"We have to take on board the risk to our correspondents and obviously safety comes first, but you can't legislate for one-off acts like this".
The argument is that there are, or could well be, one-off acts of torture in extreme emergencies that are, all things considered, morally justifiable.
The most obvious version of the argument in favour of one-off acts of torture in extreme emergencies is consequentialist in form.
Faced with the slippery slope, as they see it, of one-off acts of torture in extreme emergencies transmogrifying into institutionalised torture, and/or simply appalled by the inherent evil of the practice of torture, many theorists (Davis (2005); Luban (2005); Brecher (2008); Matthews (2008)) have opted for the opposite extreme and argued that torture can never be morally justified.
His picture imagines the story beyond the one-off act of impregnation.
A desperate addict or debtor will be supplied with drugs or cash in return for a one-off act of intimidation or thuggery.
Instead of concentrating on the history of the individual or the origins of the social practice which provides the context within which the act is performed, conduct tends to be studied as an isolated and one-off act' (139-40).
Ellis said it was hard to tell whether the act was a one-off act of barbarism or whether it was part of a deliberate strategy to target journalists.
Is this the delusional, one-off act of a pair of desperados, unhinged behaviour camouflaged in a flimsy political disguise, like the man who killed himself in Notre Dame cathedral earlier this week or the bombers of the Boston marathon?
We knocked off acts one by one, until we came to the last little bundle from whence we'd pick a winner.
In Slate, Jody Rosen asked, "Does this represent a shifting of center of pop's center of gravity: away from megastars to weird up-and-comers, one-offs, novelty acts, Rick-Rollers?" Eight months later, that hasn't happened yet.
