a ‘continuum.’ I of course think they can be placed on a continuum of suffering; and I concede that their distribution over the continuum partly overlaps, though I think the bulk of torture involves more intense aggregate suffering than does the bulk of incapacitation. But you seem to be making a different claim now—that torture IS a kind of incapacitation, or that incapacitation is a kind of torture.
The latter claim I can understand, but reject; incapacitation can sometimes be used to torture someone, but it does not follow that incapacitation itself is always just watered-down torture, for the same reason that the existence of ‘Chinese water torture’ does not imply that drinking water is, in any interesting sense, on a continuum with torture.
The former claim, that torture is a kind of incapacitation, seems more paradoxical. Is the suggestion that inflicting involuntary pain on someone is nothing but depriving that person of a certain ability—the ability, presumably, to be happy during the torture, or the ability to not suffer flashbacks afterward? I’m not sure this is a useful reframing, though it is interesting.
It’s not my argument, I thought it was yours. When you talk about torture decreasing future positive utility of all experiences that seems pretty clearly to me the same reason to dislike disability.
The reasons to dislike acute torture and superpower incapacitation are the same only in the very reductive way in which any two bad things are, given a monistic meta-ethics, bad for ‘the same reason.’ Sexual assault and poor dinner etiquette, if (monistically) bad, are bad for ‘the same reason’ in some attenuated sense. But for practical purposes this is not very informative, and I was trying to be at least a little practical in comparing the costs of torture and incapacitation.
Likewise, superpower incapacitation can be worse than torture mostly in the sense that any two generic acts can be dustspecked. This falls out of quantitative sensitivity in ethics (especially consequentialist ethics) as a boring side-effect, just as reducibility of reasons falls out of monism as a boring side-effect. In both cases, it has no special relevance to the topic at hand, and noting these general features of utilitarian tradeoffs doesn’t prevent us from also noting that typical real-world torture tends to produce more net suffering than typical real-world superpower incapacitation. (To make magic loss a counterexample to this trend, one would need to better flesh out what one takes magic to be.)
A permanent loss of magic is probably much more ethically justifiable than a temporary period of torture.
This statement contains at least three assumptions that need to be unpacked before it is of any use.
What do you mean by ethically justifiable?
What do you mean by temporary and torture? 2a. To reduce it to absurdity, I would rather be slapped than lose my hand painlessly. Where do you draw the lines on temporariness and tortureness? Is living without magic after having it a form of torture? How much life expectancy does it take before a permanent disability is worse than a temporary pain?
Why is “probably much more ethically justifiable” a fact about either of these things rather than a fact about how you feel about them?
Sorry for the slow response, I was at gencon.
Also, welcome to posting!
Thanks, drethelin!
How deep of an analysis do you want? Ultimately, what I mean is that torture tends to foreseeably decrease the net positive valence of all experience to a greater extent than does incapacitation.
We both know those are fuzzy terms. And as a utilitarian I acknowledge that some extremely minimal torture could in principle be more justifiable than an especially severe incapacitation. But everyday cases of what we call ‘torture’ are intuitively much more painful and dehumanizing than, say, permanently depriving a person of a firearms or automobile license. Do you think that one’s long-term ability to use magic would tend to cluster on the other side of torture, on a scale of resultant human suffering?
Descriptively, most ethical systems would, I think, agree with my assessment; so if ‘ethically justifiable’ just means ‘able to be justified under what various people take to be the right ethical principles,’ it is an empirical statement. But I’ll instead take the approach of stipulating what I mean by ethical justifiability in psychological terms, the felt positive and negative valence of experiences. If this is a real property of mental states, what I call ‘ethical justifiability’ will rest on the distribution of those states. I am responsible for how I use my words, but my words are not on that account ‘about me.’
Based on your description it seems more sensible to put torture on a continuum with incapacitation rather than holding it separate, as if it decreases future positive utility it seems like another sort of incapacitation to me. At this point I think we’re down to math/data on happiness of post torture experiences versus post incapacitating experiences, which because it is 1 am and I have already taken melatonin I am too sleepy to want to look into. My intuitive leaning is that the effects of torture fade with time more than the effects of incapicitation, eg because I might eventually begin to forget how bad being tortured was but can never forget how I have one fewer limb, but this is only an intuition.
Our ability to fruitfully debate this issue, while we remain in fiction, is probably very limited. It may be underdetermined whether losing one’s magic feels more like losing a driver’s license or like losing a limb. If I’m conceiving of magic loss more in the former terms (magic as a toolbox), you more in the latter terms (magic as an intimate part of the magician), then it’s unsurprising that we’ll arrive at different intuitions.
That said, I’m unclear on what your argument is for treating torture and incapacitation as a ‘continuum.’ I of course think they can be placed on a continuum of suffering; and I concede that their distribution over the continuum partly overlaps, though I think the bulk of torture involves more intense aggregate suffering than does the bulk of incapacitation. But you seem to be making a different claim now—that torture IS a kind of incapacitation, or that incapacitation is a kind of torture.
The latter claim I can understand, but reject; incapacitation can sometimes be used to torture someone, but it does not follow that incapacitation itself is always just watered-down torture, for the same reason that the existence of ‘Chinese water torture’ does not imply that drinking water is, in any interesting sense, on a continuum with torture.
The former claim, that torture is a kind of incapacitation, seems more paradoxical. Is the suggestion that inflicting involuntary pain on someone is nothing but depriving that person of a certain ability—the ability, presumably, to be happy during the torture, or the ability to not suffer flashbacks afterward? I’m not sure this is a useful reframing, though it is interesting.
It’s not my argument, I thought it was yours. When you talk about torture decreasing future positive utility of all experiences that seems pretty clearly to me the same reason to dislike disability.
The reasons to dislike acute torture and superpower incapacitation are the same only in the very reductive way in which any two bad things are, given a monistic meta-ethics, bad for ‘the same reason.’ Sexual assault and poor dinner etiquette, if (monistically) bad, are bad for ‘the same reason’ in some attenuated sense. But for practical purposes this is not very informative, and I was trying to be at least a little practical in comparing the costs of torture and incapacitation.
Likewise, superpower incapacitation can be worse than torture mostly in the sense that any two generic acts can be dustspecked. This falls out of quantitative sensitivity in ethics (especially consequentialist ethics) as a boring side-effect, just as reducibility of reasons falls out of monism as a boring side-effect. In both cases, it has no special relevance to the topic at hand, and noting these general features of utilitarian tradeoffs doesn’t prevent us from also noting that typical real-world torture tends to produce more net suffering than typical real-world superpower incapacitation. (To make magic loss a counterexample to this trend, one would need to better flesh out what one takes magic to be.)