Torture versus collateral damage; the bigger evil?

[Kiwigrunt]

That’s a straw man Carl. Here’s another one:

My hypothetical child is abducted by a gang. She can just get a phonecall to me describing what they are doing to her (colour that in for yourself). I just so happen to have one of the critters in my hot little hands. How far would I go to discover the whereabouts of the gang?

I think that what Sam is trying to get at regarding torture is that if you can come up with explicit examples where one might consider torture, then you have moved from the absolute to a continuum.

However, I don’t want to get too hung up on whether or not some extremes ‘should’ allow torture. We have discussed that before on a few other threads. I also don’t want to single out the good and the bad of collateral damage per say. What I got from reading Sam’s piece was how we seem to hold torture at a very different ethical level to collateral damage. Torturing one (‘guilty’?) person to achieve X is seen as much worse than bombing a village with some considerable collateral damage to achieve the same X. That could include some dead and injured (tortured?) innocents.

One question that comes to mind is: does our concern regarding torture stem from a genuine consideration for the rights etc. of the recipient or is it more self entered? That is to say, are we more concerned with what the process might do to us and our own morality? This statement quoted by David seems to support that:

It is about time our governments realise that torture inflicts moral damage on our society, as severe as the pain felt by the people who are physically and psychologically tortured. Our reputation has been stained and tarnished enough.

Either way, why do we not hold the same concerns, but stronger, regarding collateral damage? After all, collateral damage often produces more victims, with a greater likelihood of being innocent. (And even there we hold different standards. The comparison of bombing a village in Pakistan versus law enforcers doing similar damage in one of our own towns has been pointed out here previously.)
I think that that is also the main point that Sam is trying to make. (I have not read his book.)

So it is the difference between the two that interests me.

I wonder if we have here a moral conundrum similar to the trolley problem.