{"id":1766,"date":"2005-11-30T20:53:36","date_gmt":"2005-12-01T04:53:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ogre.nu\/wp\/?p=1766"},"modified":"2006-08-05T22:53:14","modified_gmt":"2006-08-06T06:53:14","slug":"torture-uncertainty-and-moral-absolutes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/?p=1766","title":{"rendered":"uncertainty and moral absolutes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.markarkleiman.com\/archives\/torture_\/2005\/11\/torture_uncertainty_and_moral_absolutes.php\">Mark Kleiman<\/a> unwittingly expresses a case for limiting government in general:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nThis is a special case of an underappreciated general principle:  the difficulty of judging consequences in advance means that we should pay more attention to means, relative to ends, than would appear at first blush.  Since it&#8217;s easy to know that torture is horribly wrong in itself, and very hard to guess the circumstances in which it would prevent something even more horrible, a flat &#8220;no-torture&#8221; rule may well have better <em>consequences<\/em> (putting the moral absolutes aside) than some nuanced rule.<\/p>\n<p>In that way, refusing to consider the use of torture is like respecting the results of legal processes or not cheating to win elections.  It reflects not only a decent respect for the humanity of other humans but a sensible evaluation of one&#8217;s own ignorance.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Kleiman unwittingly expresses a case for limiting government in general: This is a special case of an underappreciated general principle: the difficulty of judging consequences in advance means that we should pay more attention to means, relative to ends, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/?p=1766\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1766\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}