On the Ethics of Torture

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Sussman (2005), p. 4. Chapter 1 1. Note that on this definition strategic bombing can amount to torture. Some will regard this as counterintuitive and as speaking against this definition. (However, let me point out that quite a few definitions found in the literature also have this implication—without many people noticing it—notably including the one provided by the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment). I don’t; in fact, I think it reflects reality very well. That war and torture might have more intimate connections than many think has also been pointed out by Scarry (1987). 2. Wisnewski (2010), p. 73, confidently claims that “[a]ll forms of torture (be it punitive, interrogational, terroristic, or judicial)—has [sic] one aim: the breaking of the agent. This conception of torture as destructive of agency, and as aiming at the ‘breaking’ of the subject of torture, has achieved near-universal recognition in the literature surrounding treatment of torture victims, and a growing recognition in other disciplines that aim to understand torture.” He then selectively quotes a couple of these authors, not mentioning the fact that “the literature surrounding treatment of torture victims” deals nearly exclusively with victims of torture in dictatorships and therefore might not be conclusive for torture as such—a methodological problem that many of the authors of this literature are quite aware of (see the quote pertaining to n. 32 of ch. 2), in contrast to Wisnewski. Besides, the example of Sophie’s Choice-situations, for instance the example of a father torturing his son because a war criminal credibly threatened to slowly torture the son to death unless the father himself tortures the son by waterboarding him for 20 minutes (in that case the war criminal will let both of them go) is clearly an example where the act of the father is torture (waterboarding is torture) but where the father will not aim at breaking his son; rather he aims at sparing him a fate far worse than 20 minutes of waterboarding. Miller (2005), p. 161 162 Notes to Chapter 1 191, n. 2, accepts, though, “that, notionally at least, there might be some cases in which extreme physical suffering is inflicted but in which the torturer does not have as a purpose the breaking of the victim’s will. However, I do not regard these as the central cases when it comes to torturing human beings, as opposed to other sentient beings that lack a will in anything other than an attenuated sense.” As I say in the main text, punitive torture was widespread in the Middle Ages and is still practiced today. There is no reason to exclude it from a definition of torture, which after all as a definition should include the “notional” cases—the more so if those cases are also very real. Miller (2011) still admits that torture only “in general” aims at breaking the will; and this time he finally relaxes his definition accordingly, having condition (c) of his definition claim that torture is “in general, undertaken for the purpose of breaking the victim’s will.” However, definitions are supposed to give necessary and sufficient criteria for what they define; therefore, putting a term like “in general” into a definition is simply confused. For instance, if one accepted Miller’s definition, then, to answer the question whether the father in the above example tortures his son, one would have to answer the further question whether the father aims with this act of waterboarding in general at breaking his son’s will—obviously, however, such a question does not even make sense, and hence nor does Miller’s definition. Moreover, it is also confused to put empirical contingencies into definitions. Whether torture aims “in general” at breaking the will of the persons subjected to it is an empirical question, not one that can be decided by definitional fiat. However, if one accepted Miller’s definition, and if empirical and historical research showed that all those gruesome practices described in books on torture have rarely ever aimed at breaking the wills of the persons subjected to them (and thus do not satisfy condition (c)), one would have to say that there is no such thing as torture in the real world. That, however, would be absurd. The correct conclusion, one allowed by an acceptable definition of torture, would obviously be that those gruesome practices are torture but that one was...