THAT MYTHIC GREATER GOOD. Reason's Matt Welch discovers two silly women who weigh a case of vehicular manslaughter against a legislative record.

The ends are always worth a few strangled means, especially to those wielding or sympathizing with power. If you're openly musing whether the unwilling, unjust sacrifice of an innocent is worth a broad set of alleged legislative improvements, you're not asking a morally challenging question, you're answering it.

The principle is not limited to the self-styled progressives. Here's Patrick McIlheran.

Once we grant that torture as commonly and traditionally understood is banned, is it out of bounds for a foreign terrorist not under the protection of our laws to be frightened -- though not physically hurt or permanently harmed -- even if barring such techniques probably permits the success of a plot that will surely result in the actual deaths of many innocents? Must those innocents die for this particular scruple?

I'd really like to see a specification of the probable success of a plot, preferably after careful consideration of a proposition that non-state combatants be treated more harshly than state combatants (who are under the protection of international treaty and U.S. laws) in order to deter non-state combatants as a way of limiting war to actors that agree on the rules of combat.