General
On Torture
So there are societies who exist only because of torture. Torture and the fear of torture - and death, and vanishing into ‘nonperson-ness’ in a distant camp - form the sole legitimizing principles of the society. And the relationship between the citizen whose person is secure from the state is fundamentally different from the relationship of the subject whose person is not.We aren’t one of those societies. We never have been, due to the happy accident of English Common Law and the freedom provided by the wilderness.
And what that means is that we also know what we have to resist becoming. And pushing back on the issue of torture - being sure that we are on the right side of that line - is a damn good way to resist this.
Excellent discussion, and the bolded part above is my bright shining line to what I consider acceptable or not. If we have to, the ticking time bomb scenario, I am pretty comfortable with Jack Bauer methods, but most of the time we can be more patient and humane with our enemy captives.
Personally my line is anything that makes the captor into a monster rather than just a huge pain in the neck. I do not want, in any case, government agents getting comfortable with the idea of inflicting pain on other human beings.
Inflicting direct physical pain: Monster.
Leaving the lights on all day and night: Jerk.
And likewise with sleep deprivation and rooms that are too hot or cold, or rewards of good food versus bad. I don’t think it’s an accident that these two things are confused and mixed together under the definition of torture, to where anything that could be considered annoying to an inmate is out of bounds.
Discussion
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