A "Duh" Moment
It occured to me recently that in my thinking, I have for a long time been using an inefficient approach with respect to a certain moral and philosophical problem. Namely: perhaps it would make more sense to take the position that, all other things being equal, I do not endorse torture. That popular supernatural schemes for assigning torture to some and not others tend to use exceedingly arbitrary sorting methods is at best a secondary concern.
That this didn't occur to me earlier isn't exactly a reasoning fallacy, though I suppose it does betray a certain narrowness of POV and an underdeveloped sense of empathy. I'm not sure when exactly punishment as an end in itself became categorized in my mind as being at best an invigorating bit of fetishism, but it was some time ago. Even though I think I've made roughly that very point many times before, somehow this is the first time that I've explicitly thought about its logical ordering with respect to the aforementioned secondary concern, which dominated my mentality during my agnostic years - the mindset of a defendant in a case where constitutionality of certain provision is under question. To continue with the metaphor, my experience, beginning around age 10 and growing in intensity from there, was that of a defendant who had no lawyers and no knowledge of legal proceedings - only unarticulated misgivings, which are sure to sound feeble and unconvincing when mumbled to oneself in isolation. Sometime around age 20, a few pieces of analytic philosophy served in this scheme as the unexpected arrival of a defense team of sorts.
But there is no such trial in progress. The residual effects of having thought of it as such provoke my distaste. I feel mildly disgusted by the undignified and salvation-laden treacliness I had tried to stave off - but couldn't - while invoking the metaphor in the first place.
Torture is bad. Even as a moral non-cognitivist I can say that.
That this didn't occur to me earlier isn't exactly a reasoning fallacy, though I suppose it does betray a certain narrowness of POV and an underdeveloped sense of empathy. I'm not sure when exactly punishment as an end in itself became categorized in my mind as being at best an invigorating bit of fetishism, but it was some time ago. Even though I think I've made roughly that very point many times before, somehow this is the first time that I've explicitly thought about its logical ordering with respect to the aforementioned secondary concern, which dominated my mentality during my agnostic years - the mindset of a defendant in a case where constitutionality of certain provision is under question. To continue with the metaphor, my experience, beginning around age 10 and growing in intensity from there, was that of a defendant who had no lawyers and no knowledge of legal proceedings - only unarticulated misgivings, which are sure to sound feeble and unconvincing when mumbled to oneself in isolation. Sometime around age 20, a few pieces of analytic philosophy served in this scheme as the unexpected arrival of a defense team of sorts.
But there is no such trial in progress. The residual effects of having thought of it as such provoke my distaste. I feel mildly disgusted by the undignified and salvation-laden treacliness I had tried to stave off - but couldn't - while invoking the metaphor in the first place.
Torture is bad. Even as a moral non-cognitivist I can say that.