Critical Faculties
Tortured logic
The 'ticking-bomb' scenario, as an argument for torture, is potent. It is also silly, says one philosopher, and corrupt.
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A SIMPLE THOUGHT experiment is able to show that Senator John McCain's staunch position against torture amounts to ''preening'' and ''pieties,'' writes the columnist Charles Krauthammer. Yet Jeremy Waldron, a philosopher and legal scholar at Columbia University, says the same thought experiment is ''at best silly and at worst corrupt.'' (Full article: 1076 words)
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