Abstract
In this chapter I try to elucidate the concept of human dignity by taking a closer look at the features of a paradigmatic torture situation. After identifying the salient aspects of torture, I discuss various accounts for the moral wrongness of such acts and argue that what makes torture a violation of human dignity is the perverted moral relationship between torturer and victim. This idea is subsequently being substantiated and defended against important objections. In the final part of the chapter I give a (qualified) defense of the methodology employed in the previous sections.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
For the complete results see BBC/Globescan/PIPA (2006); in a more recent survey conducted by WorldPublicOpinion, 35% of the respondents opted for exceptions to the prohibition to torture in cases where innocent lives are at risk, and 9% held that the government should be able to use torture in general (Kull et al. 2008).
- 2.
See, for e.g., the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment Art.2(2): “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”
- 3.
- 4.
Cf., for e.g., the aforementioned Convention against Torture which bases the protection from torture in the “inherent dignity of the human person.”
- 5.
This is in accordance with Ernst Bloch’s insight that the meaning of human dignity becomes most visible when we look at violations of human dignity (Bloch 1961).
- 6.
For a thorough discussion see the contributions in Greenberg (2006); another prominent example is the European Court of Human Right’s decision in Ireland vs Great Britain that the treatment of a prisoner who was interrogated while standing blindfolded in a stress position and, additionally, deprived of food, water and sleep was a case of “maltreatment”, but not “torture”.
- 7.
- 8.
As reported in Human Rights Watch (2008); italics represent my synopsis.
- 9.
The significance of mental suffering in torture situations is already noticed by Beccaria in his “Essay on Crimes and Punishment,” (1995: Chapter. XVI). Expanding the concept of torture toward psychological effects is, also beyond Khalil’s case, very plausible since many modern torture methods, like mock executions or extended solitary confinement, put emphasis on the infliction of mental, not physical, harm. For a denial of the necessity of mental suffering as a sui generis element of torture see Davis (2005).
- 10.
Since at the present stage of the argument I am solely concerned with a description of torture, this is not meant in an evaluative sense.
- 11.
Although Twining at first grants that the intention to inflict pain is a necessary condition for torture, he (somewhat paradoxically) later argues for the insignificance of this feature (Twining 1978: 154).
- 12.
Twining (1978: 156): “It may well be the case that in legal and other contexts the term torture will be confined to situations where direct intention to inflict pain is attributable to the front-line torturer; but an adequate theory of torture and related phenomena must confront the conceptual, moral, legal and other practical problems of attributing responsibility to persons higher up the hierarchy.”
- 13.
My emphasis.
- 14.
For a discussion of non-relational approaches to human rights cf. Powers and Faden (2008: 47–49).
- 15.
Though I won’t argue this point, relation-dependence seems to be an essential feature of the moral wrongness of other forms of inhuman treatment as well.
- 16.
This is what Twining’s bureaucracy-example shows (Twining 1978: 156).
- 17.
Specific purposes, by means of which various types of torture can be distinguished, include the obtaining of intelligence (interrogation torture); the punishment or the intimidation of the victim (punishment/terroristic torture); or, simply, the sadistic gratification of the torturer (an element present, at least as a side-effect, in most torture cases).
- 18.
Sussman (2005: 30): “[Torture] is not just an assault on the victim’s autonomy, but also a perversion of it […].”
- 19.
This is an element emphasized by Elaine Scarry whose account Sussman uses as an important empirical source (Scarry 1985).
- 20.
Sussman (2005: 30): “[Torture] is not just an assault on or violation of the victim’s autonomy, but also a perversion of it, a kind of systematic mockery of the basic moral relations that an individual bears both to others and to herself.”
- 21.
It is important to note that, if Shue’s argument is correct, it would not be necessary that we already know that the victim is in possession of the information; it would (in analogy to cases of self-defense) be enough if the torturer would be justified in believing that this is the case.
- 22.
- 23.
Cf. the “Nowheresville”-scenario in Feinberg (1970).
- 24.
- 25.
“Justification” is meant in a weak sense, i.e. as giving you an account of the reasons I acted for, not as being able to show that what I did was not blameworthy.
- 26.
This is similar to Feinberg’s idea that dignity is the “capacity to claim rights” (Feinberg 1970). Recent renewals and elaborations of this idea can be found in Stephen Darwall’s theory of a “second-personal dignity” (Darwall 2006: Chapter 6) and Rainer Forst’s conception of dignity as the right to justification (Forst 2007).
- 27.
Despite the rich tradition of intersubjective accounts of the concept of human dignity (see fn. 26 above) this move might seem quite arbitrary. For a (qualified) defense see Section 5.
- 28.
This puts torture into a category with other morally wrong practices like rape or slavery where exactly the same asymmetry is a dominant feature.
- 29.
See Section 8.3.1 above.
- 30.
- 31.
Seumas Miller mentions a real case with these features (Miller 2008).
- 32.
For a defense of torture along these lines cf. Steinhoff (2006).
- 33.
The foundation of this account is the idea that the basic elements of morality are concrete others, not ideal and abstract moral agents. Benhabib presents a strong argument against the validity of moral theories not taking the moral identity of concrete persons into view (Benhabib (1987: 88–90).
- 34.
Jeremy Waldron has a similar argument with respect to the legal wrongness of torture. He contends that with giving up the legal prohibition of torture we would not merely lose a single legal norm but change the shape of the whole legal system (Waldron 2005: 1728–1734).
- 35.
Thanks to Susanne Boshammer for this objection.
- 36.
The same holds true for so-called “catastrophic” scenarios where a morally wrong action (e.g. killing an innocent person) has to be committed to “save the world” (Fried 1994: 76).
- 37.
I would like to thank Holger Baumann, Susanne Boshammer, Paulus Kaufmann, and Elaine Webster for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and the editors of this volume for many valuable suggestions.
References
BBC/Globescan/PIPA. 2006. One-third support ‘some torture’. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ 6063386.stm. Accessed 3 Aug 2009.
Beccaria, Cesare. 1995. On crimes and punishments. In On crimes and punishments and other writings, ed. Richard Bellamy, 111–113. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Benhabib, Seyla. 1987. The generalized and the concrete other. In Feminism as critique, eds. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, 77–95. Oxford: Blackwell.
Bloch, Ernst. 1961. Naturrecht und menschliche Würde. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.
Brecher, Bob. 2007. Torture and the ticking bomb. Oxford: Blackwell.
Darwall, Stephen. 2006. The second-personal standpoint. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Davis, Michael. 2005. The moral justification of torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. International Journal of Applied Philosophy 19(2): 161–178.
Dershowitz, Alan. 2002. Why terrorism works: Understanding the threat, responding to the challenge. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Feinberg, Joel. 1970. The nature and value of rights. The Journal of Value Inquiry 4: 243–257, Dec 1970.
Forst, Rainer. 2007. Das Recht auf Rechtfertigung. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.
Frankena, William. 1986. The ethics of respect for persons. Philosophical Topics 14: 149–167.
Fried, Charles. 1994. Right and wrong as absolute. In absolutism and its consequentialist critics, ed. Joram Graf Haber, 73–92. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Gewirth, Alan. 1992. Human dignity as the basis of rights. In The constitution of rights. Human dignity and american values, ed. Michael J. Meyer and William A Parent, 10–28. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Greenberg, Karen, ed. 2006. The torture debate in America. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Honneth, Axel. 1992. Integrity and disrespect: Principles of a conception of morality based on the theory of recognition. Political Theory 20(2): 187–201.
Human Rights Watch. 2008. The torture of Tasneem Khalil. http://www.hrw.org/sites /default/files/reports/bangladesh0208_1.pdf. Accessed 3 Aug 2009.
Kull, Steven et al. 2008. World public opinion on torture. http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/jun08/WPO_Torture_Jun08_packet.pdf. Accessed 3 Aug 2009.
Macklin, Ruth. 2003. Dignity is a useless concept. BMJ 327: 1419–1420.
Margalit, Avishai. 1996. The decent society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Miller, Seumas. 2005. Is torture ever morally justified? International Journal of Applied Philosophy 19(2): 179–192.
Miller, Seumas. 2008. Torture. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2008 edn), ed. Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/torture/. Accessed 3 Aug 2009.
Pinker, Stephen. 2008. The stupidity of dignity. The New Republic May 28, 2008.
Powers, Madison and Ruth Faden. 2008. Social justice: The moral foundations of public health and health policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Scanlon, Thomas, and Rainer Forst. 2007. Das Recht auf Rechtfertigung. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.
Scanlon, Thomas, and Rainer Forst. 2008. Moral dimensions. Permissibility, meaning, blame. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The body in pain: The making and unmaking of the world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shue, Henry. 1978. Torture. Philosophy and Public Affairs 7(1): 124–143.
Steinhoff, Uwe. 2006. Torture – The case for dirty harry and against Alan Dershowitz. Journal of Applied Philosophy 23(3): 337–353.
Sussman, David. 2005. What’s wrong with torture? Philosophy and Public Affairs 33(1): 1–33.
Twining, William. 1978. Torture and philosophy. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 52(Suppl): 143–194.
Waldron, Jeremy. 2005. Torture and positive law. Jurisprudence for the white house. Columbia Law Review 105(6): 1681–1750.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the desert of the real. London: Verso.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Maier, A. (2011). Torture. In: Kaufmann, P., Kuch, H., Neuhaeuser, C., Webster, E. (eds) Humiliation, Degradation, Dehumanization. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 24. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9661-6_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9661-6_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-9660-9
Online ISBN: 978-90-481-9661-6
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)