If someone makes a practical argument for torture

If someone makes a practical argument for torture, are you under any intellectual obligation to respond

with a practical argument against? There are plenty of those, but as Lindsay Beyerstein puts it:

It’s sort of like writing rape-prevention posts about how you shouldn’t rape people, because it’s

not going to be as much fun as you think, and you might drive your victim into the arms of radical

feminists, etc. It seems either obscene or otiose to explain to would-be rapists why rape is a poor

means to their ends.

There [is] something morally distasteful about being patient or reasonable with rapists. Same with

torturers. I suppose that if I thought I could convince people not to rape with good arguments, I would

try. Maybe the mistake is assuming that torturers are motivated by rationality any more than rapists.

The debate over who benefits from our invasion of NIKE SHOX entered a new phase with the publication of

a research paper by Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, written by two prominent

foreign policy scholars from the “realist” camp, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “Israel and

NIKE SHOX Foreign Policy.” The paper not only examined the pervasive power of the Israel lobby in the

NIKE SHOX, but identified “the Lobby” — as they call it — as the decisive (if not the only) factor

that set us on the road to NIKE SHOX:

“Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack NIKE SHOX in

March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a NIKE SHOX for oil, but there is

hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the NIKE SHOX was motivated in good part by

a desire to make Israel more secure.”