A frequent criticism of the torture scenario in Should You Kill The Fat Man? is that it is not realistic.The criticism tends to be that torture isn’t effective in the real world, therefore, (a) the scenario is flawed, since it states there’s a 75% chance that torturing the fat man will be effective; and (b) there is no contradiction in claiming that torture is always wrong, and yet thinking the fat man should be tortured, since there could be no real world equivalent of the fat man torture scenario.
This criticism is misplaced for a number of reasons.
The first thing to say is it just isn’t true that thought experiments, such as the torture scenario here, have to be straightforwardly realistic (if this were true, then many of philosophy’s most important thought experiments – for example, Judith Jarvis Thompson’s “famous violinist” thought experiment – just wouldn’t get off the ground). Although thought experiments are designed to tell us something about the nature of things (including, as in this case, our intuitions about moral choices), it isn’t necessary for them to replicate the details of empirical reality. Put simply, thought experiments have to be logically coherent, but they don’t have to describe events and situations that are actually possible.
This means that even if it were the case that the torture scenario in Should You Kill The Fat Man? is unrealistic, this wouldn’t be a problem in principle: it’s entirely possible for us to learn something about the way we see moral choices by seeing how we would react to a hypothetical situation.
The second thing to say, though, is that it isn’t clear that the torture situation is unrealistic in the sense that we can be confident it could never occur. Yes, it’s true that there is plenty of testimony – if not evidence – that torture is ineffective. But it’s also true that there is no consensus on this issue; and also that while it might be true that torture isn’t generally effective, it’s a much harder case to make that it is never effective, or that there will never be circumstances where one might come to the conclusion that torture would be the most effective technique to elicit particular information. There is enough individual variation in the way that people respond to situations to make this kind of blanket claim highly suspect.
The final point to make here is that even if it were true that torture is never the most effective interrogation technique, it doesn’t follow there is no contradiction in claiming that torture is always wrong, and yet thinking the fat man should be tortured (where the argument is that there is no contradiction because de facto one would never come across a situation in the real world that is equivalent to the fat man torture scenario). The reason it doesn’t follow is because the question about torture at the beginning of Should You Kill The Fat Man? doesn’t just ask whether torture is always morally wrong, it asks whether it is always morally wrong in principle. This makes all the difference: if torture is always morally wrong as a matter of principle, then it means that regardless of the consequences it is never morally justified. To put it simply, principles are not contingent upon outcomes. Therefore, anybody who claims that torture is morally wrong as a matter of principle should not think the fat man should be tortured even in a ticking bomb situation.
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