Ramesh’s deconstruction of the “ticking time bomb” would be very persuasive if it were an accurate reflection of the relative philosophies of the two sides of this discussion. But it’s not.

There is only one side of this debate that is taking an absolutist position. The anti-torture side says no torture, ever, ever, period. The other side says no torture presumptively, but there are some circumstances where it could be the lesser moral evil – depending on what is at stake, what methods are used, whom coercion is targeted against, etc.

Ramesh says: “The point of my hypothetical, about torturing innocents, was to show the anti-prohibitionist that he might not like the implications of his principle, either, or at least that he might have to refine his principle to avoid it.” So what?

The anti-prohibitionist – at least this one – has never taken the position that his “principle” was beyond refinement. His whole point has been that the absolutist position – which has been the principal impediment to a meaningful debate about what the real-life limitations should be – cannot be defended. That is, “never, never” doesn’t make any more sense than “anything goes.”

To tell the people who have been saying all along that an absolute position can’t be defended, “See, you can’t defend an absolute position,” is a strawman. It doesn’t do anything to reduce the force of the hypothetical against the side that actually was calling for an absolute prohibition.

It is like claiming that the absolutist opposition to the death penalty is materially bolstered by the fact that most of those who favor the availability of capital punishment would limit it to particularly heinous murders and not apply it to lesser crimes – as to which, though it would be a deterrent, it would be gross overkill. The death penalty is not a simple matter of deterrence. It is a severe sanction, so we make it presumptively unavailable and draw hard, narrow, categorical lines about the rare instances of when we would employ it.

Neither is coercion a simple matter of utility – to be used whenever it might work to get us information. Jonah’s article this morning makes just that point.

If thousands of innocent lives were at stake, that I would refuse to coerce an innocent person does not somehow make more reasonable the absolutist position against coercion of a culpable person. The difference made in the equation by whether we are talking about an innocent person or a culpable terrorist is not a mere difference of degree. It is a categorical difference that changes the basic assumptions of the ticking-bomb scenario.