Clever minds can always fashion clever questions and scenarios to seemingly justify the unjustifiable.

Reminds me of the times people have said things to me like "Suppose you're driving down this narrow mountain road and you come around a hairpin turn and there's this huge truck bearing down on you. You could turn left, but if you do you run over a little girl with a puppy in her arms. You could turn right and fly off the cliff, killing yourself. You could plow straight ahead into the truck and kill yourself, and maybe the trucker too. What is the right thing to do?"

Like I said..."clever" minds come up with these things...in order to justify some line of reasoning which they have already invested their ego in defending, so they've gotta keep defending it.

Such arguments are in fact complete BS, are spurious, have nothing to do with anything, and usually posit a situation which is never going to arise anyway. Furthermore, one cannot concoct perfect solutions ahead of time for hypothetical extreme situations which may (and probably will) never happen. One can only deal with each unique circumstance in a fresh and creative way as it arises.

Accordingly, I am about as impressed by arguments in favour of torture as I am impressed by bullies who explain to me why it's a great idea and a REALLY GOOD THING for them to beat the hell out of smaller people, given certain "special" circumstances....or to put it another way, I'm about as impressed as I would be by a turd lying in the middle of the road.

- LH