Why Torture is the Worst Thing We Do

Abstract

As Lisa Hajjar has recently detailed, Guantánamo is a monument not only to torture, but also to its ubiquity and its acceptance. (https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/42542) For that reason, as well as for very many others, we need to understand what torture is, why it matters so much and why it is to be unreservedly condemned, always, everywhere and whatever the context. I argue that torture is at once the ‘deliberate infliction of pain in order to destroy the victim’s normative world and capacity to create shared realities…’ (R M Cover, ‘Violence and the Word’, Yale Law Journal (95). 1986, p.1602) and an impossible reminder of those realities.  By that I mean that the whole point of torture, and with that its fundamental purpose, is that it seeks to achieve the erasure of a person on the basis of their being an embodied rational agent. It thus requires that the torturer at once both recognise and negate the personhood of the person being tortured. Following Jean Améry’s description of the nature of the central horror of torture, I argue that the act of torture is worse even than that of killing, naïve commentators’ assumptions notwithstanding; that it is, quite literally, the worst thing that we do. Finally, while not making the argument directly here, I note that interrogational torture’s being said by some to work in terms of eliciting information is just an excuse, and one that remains – at best — disgracefully ignorant of what torture is, of what it does and why.

Bio

Bob Brecher is Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Brighton and was Director of its Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics & Ethics. He works mainly on moral theory, applied ethics, “terrorism”, liberalism and neoliberalism and the politics of higher education. His Torture and the Ticking Bomb (Wiley 2007) was the first book-length rebuttal of calls to legalise interrogational torture. He co-edits a monograph series, Off the Fence, for Rowman & Littlefield International; was founding editor of Res Publica; and is on the Board of a number of academic journals.