We've each posed a scenario to the other. There is a difference though. My scenario is a real life event that actually happened. My scenario is a realistic and common sense instance about a moral choice with straightforward consequences. Beat a man to save a child. Your scenario, by contrast, is an unrealistic fantasy with magic consequences. You are asking "Would you do something good, if, by magic, doing something good caused something bad to happen?"
> My scenario is a real life event that actually happened.
Not really. It was a story that a philosophy book used to illustrate a conundrum. It bore resemblance to "actually happened" like a film "based on true events". Are we taking the word of the cops and philosophers or does the man himself have something to say about it? What would have happened if the cops didn't beat the man? We will never know.
But ok, let's grant it, for the sake of argument. For our purposes, it is the unvarnished reality, precisely as the book said. The cops had to beat the man or the child would have died.
The beating of the man had unknown consequences, however, and the construction of the scenario elides them. Is it worth it to live in a society where cops beat thieves to extract information from them? We don't have to guess. Look around you (I mean, assuming you live in the US or similar country in that respect). Do cops only beat men to extract life-saving information from them? The unintended consequence of "it's okay to beat this man just this once" is readily apparent. It never is just the once in that exceedingly rare scenario, is it?
Now, you can answer my question. In the magical society where cops do not beat people, but then do, is 100 beatings and 1 or 2 deaths worth the life of 1 child?
It's a real case that went to trial in New Zealand. The car thief was on video stealing the car, he confessed to stealing the car (admittedly under torture), and he was able to locate the stolen car and child.
As it happens, we know what would've happened had the police not beat him, because they tried that first. The man refused to say where the car was. He would rather let a child die than admit to car theft. Of course, maybe, if they had let the child die a magic genie would've prevented all future crime - it's as plausible as your hypothetical - so maybe the police did wrong after all...
As for your question my moral judgements are tuned to reality, not nonsense fantasy land. I don't have a strong sense of what is right and wrong in a universe that does not obey causality as I know it. I would, however, be willing to beat the thief if it were my child in the car.
Cops beat people quite often in the US, and exactly zero-point-never times is it to save the life of a child. Yet for some reason, you find it necessary to bring up that one time in New Zealand to justify torture. I'm sorry, but I find that baffling. Seems to me very much not tuned to reality, but maybe we should just agree to disagree here.
The original comment of yours that I replied to says that "torture = bad" and that all that separates good and bad people is principle. I have two reasons for challenging this. First, it's just not true. Torture, in some cases, is completely justified. These cases are both hypothetical (you need to find the dirty bomb going to kill millions) and real (beat a car thief to save a child). Second is to question the underlying principle that makes torture usually immoral.
I can ask it no clearer: Given that your counterfactual is an exceedingly rare edge case, why do you feel it is important to counter the valuable moral heuristic of "torture=bad"? What are you gaining by doing that?
