Waterboarding series summary

This series has covered why I believe waterboarding prisoners is torture and why you should too. Three kinds of reasons were given: reasons from history and law, reasons from intuition, and reasons from argument. The part on reasons from argument includes a pair of “live documents” that I’ll update over time. Here are the posts:

• Why I believe waterboarding prisoners is torture, and you should too
• Showdown at High Noon
• Rough Ride Ahead, or why waterboarding is important
• The Gasping Grimoire, or pathologies of failed arguments
• A catalog of failed arguments
• Abortion is more important than torture

I know we’ve had lots of esoteric arguments about moral theology in the past. In this series I’ve tried specifically to frame things such that those particular and highly nuanced disputes do not come into it: hopefully the series doesn’t depend on anything too complicated or deep.

We’ve also had lots of disputes over elections, voting, political action, and such. This series doesn’t address those questions. We can pound a stake into the heart of the contention that waterboarding prisoners for information is not torture without resolving every other dispute about all of those things.

”For true and false will in no better way be revealed and uncovered than in resistance to a contradiction.” — St. Thomas Aquinas