fiveredaples wrote:No comment on this opinion. I'm saying that THAT debate is not the topic of this thread. I think I've made the topic of this thread abundantly clear: I'm analyzing the UN's definition of torture. That project can be done without invoking the CIA water boarding example.
Actually, your OP clearly states that your focus is "
to analyze a particular definition of torture often invoked in arguments against CIA water boarding", so at least you're bringing up your motivation to analyze the UN's definition of torture, which then becomes part of the topic. Might have granted you the benefit of the doubt, because it's true that you can focus just on the definition itself, if you had not invoked the CIA water boarding example quite a few times again in the rest of the thread. One wonders if actually the whole project, as presented in this thread, can divorce from the CIA water boarding example.
But OK, enough of it: let's put the water boarding example out of the topic. On with the UN's definition of torture.
fiveredaples wrote:
It's just a matter of trying to understand, conceptually, the UN's definition and seeing if it meshes with our conception of torture. And, yes, some of us might have a different conception of torture, so we might disagree on whether it meshes or not, but we can't agree or disagree until we're first clear on what the UN's idea of torture is.
That really doesn't matter much. It seems obvious to me that the UN's definition, as often happens in organizations that have to work on a particular field and focus on things it can measure and control, is just an operational definition, that is, the practical definition that allows everyone to know what is that is being dealt with. Operational definitions care less about the broad array of philosophical concepts surrounding a given term, and care more about what it can empirically accomplish by narrowing the scope of the subject. The practice of law also requires a lot of operational definitions, and that's why some legal terms not necessarily apply in common language. That is why the UN's definition starts by saying "for the purpose of this convention...", making it clear that in other contexts the definition would not be relevant. In social sciences dealing with geography and population, like Demographics, you see, for example, the operational definition of "urban population". Everyone interested in philosophical and scientific inquiries about what urban population is, might spend years dealing with the subject and discussing it, even creating different schools of thought, without a definite conclusion. The same with torture: you can speculate all you want and review all the possible philosophical interpretations of the term, but someone has to put hands to work to deal with governments playing Torquemada against its political enemies. And so, if you're signatory of the convention, you cannot then try to work around the operational definition to avoid compliance and come up with something like: "oh, well, when we water boarded the poor guy, we had another philosophical approach to the concept of torture (which just casually fits our political interests)".