Confronting Torture

Confronting Torture PDF

Author: Scott A. Anderson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-04-23

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 022652955X

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Torture has lately become front page news, featured in popular movies and TV shows, and a topic of intense public debate. It grips our imagination, in part because torturing someone seems to be an unthinkable breach of humanity—theirs and ours. And yet, when confronted with horrendous events in war, or the prospect of catastrophic damage to one’s own country, many come to wonder whether we can really afford to abstain entirely from torture. Before trying to tackle this dilemma, though, we need to see torture as a multifaceted problem with a long history and numerous ethical and legal aspects. Confronting Torture offers a multidisciplinary investigation of this wrenching topic. Editors Scott A. Anderson and Martha C. Nussbaum bring together a diversity of scholars to grapple with many of torture’s complexities, including: How should we understand the impetus to use torture? Why does torture stand out as a particularly heinous means of war-fighting? Are there any sound justifications for the use of torture? How does torture affect the societies that employ it? And how can we develop ethical or political bulwarks to prevent its use? The essays here resist the temptation to oversimplify torture, drawing together work from scholars in psychology, history, sociology, law, and philosophy, deepening and broadening our grasp of the subject. Now, more than ever, torture is something we must think about; this important book offers a diversity of timely, constructive responses on this resurgent and controversial subject.

Confronting Evils

Confronting Evils PDF

Author: Claudia Card

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-07-22

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1139491709

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In this contribution to philosophical ethics, Claudia Card revisits the theory of evil developed in her earlier book The Atrocity Paradigm (2002), and expands it to consider collectively perpetrated and collectively suffered atrocities. Redefining evil as a secular concept and focusing on the inexcusability - rather than the culpability - of atrocities, Card examines the tension between responding to evils and preserving humanitarian values. This stimulating and often provocative book contends that understanding the evils in terrorism, torture and genocide enables us to recognise similar evils in everyday life: daily life under oppressive regimes and in racist environments; violence against women, including in the home; violence and executions in prisons; hate crimes; and violence against animals. Card analyses torture, terrorism and genocide in the light of recent atrocities, considering whether there can be moral justifications for terrorism and torture, and providing conceptual tools to distinguish genocide from non-genocidal mass slaughter.

At the Side of Torture Survivors

At the Side of Torture Survivors PDF

Author: Sepp Graessner

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2001-03-22

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 9780801866272

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"An outstanding collection that brings an extraordinary international perspective to the growing literature on the treatment of the survivors of torture." -- New England Journal of Medicine

The Absolute Violation

The Absolute Violation PDF

Author: Richard S. Matthews

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2008-07-24

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 0773578285

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Richard Matthews challenges the increasing acceptability of state-sponsored torture interrogation, repudiating any possible justifications. He confronts its various supporters - ticking time bomb and tragic choice theorists, utilitarians, legal scholars - and draws from philosophy, medicine, psychiatry, survivor and torturer narratives, history, feminism, the experience of working intelligence officials, anthropology, and game theory to illustrate that no moral justification for torture can be supported.

Torture and Its Consequences

Torture and Its Consequences PDF

Author: Metin Basoglu

Publisher: CUP Archive

Published: 1992-11-05

Total Pages: 562

ISBN-13: 9780521392990

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A classic publication in this field which serves as a scholarly yet very practical resource.

Confronting Terror

Confronting Terror PDF

Author: Dean Reuter

Publisher: Encounter Books

Published: 2011-08-23

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1594035636

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After the September 11, 2001 attacks the United States went to war. With thousands of Americans killed, billions of dollars in damage, and aggressive military and security measures in response, we are still living with the war a decade later. A change of presidential administration has not dulled controversy over the most fundamental objectives, strategies and tactics of the war, or whether it is even a war. This book clears the air over the meaning of 9/11, and sets the stage for a reasoned, clear, and considered discussion of the future with a collection of essays commemorating the 10th anniversary of the attacks. The contributors include supporters and critics of the war on terrorism, policymakers and commentators, insiders and outsiders, and some of the leading voices inside and outside government.

Kill Boxes: Facing the Legacy of US-Sponsored Torture, Indefinite Detention, and Drone Warfare

Kill Boxes: Facing the Legacy of US-Sponsored Torture, Indefinite Detention, and Drone Warfare PDF

Author: Elisabeth Weber

Publisher: punctum books

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0998531847

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Kill Boxes addresses the legacy of US-sponsored torture, indefinite detention, and drone warfare by deciphering the shocks of recognition that humanistic and artistic responses to violence bring to consciousness if readers and viewers have eyes to face them.Beginning with an analysis of the ways in which the hooded man from Abu Ghraib became iconic, subsequent chapters take up less culturally visible scenes of massive violations of human rights to bring us face to face with these shocks and the forms of recognition that they enable and disavow. We are addressed in the photo of the hooded man, all the more so as he was brutally prevented, in our name, from returning the camera's and thus our gaze. We are addressed in the screams that turn a person, tortured in our name, into howling flesh. We are addressed in poems written in the Guantánamo Prison camp, however much American authorities try to censor them, in our name. We are addressed by the victims of the US drone wars, however little American citizens may have heard the names of the places obliterated by the bombs for which their taxes pay. And we know that we are addressed in spite of a number of strategies of brutal refusal of heeding those calls.Providing intensive readings of philosophical texts by Jean Améry, Jacques Derrida, and Christian Thomasius, with poetic texts by Franz Kafka, Paul Muldoon, and the poet-detainees of Guantánamo Bay Prison Camp, and with artistic creations by Sallah Edine Sallat, the American artist collective Forkscrew and an international artist collective from Pakistan, France and the US, Kill Boxes demonstrates the complexity of humanistic responses to crimes committed in the name of national security. The conscious or unconscious knowledge that we are addressed by the victims of these crimes is a critical factor in discussions on torture, on indefinite detention without trial, as practiced in Guantánamo, and in debates on the strategies to circumvent the latter altogether, as practiced in drone warfare and its extrajudicial assassination program.The volume concludes with an Afterword by Richard Falk.

Confronting Global Terrorism and American Neo-Conservatism

Confronting Global Terrorism and American Neo-Conservatism PDF

Author: Tom Farer

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008-02-07

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 0199534721

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Liberal intellectuals and political leaders have been slow to articulate a grand strategy informed by liberal values for confronting global terrorism. This book outlines the framework of a liberal strategy, and exposes the costs of the neo-conservative alternative that has driven US foreign policy since 9/11.

Confronting Terror

Confronting Terror PDF

Author: Dean Reuter

Publisher: Encounter Books

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1594035628

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Presents new essays dealing with the September 2001 terror attacks and the subsequent anti-terror laws and policies, featuring authors with a wide variety of viewpoints on the matter.

Torture and Dignity

Torture and Dignity PDF

Author: J. M. Bernstein

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-09-14

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 022626632X

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Torture and rape are only rarely considered by moral philosophers—because they are so indisputably morally atrocious acts and because their specific mode of suffering cannot be accounted for by reigning moral theories. By making them pivotal to the understanding of morality in general, however, Jay Bernstein’s intention is to throw into question the dominant schools of modern moral philosophy and to attempt to restructure moral experience and understanding on the basis of the formations of suffering they make salient. Morals, Bernstein argues, emerge from the experience of moral injury, from the sufferings of the victims of moral harm. For us moderns, morality at its most urgent and insistent is, finally, a victim morality. This can sound hyperbolic; but since all of us are potential victims, it turns out that this perspective is readily available and intrinsic to ordinary ethical experience. One of Bernstein’s pivotal arguments is that trust is a form of mutual recognition; that trust is the ethical substance of everyday life; and that understood aright trust is structured from the perspective of a potential victim of harm rather than from the perspective of a deliberating agent. This book promises to be a major contribution to moral philosophy.