| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Are we now arguing that torture is not evil, or that torture can sometimes be the lesser evil? Because, yeah. Torture can always be the lesser of two evils. If you need to torture someone to stop Rovagug from escaping, I'd consider it the lesser of the two.
The only problem that I can think of is that in a game like Pathfinder, there are pretty much always better alternatives to torture. In a hypothetical scenario where there are absolutely no alternatives, I'd say that torture can be considered the lesser evil.
|
That premise doesn't in any way say that torture will work, just that there are cases where "not getting information X" is worse than "engaging in torture." That's all, nothing more.I didn't ignore it, but that statement still stands on the notion of torture being effective, and the person being tortured being absolutely truthful. If there's something calamitous about to happen, then those odds are nil.
Once more, so that you have more to pretend to not read:And you accuse me of not conversing in good faith.
That does not assume torture will work, it is just setting up a point of comparison between situations where it can and cannot work.The more dire the circumstances, the less likely torture will work, not more. And it wasn't likely to work to begin with.
If that other option is to allow some other evil and you are in a world where torture can work to extract information, (such as, say, one in which spells like Zone of Truth exist),Zone of Truth does not compel anyone to speak, nor is it unbeatable, so again, still not justifiable.
you are faced with choosing the lesser of two evils. Now, you can believe that it is impossible for there to be an evil worse than torture but that is a rather extreme and hard to defend position.I haven't claimed there wasn't anything more evil than torture, but that torture is your go to or the only option is the rather hard to defend position.
Remember that what we are speaking of is justification as the lesser evil: The lesser evil is still evil.Yes, but you seem to be operating under the assumption that there are only two options, torture, or do nothing.
(Are you perhaps confused about the context? This line of discussion is a bit tangential to the OP after all and is about the addition of truth detecting/extracting magic changing the ability to justify torture in general, not for characters of any particular alignment.)
Show me spells that are infalliable and also compel speech, I don't know of any.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
So I’m having an alignment issue. About to roll a new character and decided I wanted him skilled in the art of torture but didn’t necessarily want him to be evil. When he would torture it would be because it must happen in his opinion, never for pleasure and he would heal the damage after (kinetic healer, give them the point of burn). I’m sure I could justify Chaotic Neutral but would Chaotic Good be too much a stretch?
Stretched to breaking.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I love morality debates about a world where you run around murdering sentient beings and stealing their belongings, then leave their bodies to rot where they fell the vast majority of the time.
Only until the first time a necromancer raises the bodies as undead on them. Then they will make sure to burn the next combats results to cinders.
Won't stop the cinderghosts from rising but at least it keeps the field clear.
So I’m having an alignment issue. About to roll a new character and decided I wanted him skilled in the art of torture but didn’t necessarily want him to be evil. When he would torture it would be because it must happen in his opinion, never for pleasure and he would heal the damage after (kinetic healer, give them the point of burn). I’m sure I could justify Chaotic Neutral but would Chaotic Good be too much a stretch?Stretched to breaking.
I would consider CN to be a stretch. A chaotic neutral person should have some kind of line they aren't going to cross for personal gain, and if that line is past "torture" you're in serious danger of being evil.
Like CN should be something like "I will fight for whoever pays the best, but I won't kill civilians." I think LN has a lot more wiggle room for evil since they have the "I was given a direct order by a superior officer" defense and "following the chain of command" is their whole thing.
“Only following orders” is the tag line for LE.
I'm just saying "doing an evil act" when you are commanded to do so and you are a person for whom "following orders" is important is much more defensible than if you are a wholly self-directed person who does what they want and takes orders from no one.
PossibleCabbage, you're comparing LE to CE. Both are equally Evil in Pathfinder's rules.
Finally at a keyboard, so I can write a full answer.
The point I was trying to make was that although it is very easy to say on the face of it that torture is evil, I think the OP was looking at are there any circumstances where it can be justified. To answer that, I took the widest definition of torture, which included the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques and even underhand and misleading interrogation techniques e.g. "if you don't talk, you're gonna spend a night in the cells and you know what they do in there...so talk".
I fully accept that I have conflated interrogation and torture, as I could not think of any torture reason that was not related to interrogation that could be justified as non-evil. The question is, at what stage does an interrogation technique become torture? The next question would be: is that interrogation technique (whether you consider it a form of torture or not) justified in the current circumstances?
I'm not going to disagree that torturing someone for the sake of it isn't evil. But neither do I think that a captured assassin is going to reveal who hired him in exchange for a plate of cookies. I also think your second, blackmail example, sits on the spectrum as the priest would be psychologically tortured.
To use a real world example of how a plate of cookies turned an enemy into an informant, check out Abu Jandal. You're severely overrating the practical utility in torture.
Threatening to defame someone certainly isn't a good act, but calling it psychological torture is like saying that a wet willy is basically malicious wounding.
And again, interrogation techniques don't have to involve pain.
Think good cop, bad cop. Unless the bad cop actually starts hurting the subject, that can't cross into torture.
The discussion needs to nail down a specific for torture because at this point, someone could argue that working a full time job is torture...
Doing something evil and getting results does not make it less evil. What gets the death penalty and what doesn't is subjective. Evil and Good are objective- torture is always evil, creating undead is always evil, deliberately harming innocents is always evil, etc.
And again, interrogation techniques don't have to involve pain.
Think good cop, bad cop. Unless the bad cop actually starts hurting the subject, that can't cross into torture.
The discussion needs to nail down a specific for torture because at this point, someone could argue that working a full time job is torture...
Thank you for your replies. As I had said I had widened the definition and included all forms of interrogation and my question is based on is the technique justifiable in the circumstances. Taking the good cop/bad cop example in two different scenarios:
1. A small-time teenage drug dealer is arrested. The bad cop threatens the teenager with jail unless he supplies the details on his supplier; describing how he is going to be gang raped every night. All the while the cops are fairly sure the supplier has coerced the teenager with threats against his family. In the teenager's mind they will be damned if he does and damned if he doesn't and under tremendous psychological pressure.
2. A mob boss is arrested and similarly threatened by the bad cop unless he turns informant. The mob boss's reaction is likely to along the lines of a sneer and to ask whether thinking about it turns the bad cop on. The technique is entirely ineffectual and has delivered the upper hand to the one being interrogated.
This is the same technique, performed by the same people in two different circumstances. In the first, it was unnecessary and cruel (evil in game terms). In the second it was too soft a technique and a different form of leverage is required - perhaps sleep deprivation (lights left on, placed in a cell with a loud drunk, offered food and water just as nodding off etc) and humiliation (ignored, forced to go to the toilet in public, not enough toilet roll, bent cutlery, cold food etc) to generate anger and a lack of clear thought and repeat questioning to catch the mob boss in a lie would be justifiable.
By some definitions, sleep deprivation and humiliation are considered torture, as is waterboarding. I don't think that there is a plain and simple line that says this form of interrogation is universally acceptable and this is universally wrong. There are clear extremes (e.g. offering cookies and painfully maiming people) and a very large grey area in the middle. Where that line sits within the grey area is dependent on the circumstances and motivations of those involved.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
