The crux of the article's entire argument was that in times where the needs of the many outweigh that of a single individual, it is morally justifiable, even required, to torture the individual if it will save the many from harm. A terrorist, for example, has set up a bomb to explode in four hours, and in order to stop the explosion the authorities should torture the terrorist to find the location of the bomb. The author was basically arguing that any amount of pain/harm that was committed to this one person was worth the lives that would be saved by the disarming of the bomb.
The argument within the article was, for me, basically crap. The author resorted to a ton of charged epithets that were meant to evoke our inner American, and because of that his argument pretty well fell apart. The argument itself, however, wasn't what interested me. What became interesting as I read was how ubiquitous utilitarianism has become in our society. Utilitarianism is, in case you didn't know, the ethical philosophy that states that the right course of action is the one that maximizes the amount of "good" that comes out of a situation, i.e., you should always kill one person in order to save a hundred, etc., etc. This was sort of the central tenet of the argument the author was making, and it was interesting to see how many times it was appealed to within the article without the author seemingly knowing that he was doing so.
For the most part, it made me think about how much certain things disseminate within society without us even knowing. Many of our assumptions, if not all of them, have been passed to us through generations without our knowledge. Things that we take for granted on many issues, ethical or not, are often the product of the time we're raised in.
So, next time you're making a seemingly unqualified decision about something, stop and think about why you're really doing so. The answer just may surprise you.
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