Description: This volume brings together the most important writing on torture and the 'war on terror by one of the leading US voices in the torture debate. Philosopher and legal ethicist David Luban reflects on this contentious topic in a powerful sequence of essays including two new and previously unpublished pieces. He analyzes the trade-offs between security and human rights, as well as the connection between torture, humiliation, and human dignity, the fallacy of using ticking bomb scenarios in debates about torture, and the ethics of government lawyers. The book develops an illuminating and novel conception of torture as the use of pain and suffering to communicate absolute dominance over the victim. Factually stimulating and legally informed, this volume provides the clearest analysis to date of the torture debate. It brings the story up to date by discussing the Obama administration's failure to hold torturers accountable.
Brief description: David Luban is University Professor in Law and Philosophy at Georgetown University. His many publications include Lawyers and Justice: An Ethical Study (1988), Legal Modernism (1994), Legal Ethics and Human Dignity (2007), and well-known essays on just war theory and international criminal law.
Review Quotes: "David Luban has written over the past decade an extraordinarily compelling set of philosophical, legal (and simply human) reflections on what has unfortunately become a defining issue - torture. He raises crucial questions not only about the role of lawyers in legitimizing indefensible practices, but also about broader aspects of moral argument, especially the common practice of relying on 'extreme cases' and 'brainteasers' as alternatives to confronting more mundane (and horrific) realities. The book therefore promises to be important even after that happy day when torture has indeed been eliminated from the world."
Sanford Levinson, University of Texas, Austin