Would Reliable Truth Detection Make Torture More Ethical

Self-defence isn't intentionally causing pain to another human being, though. You may inflict pain in the course of self-defence, but that's an unavoidable side effect. With torture, the whole point is to cause pain.

Torture should never be used, and any society that condones it cannot claim to be a civilised one.

About anything more than that, however, I am on the "pacifist" side.

edited 14th Oct '12 7:51:14 AM by Carciofus

I understand the point, but I'll will point out that self-defense can cause far more physical pain injury and death than professionally conducted torture will.

We do have laws against excessive violence even if it's in self-defence, so if you go too far in the act of defending yourself, that's a crime too.

But, if the person defending themselves does not go overboard, it's really the fault of the person initiating the violence if they suffer grievous injury or death. They chose to create that situation.

edited 14th Oct '12 9:39:31 AM by Talby

Self-defense and pacifism is rather far afield from the topic of this thread...

Based on the presumptions I made through the OP, I'd ay that yes. OP, you mentioned that it's "doubly wrong because the information is unreliable" or thereabouts. It is no longer doubly wrong, so it is more ethical regardless of whether or not you think it is sufficiently ethical to do.

Edit: If our lie detecting widget can be used without torture, you can always ask first and torture until you get an answer.

edited 14th Oct '12 9:54:29 AM by Deboss

^ That's an interesting question, Deboss. If something is wrong for several reasons that are unrelated to each other, and one of those reasons can be removed, is it really "less wrong"? Or is it still just as wrong, but for fewer reasons?

Yes, I would say that it is less wrong. Torturing someone to discover the identity of a thief is wrong. Torturing someone to discover the recipe for his mother's chicken soup is worse.

Again, these questions will have to be really pointed. It just seems like instead of trying to make interrogation better, it just makes it more complicated and loopholes.

Not really. The only thing it really changes is the certainty that the target believes what s/he says. (Unless it's so good that it can detect self-deception or half-truths, in which case it's completely reliable, but we're getting into Charles Xavier territory there.)

I remember when I was going through the police academy and had to go through the lie detectors. Lie detectors are a complete joke by the way. I passed one lying through the whole thing, I failed on telling the truth through the whole thing. They're just really easy to mess with.

So with that experience, we would have to be very careful in what questions we ask for the following factors:

Chances are those who are under torture are probably the kind of people who are more conditioned to resist or bear torture in various forms. Common criminals don't need extensive interrogation techniques.

If the person under interrogation knows they won't be able to lie, well, that just means they can change the version of the truth they're telling. You can change a lie detector just by just thinking of something different or changing their heart-rate. I consider those actions harder than just misleading the truth.

Now, one way that it could work is if we have people answer questions over and over, like those little psych exams that ask the same thing in five different ways. But interrogation would have to be very carefully done. Physical torture would be useless for the most part. But psychological torture would have to be honed and carefully crafted.

In a way, if I were under the interrogation, I would consider the fact I can only tell the truth an asset. So I could mess with my captors a lot more.

That's not inherently true and is an overly dismissive assumption. If torture would, for example, properly identify a suspect in a petty crime with untrained criminals, that is an effective use.

Again, this is not an argument to look for reasons why torture is bad. It's a theoretical what-if to determine the positive and negative consequences of reliable lie detection combined with torture.

Again, that just means questions would have to extremely leading. Starting with narrowed "Yes/No" questions. That means even if the technique is imperfect, you still wind up with more information than you started with. And if you started with no information at all, then it's an unambiguously net positive.

Which again falls back to torture as an incentive for correct answers. If the argument against torture is that "eventually people will say anything to make is stop", then truth-detection gives them an actual incentive to tell easily-verifiable truth.

I'm of the ethical standpoint that inflicting harm on another in cold blood is wrong, regardless.

No amount of justification will negate the fact that, yes, you are harming another and infringing their human rights.

The average petty criminal isn't going to need extensive interrogation methods. We already have really good ways of getting the common criminal to talk now. Police can promise anything but a deal. They can claim evidence, they can claim that they have someone rolling on them, we have very good methods now. If we have to resort to physical or psychological torture to get something out of them, well, shit's hit the fan.

I'm also willing to bet a truth serum or something like that will be very expensive, so you're not going to want to waste it on some guy that is a small time dealer or a habitual offender who went from petty crime to assault.

Again, I never said it was bad or good, I'm talking about practicality. If you're in a situation where ripping someone's fingernails off or sleep deprivation is even on the table as a method of information extraction, you're not dealing with the average bad guy.

All questions are leading. But someone with any amount of training or certain mentalities can work against that. Again, I'm highly doubtful that we'll be using this method against stupid criminals. We'd probably be invested in using this against Guantanamo-esque terrorists, operatives, and other organized criminals. Even a basic sociopath can mess with questions. The only solution to this would be to be able to administer the "truth method" in a way that they didn't know they couldn't lie, if that was even possible.

But here's the thing, physical torture doesn't work well in getting people to talk. It builds resistance. Again, this is where conventional police work excels. You don't get the pedophile to confess and tell you where the body is by threatening them or hurting them. You make them feel comfortable. Tell them you understand them. Ask if the child led them on. That's how they spill their guts. (Again, cops can lie about almost everything but offering a plea deal.)

I'm not saying that torture isn't a possible option, I'm contextualizing that option in more rational forms based on efficiency. It's an interesting idea, but the practical applications are very limited, especially considering the methods we have now, what we know about physical and psychological torture, and what it does to those actually administering the interrogation.

I would really be questioning of what effect being able to use torture as an "incentive to talk" would give to the interrogator. If they were the only ones who knew the person couldn't lie, could we effectively reign them in not to go overboard? By that logic, I could keep beating the shit out of someone until they were dead to keep them talking and milk them for as much as possible. We've already had some very intensive studies on the dangers of being an integrator who is allowed or is forced to use various torture methods on people. It's not very promising. So this needs to be factored in as well.

It's a very complex problem that has more facets than initially come to the surface. A very interesting quandary, but still not easy to factor in everything.

edited 14th Oct '12 12:31:06 PM by Gabrael

That's not relevant. All of those options is fine, and this isn't explicitly about torture replacing those options. Even if everything you said is true, would torture being an option on top of those things be worse for whatever reason?

Also, social mores are kind of a conditional nuance. Society tends to shift opinions of the subject throughout eras.

As I stated in the first post, for this topic to work, we have to beg the question and assume that the method of truth-detection is 100% practical and functional. Otherwise, we can't begin this conversation.

Again, not relevant to what we're talking about. Even if torture is a last resort, that doesn't mean the option of using it is worse than the option of not using it.

Again, that's fine. The more they continue to "mess with" questions, the more the torture continues and eliminates Exact Words and Metaphorical Truths. In the meantime, however, the victim continues to suffer and information is still being acquired through process of elimination. In such a scenario, the only differences between a trained and untrained victim would be the amount of time it takes.

If this is true, Citation Needed.

edited 14th Oct '12 2:20:28 PM by KingZeal

Here's a question: If we have reliable truth detection to begin with, why would we even need to torture people? Seems like such a thing would eliminate the perceived need in a lot of cases.

At which point it becomes immoral because it's not even necessary to get the information you want, and becomes an action done largely for the joy of it.

Again, you would need an incentive for people to say anything true at all. If someone asks "where are the drugs being shipped", and the person answers "the Dagobah system", truth-detection alone would be useless. If you provide positive or negative incentive (reward or punishment), you give them a reason to say something true, and the faster you come to the whole truth, the sooner they get rewarded. (Unless you lied.)

edited 14th Oct '12 2:09:34 PM by KingZeal

Same reason we torture people already? To get information?

Just because we know if they're lying or not doesn't mean that they're going to suddenly be willing to talk.

Ninjas.

edited 14th Oct '12 2:09:40 PM by DrunkGirlfriend

You know what's the best incentive to get someone to tell the truth: humanity.

Almost every agency worldwide goes for the hot meal and medical treatment first, not waterboarding.

As Gabrael pointed out with the pedophile, and as a mental health professional myself, you get them to talk by being their friend and making them feel safe, not causing pain.

There is also the tactic of planting a false prisoner in with the group. But that is far harder to pull off because that means you have to inflict the exact damage on your own man as you would the rest of the suspects.

Torture is the absolute worst method of intelligence gathering.

Well yes. I was assuming we were still treating it as if it were a last resort sort of thing in this hypothetical scenario.

It should never even be an option.

Everything should be considered an option depending on the stakes of a situation.

edited 14th Oct '12 4:59:31 PM by DeviantBraeburn

There are so many better ways.

They don't need to resort to torture when there are people who are specifically trained to get people to talk without it. One of my professors was also one who specialized in serial killers. He would work with the state police all the time. He also had a great success rate.

No matter how horrible the situation is, torture doesn't work how people think it does. This isn't 24. Torture is used more for a carthysis to the person doing the action more than an incentive for one receiving the action.

Under intense pain and stress, the body will actually shut down areas of the brain due to the overstimulation. This is where shock comes from. To override this natural failsafe in order to force the target to be more truthful would actually increase the pain they were feeling, rendering the target even more useless.

Those are very good points.

There are a heck of a lot of interrogation techniques that are effective, and none of them involve torture of any kind. They're more mind-games than anything else. And if you have an experienced interrogator running the interview, they'll get useful information out of the source one way or another, all without having to physically lay a hand on the source, ever.

Direct interrogation (ask questions, note the answers) works if the source is just off of the battlefield. Records indicate that this was most-used by the Military and had a high rate of success in WWII and Vietnam.

If you can belittle them for failing their mission or the fact that they got captured: "so why is it that we managed to capture you with ammunition still in your weapon?" or "it would seem that you're not a very disciplined soldier [critique about their appearnace here]." You make them want to defend themselves, to regain any lost honor, and they end up saying things that you can use.

You can also suggest that you can work out a deal with them, especially if it becomes clear that they aren't exactly loyal to their country or cause.

The good cop bad cop approach is also valid. They'll either spew out a bunch of stuff defending themselves to the bad cop, or they'll start to cooperate with the good cop.

Offering them better conditions (but only tokens, like a pack of cigarettes, a better cell and so on). Take away privileges (but nothing that they have to have in the Geneva Conventions and whatever else) if they refuse to cooperate.

Tossing down a dossier filled with lots of information (and fluff), and spitting out fact after fact. Eventually, they'll start saying things that you don't know as facts. They'll be filling in the blanks. You have to test them with known information, though, so that they don't catch on that you don't really know everything.

Simply staring at them for a really long time, maybe with a slight smirk.

Don't let them answer your questions - rapid-fire questions from one or two interrogators. Eventually, they'll be screaming at you to shut up so they can properly finish an answer.

And naturally, mixing these up so that they're not strictly formula.

This stuff works. Honestly, why resort to torture at all? Is it because we're too lazy to invest the extra time and training into skilled interrogators?