I recently came across a very odd attempt to justify torture:

I asked what was the least bad, bad thing that could happen, and suggested that it was getting a dust speck in your eye that irritated you for a fraction of a second, barely long enough to notice, before it got blinked away. And conversely, a very bad thing to happen, if not the worst thing, would be getting tortured for 50 years.

Now, would you rather that a googolplex people got dust specks in their eyes, or that one person was tortured for 50 years? . . .

Most people chose the dust specks over the torture. Many were proud of this choice, and indignant that anyone should choose otherwise: "How dare you condone torture!"

-- Eliezer Yudkowsky, "Circular Altruism" (links added)

Yudkowsky is an artificial intelligence researcher for the Singularity Institute writing on a blog run by Oxford. He's not just advocating torture on the Internet -- he's trying to help create a "superintelligence" that will, if it works the way he hopes, choose the torture over the dust.
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