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I overstated, then. I think your definition of moral principle requires a willingness to be martyred, literally or metaphorically (say, career, social life, tolerating being the acceptable target of hatred, etc), and exceedingly few people hold any principle that strongly.
There's a significant gap between benefits drying up and 'costing you dear,' though.
Let's take two moral principles that I think we might agree the average "normie liberal" of 2008 could have been said to hold: free speech is good, and racism is bad. As it turns out, both of these were quite ideologically constrained for most people- only some free speech is good, and only some racism is bad.
On one hand, I still think both are good principles to have. On the other, holding them in the social climate of the last 15 years makes one into something of a punching bag. If saying "free speech is good" plays a role in making it so academics and journalists have no repercussions for calling people that look like me cancerous goblins that made deals with the devil, my willingness to think free speech is good dwindles rapidly.
Does this mean that my thought of "free speech is good" is not a true moral principle? So be it, it's not a moral principle. I think it is good in theory but the tradeoff cost can and has been reached.
I think many people intellectually hold principles that strongly. Perhaps, under duress, they would break. But they would recognize themselves to be acting in an immoral manner. They would feel guilty. They would continue to believe that it would have been more ethical of them to stick to their guns, even if they made excuses for why it wasn't that bad of them to have fallen short of that ideal. All of which I find to be very different from openly saying "holding this belief became inconvenient for me, so I gave it up". The former is flawed human nature failing to live up to its genuinely-held moral principles; the latter is giving up on the idea of having moral principles at all.
I can imagine scenarios where I could be coerced into taking actions that clash against my moral principle that e.g. torture is wrong; but I cannot imagine any scenario where the pressure would result in me surrendering my belief that torture is wrong at the abstract level. I would still consider my actions to have been wrong, and someone who had resisted the pressure to be morally superior to me.
This is an excellent explanation and example of its application ... though, as an aside, my opinions are 180 degrees off from yours on the specific example.
At the abstract level, torture might be fine. History is full of war criminals and psychopaths who pretty clearly deserved to be tortured, and if extra suffering for them were also to elicit information that could save innocents or even just potentially deter others who would otherwise someday do as much damage to innocents, that's a win-win.
It's in the realistic messy practical scenarios that all the reasons for an absolute ban on torture take precedence. An absolute ban is a Schelling point in a way that "except when it's really okay" can't be; the risk of mistakenly torturing innocents may outweigh the benefits of mostly torturing the deserving; the damage done to the torturer's psyche makes them a dangerous person to have in a position of that much authority even if selection bias didn't make them too dangerous to begin with; the damage done to the torturers' culture may erode the rule of law or imperil peaceful future coexistence with an offenders' community; etc. etc.
Oh, I don't think we disagree as much as you think; when I spoke about coercion/pressure to commit torture, I was very much picturing something unglamorous and "selfish", not a "torture a terrorist into releasing vital information" trolley problem, or even judicial arguments about deterrence. I'm talking about a scenario where even by cold hard utilitarian analysis, refusing would still be the moral thing to do - but where many ordinary, well-intentioned people would probably give in, and even you or I cannot be entirely sure what we would do. Say, some Saw-style thing where a sadist kidnaps you, tortures you a bit, then pushes you into a locked room with a bound victim and orders you to torture them even more severely, or else he'll torture you some more instead - though still not quite as badly as what he's asking you to do to the other guy.
That being said, we still disagree around the edges, insofar that I don't think anyone ever deserves to be tortured in a vacuum, even the worst POS you can imagine. I'll only go as far as saying that if you need to torture information out of someone to save more lives/prevent more suffering, then it is more acceptable to torture an evil man than an innocent; but we're talking about a spectrum of necessary evils.
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Okay, this is much more clear on the distinction and I'm glad we stuck through the conversation to reach this point. Thank you.
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