Torture, Inhumanity, and life Incoherence

Abstract

The paper argues that torture can never be justified by appeal to the sanctity of innocent life its supporters invoke to justify it, precisely because it is destructive of that which makes life sacred and valuable, at the individual level, for both torturer and torture victim, and at the level of the social institutions within which good lives may be led. In sum, to torture and to be tortured are the ultimate degradation and destruction of that which makes human life uniquely valuable. That which makes it uniquely valuable is not mere biological functioning, but the capacity to care for principles, people, creatures, and futures beyond the limits of our own skins. That capacity is what one might call—without positing the existence of any metaphysical or transcendent spiritual substance—the soul of human beings, which, if lost, causes the loss of our humanity. Torture, for both victim and perpetrator, is soul-destroying. Any society that actively cultivates torturers and employs information obtained by their work has abandoned any claim to adhering to a value system rooted in the recognition of the sanctity of human life.

Keywords:

• torture
• life value
• inhumanity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jeff Noonan is Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Windsor. He is the author of Critical Humanism and the Politics of Difference (2003), Democratic Society and Human Needs (2006), and Materialist Ethics and Life Value (2012), as well more than 30 articles in journals such as Res Publica, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Philosophy Today, Re-thinking Marxism, and Dialogue.

Notes

¹My aim in this paper is not to criticise the Bush-Cheney administration as such, but the practice of torture and anyone who supports it. If criticism, like charity, begins at home, (and it should), then I should point out that the current Canadian government was complicit with aspects of the CIA's torture regime, and maintains to this day that they would use information gleaned from torture. In 2012, Canadian Justice Minister Vic Toews re-ignited the debate in Canada over whether democratic governments should ever use torture to prevent terrorist attacks when he disclosed that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canada Border Services Agency would be allowed to use information obtained under torture if its use could protect “the life and property” of Canadians (Canadian Press 2014). Toews was just one more example of Western leaders—always quick to pontificate about human rights when denouncing their enemies, coming to “accept torture as a normal course of social and political events” (Behrens 2014).