The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 reopened what many people in America had long assumed was a settled ethical question: Is torture ever morally permissible? Within days, some began to suggest that, in these new circumstances, the new answer was ''yes.'' Rebecca Gordon argues that September 11 did not, as some have said, ''change everything,'' and that institutionalized state torture remains as wrong today as it was on the day before those terrible attacks. Furthermore, U.S. practices during the ''war on terror'' are rooted in a history that began long before September 11, a history that includes both support for torture regimes abroad and the use of torture in the jails and prisons of this country. Gordon argues that the most common ethical approaches to torture - utilitarianism and deontology (ethics based on adherence to duty) - do not provide sufficient theoretical purchase on the problem. Both approaches treat torture as a series of isolated actions that arisein moments of extremity, rather than as an ongoing, historically and socially embedded practice. She advocates instead a virtue ethics approach, based in part on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. Such an approach better illumines torture's ethical dimensions, taking into account the implications of torture for human virtue and flourishing. An examination of torture's effect on the four cardinal virtues - courage, temperance, justice, and prudence (or practical reason) - suggests specific ways inwhich each of these are deformed in a society that countenances torture. Mainstreaming Torture concludes with the observation that if the United States is to come to terms with its involvement in institutionalized state torture, there must be a full and official accounting of what has been done, and those responsible at the highest levels must be held accountable.
Rebecca Gordon argues that institutionalised state torture remains as wrong today as it was before those terrible attacks, and shows how U.S. practices during the 'war on terror' are rooted in a history that includes support for torture ...
Some might dismiss this as a symbolic exercise. But what is at stake here is the very soul of the nation.
"This book focuses on the science, law and morality behind interrogational methods. It develops, for the first time, a comprehensive discussion regarding the legality of torture and the efficacy of interrogation.
On the other hand, the liturgical community of reconciliation will also remember God. ... figure and how does it foster identification with traumatized people?1 By remembering trauma and by remembering God, the community will remember ...
Johnson, James Turner. “Just War, as It Was and Is.” First Things, January 2005. http://www.firstthings.com/article/2005/01/just-waras-itwas-and-is. Johnson provides an insightful exploration of changes in the just-war tradition in ...
This book contributes to a feminist understanding of international human rights by examining restrictions on reproductive freedom through the lens of the right to be free from torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
17 Greenwood, Customary International Law, 79 (emphasis added). 18 Ibid. 19 MATTHEW C. WAXMAN, INTERNATIONAL LAW AND THE POLITICS OF URBAN AIR OPERATIONS 21 n. 44 (2000). See also J. W. Crawford, III, The Law of Noncombatant Immunity ...
... the “virtues of mendacity”: Jay, Virtues of Mendacity. 126 Mearsheimer, Why Leaders Lie, 105. Note that the reference to “good strategic reasons” presupposes widespread agreement on the eventual goal of the political action concerned ...
... Mainstreaming Torture in June 2013. At that time I wrote that there were three things the U.S. government and specifically President Obama should do in the short term: Close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, end the practice of ...
... Mainstreaming Torture : Ethical Approaches in the Post - 9 / 11 United States ( New York : Oxford University Press , 2014 ) . 108Richard Matthews , The Absolute Violation : Why Torture Must Be Prohibited ( Montreal : McGill - Queen's ...