Looking for a foothold

In the comments section of a post at Right Reason, author Edward Feser offers some obiter dicta which strike me as being right-on, with respect to the poverty of the current controversy over torture :

"I don't have a worked out view on the torture debate, but I do know this much: one side (the "conservative" one) is too obsessed with purely pragmatic questions about what we might "need to do" in order to stop a terrorist attack when they should be more concened with the question of what justice allows; while the other side (the "liberal" one) is too beholden to vague and poorly thought-out rhetoric about "human dignity" and not concerned enough with careful analysis of the concepts involved or with serious argumentation. The first side is too coldly utilitarian and amoral, the other too muddle-headed and self-righteous."

(Parenthetically, I'll add that I'm not persuaded by Feser's post, defending the propriety of capital punishment - but that's a separate issue).

I'm generally not an enthusiast for "split-the-difference" approaches to contentious matters,and I wouldn't want to be understood as recommending that in this case. But Feser has put his finger on what's bothered me about the two main sides in this debate (which helps to identify, at the least, what to avoid) : taking two prominent antagonists as examples ... disturbingly, the Krauthammer-ian view seems willing, unaccountably, to jettison various strictures on means in order to serve pressing ends; on the other hand, the Sullivan-esque approach, at its worst,is platitudinous and sanctimonious. The goal ought to be, somehow, neither to sacrifice principle to expediency, nor to trumpet formulae and legalisms.

As I intimated in a previous post, I suspect that this question will not admit of a satisfyingly precise resolution, underscoring yet again that ethics is an "inexact science" - which will be particularly discomfiting to the overtly decidophobic.