There’s something really odd about characterizing “torture is preferable to this utterly unrealizable thing” as “advocating torture.”
You know, in natural language “x is better than y” often has the connotation “x is good”, and people go at lengths to avoid such wordings if they don’t want that connotation. For example, “‘light’ cigarettes are no safer than regular ones” is logically equivalent to “regular cigarettes are at least as safe as ‘light’ ones”, but I can’t imagine an anti-smoking campaign saying the latter.
Fair enough. For maximal precision I suppose I ought to have said “I reject your characterization of...” rather than “There’s something really odd about characterizing...,” but I felt some polite indirection was called for.
You know, in natural language “x is better than y” often has the connotation “x is good”, and people go at lengths to avoid such wordings if they don’t want that connotation. For example, “‘light’ cigarettes are no safer than regular ones” is logically equivalent to “regular cigarettes are at least as safe as ‘light’ ones”, but I can’t imagine an anti-smoking campaign saying the latter.
Fair enough. For maximal precision I suppose I ought to have said “I reject your characterization of...” rather than “There’s something really odd about characterizing...,” but I felt some polite indirection was called for.