Wednesday, August 29, 2007

An intentionally inflammatory post at Overcoming Bias:

In many situations it would be better to impose a punishment of torture than imprisonment. The fact that the U.S. justice system rejects torture as a punishment is the result of an anti-torture bias.

Overcoming Bias, though interesting, is firmly in the "we're super-rational and you're all superstitious morons", "most people are mindless lost sheep except the chosen rational atheist libertarian few" camp of blogs.

As a critique of this kind of thinking, this post gets it half right. But the problem is not really consequentialism, it's materialism.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i agree he gets it half right. I'm not really convinced that Vox Nova is really more than half right however :-)

"most people are mindless lost sheep except the chosen rational atheist libertarian few" - it's strange how religious they can be...and I thought Southern Baptists were bad!