The key words here as with the earlier questions are terrorists” and – – “suspected “prisoners.” By definition, neither group terrorists. They be terrorists, but the question reveals their are may status to be of it’ or awaiting that adjudication.’ As such, respondents ‘suspected ‘imprisoned will need information about the case against these individuals in order to judge whether they would be the sort of people who might have information. Of course, in that event, the question will have drifted a long way from being about torture, as the respondents’ moral judgments just will have been muddied by considerations of a penal system in which due process is nonexistent and guilt rather than innocence is assumed. In other words, against the moral good of preventing future attacks, they now must weigh not just the moral wrong of torturing guys,” but also “bad the moral wrong of torturing guys and the moral wrong of subverting the possible good certain rule of law (beyond the subversion that torture itself implies), not to mention the presumption of innocence. Thus far, then, we see that even if we assume that torture techniques are effective, there are still two conditions that need to be met before a survey question would actually tell us much about the acceptance of torture: we need to know the degree of certainty (on the part of officials) that the suspected terrorists/prisoners terrorists, and we need to know how likely it is that are torturing these individuals will yield information. In other words, we need to know whether they are terrorists the information we want terrorists who might provide it under torture. with and Unfortunately, clarifying those issues will only take us so far, for there is still the matter of the information to be extracted. There are at least two issues here. To illustrate the first, consider how this question from a CBS News/New York Times Poll differs from the preceding one:
The key words here – as with the earlier questions – are “suspected terrorists” and “prisoners.” By definition, neither group are terrorists. They may be terrorists, but the question reveals their status to be ‘suspected of it’ or ‘imprisoned awaiting that adjudication.’ As such, respondents will need information about the case against these individuals in order to judge whether they would be the sort of people who might have information. Of course, in that event, the question will have drifted a long way from being about just torture, as the respondents’ moral judgments will have been muddied by considerations of a penal system in which due process is nonexistent and guilt rather than innocence is assumed. In other words, against the moral good of preventing future attacks, they now must weigh not just the moral wrong of torturing “bad guys,” but also the possible moral wrong of torturing good guys and the certain moral wrong of subverting the rule of law (beyond the subversion that torture itself implies), not to mention the presumption of innocence. Thus far, then, we see that even if we assume that torture techniques are effective, there are still two conditions that need to be met before a survey question would actually tell us much about the acceptance of torture: we need to know the degree of certainty (on the part of officials) that the suspected terrorists/prisoners are terrorists, and we need to know how likely it is that torturing these individuals will yield information. In other words, we need to know whether they are terrorists with the information we want and terrorists who might provide it under torture. Unfortunately, clarifying those issues will only take us so far, for there is still the matter of the information to be extracted. There are at least two issues here. To illustrate the first, consider how this question from a CBS News/New York Times Poll differs from the preceding one: