Apologies and Twlight Zone

Been running around in recent days finagling how the move-in back to the happy land of Cambridge is going to go and I've been unable to post. Most of you who are members of the Umbrella list have received an initial document and hopefully that'll get the ball rolling on the entire project. At any rate, I intend to return to regular posting as soon as I hit ground again at Harvard in a week or so.

But, after an extensive trip with Mike into the city to see "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" (of which I have to blog about eventually) and consignment store shopping, we and Justin got to talking about long-winded philosophical dilemmas, which is often our habit. In particular, we were dealing with the ethical dilemmas posed by the medical anesthetic "Twilight."

http://www.justbreastimplants.com/surgery/twilight_anesthesia.htm

What's interesting about Twilight is that it induces a mid-level state between unconsciousness and wakefulness in the patient. However, it does not itself create sufficient relief from surgical pain, rather the interesting thing about the chemical is that it removes all memory of the surgery. That is to say, without being combined with a local anesthetic (which it usually is), Twilight could theoretically allow you to feel all the pain of an event, but eliminate all memory of that event later on.

Question: Would it be ethical to hit a prisoner with Twilight and then physically torture him for information? (in a way in which the prisoner was never able to discover)

It's an interesting consideration, because it asks if the removal of persistent consequences eliminates the moral imperatives of a particular action. The gut instinct reaction, at least in my case, is "yes." Arguably, the guy you tortured never suffers any adverse effects (beyond the pain of the original torture) and you get the information that you need. No harm, no foul, right?

Though, unfortunately, you could equally reconstitute the system to say that this reasoning justified date rape, assuming that the rapee never discovers the situation. Or, alternatively, that stealing money from someone who never finds out is not really stealing in any sense. Insofar as we hinge the entirity of moral culpability on the cognizable consequences of our actions, we can hold that a entire number of acts are not morally wrong.

Gedanken Experiment: We live in a world where we all suffer from the memory loss in "Momento." Are there ethics? Does right and wrong exist without memory?

Interesting, I'm going to have to think about this one some more.