David Sussman, “What’s Wrong with Torture”戴维Sussman“酷刑”的错误.pptVIP

David Sussman, “What’s Wrong with Torture?” (David Sussman is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Sussman’s Thesis “In this article, I defend the intuition that there is something morally special about torture that distinguishes it from most other kinds of violence, cruelty, or degrading treatment. Torture is all these things, of course, and is morally objectionable simply as such. What I deny, however, is that the wrongness of torture can be fully grasped by understanding it as just an extreme instance of these more general moral categories. I argue that there is a core concept of what constitutes torture that corresponds to a distinctive kind of wrong that is not characteristically found in other forms of extreme violence or coercion, a special type of wrong that may explain why we find torture to be more morally offensive than other ways of inflicting great physical or psychological harm. . . . I do not contend here that torture is categorically wrong, but only that it bears an especially high burden of justification, greater in degree and different in kind from even that of killing. . . . My approach is broadly Kantian, but I do not construe the wrong of torture as just that of disregarding, thwarting, or undermining the victim’s capacities for rational self-government. Instead, I argue that torture forces its victim into the position of colluding against himself through his own affects and emotions, so that he experiences himself as simultaneously powerless and yet actively complicit in his own violation. So construed, torture turns out to be not just an extreme form of cruelty, but the pre-eminent instance of a kind of forced self-betrayal, more akin to rape than other kinds of violence characteristic of warfare or police action” (p. 190). A Working Definition of Torture “In addition to the intentional infliction of great pain, torture seems to require that its perpetrators and victims be placed in a distinctive k