Some very good stuff there.

The most important phrase in your quotes:

The moral error in reasoning from in the ticking bomb scenario arises from weighing the harm to the guilty terrorist against the harm to the prospective innocent victims. Instead, the harm to innocent terrorist victims should be weighed against the breakdown of key social institutions and the state-sponsored torture of many innocents.

In short, how many innocent lives are worth a nation's soul? Not a question with an easy, off-the-cuff answer.

I have pointed out a similar tradeoff in the way we are fighting the war in Iraq, losing many American lives by using an on-the-ground street-by-street approach to battles, attempting to minimize innocent deaths and collateral damage. Carpet bombing from the skies would create few if any American casualties at all.

Yet not only is the military berated for excessive casualties, but it is also berated, often by the same people, for any civilian deaths that do occur (this is referring to combat situations, not prisons).

Nobody sees the tradeoff in this arena. Too much emotion attached.

I also made the point many months ago when the Patriot Act was the big controversy. I said you could legitimately ask where the tradeoff was between lost lives and liberties, and that I believed there was such a tradeoff point. A blown up building can be rebuilt, and lives are lost in many ways in the life of a nation. But it's not easy to return a basic freedom once it's been seriously abridged.

In short, a free society may have to endure a 9/11 once in a while. And go on from there.

But nobody understood that tradeoff either. It was "Down with the Patriot Act" and "hang the officials that let 9/11 happen," all in the same breath.

What makes you think the torture/terrorism/freedom big picture is going to be any more visible to the average citizen?

How would you explain the tradeoff in the terrorism/torture situation?