" Yet--have I missed something? I did, after all, attempt to separate the "monstrousness" of an act from its ultimate evil. I believe, after all, that wrong-doing requires intention. Killing someone accidentally is a fault, but not the same wrong as killing someone intentionally. Is it different, then, for a woman who does not believe she is killing a human being to abort a nascent child than for a soldier to torture someone? I think it is. Dramatically so. Many women believe they are acting out of compassion (however mistakenly); is it possible for a torturer to hold similar beliefs? To put it poetically: how blackened are the souls of all involved in torture? How blackened are the souls of all involved in abortion?
I think torture is the most manifestly destructive to all human goodness, because it is less possible to commit the crime through simple error. It requires significant subversion of a person's humanity to make him into a torturer (even if it is frighteningly easy to do), whereas it requires significant attention to specific arguments to convince someone of the evil of abortion. As such, I think we need to pay greater attention to obliterating all instances of torture than to obliterating instances of abortion."
RTWT! This also reminds me about a book I finished a couple of weeks ago..."Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator's Dark Journey Through Iraq". The author Tony Lagouranis details the devolution of torture and how easily it spreads... how it doesn't WORK to get good information and mainly how it had such a horrible effect on his psyche knowing that he was capable of evil in these circumstances. The soldiers have to deal with this there and when they come back.... Good summary story from the Chicago Reader
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