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Thank you all very much for coming to this special event organised by Elac,

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the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict on Torture and Dignity.

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So this event really came about because we realised that David was in the country for a period of time teaching down in London,

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and we thought that this was this was too good an opportunity to miss having three of

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the most eminent and distinguished and active writers theorists and I suppose in a way,

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activists on the issue of torture in recent times in the country at the same time.

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So we thought we'd seize on this opportunity to bring them all together for this event,

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which I think is just going to be terrifically interesting and stimulating.

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So a colleague of mine said to me, but then they would just agree with each other.

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And in a sense, of course, that that's true.

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I tend to think that's not a problem, since I tend to think that the elements of the shared position is fundamentally the correct one.

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And I think that over the last few decades, the work and the scholarship of these other three men has really been a bastion

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of clear thinking and moral decency and a and a period of public debate,

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which has often been characterised by neither of those two things.

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So let me just very briefly introduce our three panellists here today.

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David Luban to my right is going to kick us off in the presentation.

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David is the University Professor of law and philosophy at Georgetown University.

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He has been writing on the issue of torture for well over a decade now and has

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collected papers will soon be published by Cambridge University Press under the title.

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Remind me again what you gave torture. Power and torture power and law.

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And he's also been very, very active in the public policy debate in the United States,

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including in testifying to both houses of Congress on the role of lawyers in US torture activities.

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On my far left is Professor Jeremy Waldron,

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who is actually professor of social and political theory at All Souls College in Oxford and also university professor at NYU Law School.

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He has also published broadly and deeply on issues of torture, and his papers are collected in a rival complement complementary series with al-Qaeda,

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abuse and Torture, Terror and Trade-offs philosophy for the White House.

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And I was actually fortunate enough to have written assessments for both crises on both books,

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and I can attest that both of them are absolutely superb, essential readings for anyone who is interested in these matters.

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And on my immediate left is Professor Henry Shu, emeritus of Oxford University,

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who is many of you will know, wrote one of the seminal early papers on torture,

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his 1978 paper and philosophy in public affairs, which I know has been an inspiration to many people who work in this field and

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who continue to to write and intervene and on this debate to the present time.

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So we're extremely grateful to have the three of you here. And I look forward to out to a fascinating discussion.

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So, David, I'll ask you to to kick us off. Well, thanks. Thanks for the generous introduction and for having me here.

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And when a few days ago, when David was fretting over email about how similar our views were and how we really need a disagreement,

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I thought that I could start by saying that now I've seen Zero Dark 30 and I'm pro torture.

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But but it wouldn't be true because I haven't seen it and I haven't changed my view.

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No, it's every human rights instrument, every major human rights instrument in the world declares that torture and cruel,

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inhuman and degrading treatment are violations and almost all of the world's human right instruments

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also explain that the reason that we have human rights is out of concern for human dignity.

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Now, the the first seems like an obvious thing to include in a human rights treaty.

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The second is a philosophical proposition, and it raises puzzles.

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How do you get specific human rights out of a general concept of human dignity?

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I mean, some might say that you can't get a rabbit out of a hat without having first put the rabbit into the hat.

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And there's a more specific puzzle about connecting human dignity and torture,

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and that is that it just seems the evil of torture seems too obvious to need fancy explanations through philosophical concepts.

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It's the imposition of pain. I mean, torturing a dog is wrong, all.

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So. And we might think that torturing a dog is wrong for most of the same reasons, that torturing a human being is wrong.

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And then where do you get the human dignity? By the way, dogs will continue to appear in my remarks today in a couple of other places as well.

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So you might think that grounding the prohibition on torture in human dignity is too refined and maybe even downright evasive.

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And I hope to argue that that's not the case now.

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Human dignity is not a precisely defined ahistorical concept like alkaline salt,

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and it's not even a historical but definable and a historical fuzzy term like tort or obligation.

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I actually think that human dignity is a concept that largely exists in its historical meanings.

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And the problem is that there are a lot of them in human dignity.

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If you look at the stoic tradition was identified by Epictetus with the unshakeable will by Cicero and Marcus Aurelius,

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with reason moving from Stoics to the biblical tradition,

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it's human dignity comes from being created in God's image or in having dominion over the rest of nature,

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and therefore being a higher order of being than the rest of nature.

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In the Renaissance Pico Della Miranda line is oration on human dignity says that it's our chameleon nature.

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Our ability to recreate ourselves can't locates it in autonomy.

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It could be located in individuality. The contemporary philosopher Avishai Margalit locates it in not being humiliated,

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which is something that I have said in in various writings over the last few years.

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There is a cultural feminist understanding of human dignity that focuses not so much on

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the very masculinist tradition of governance and a kind of senatorial conception of rule,

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but on the giving of care and the capacity to give care.

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And I know Jeremy is going to be elaborating on conceptions of human dignity, so I'm not going to say more about it right now.

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I will say that what I'm going to be focusing on is is two features that I think any

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reasonable concept or any reasonable conception of human dignity will have to include.

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And those are just to anticipate a bit the integrity of the human personality and the equal status of all people.

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Now, let me just start the argument by a reference to an interesting opinion by the German Supreme Constitutional Court from 1977.

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The German court was considering whether a life sentence without parole is constitutionally permissible, and they concluded that it wasn't.

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This is for two reasons. So it's based on two articles of the German constitution.

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One which guarantees human dignity and one which guarantees the free development, the right to free development of the personality.

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And the court linked those and said, if you sentenced somebody to life in prison without parole, then you are,

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in essence declaring that they are beyond the possibility of rehabilitation,

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beyond the possibility of redeeming themselves, of being welcomed back into human society.

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And to convey that to a person is to violate their human dignity.

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So without at least the hope of parole and of course, at a parole hearing of somebody who is not ready to come out of prison,

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back into society, can stay in prison, but they're given the opportunity.

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So without that hope, then it's no longer possible to form human goals, you might say, because there is no goal.

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This is endless imprisonment or motivations.

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Life would have the characteristic of Bernard Williams called the tedium of immortality, and the personality would be in danger of breaking up.

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Now, of course, many prisoners who've gotten life without parole sentences don't break up.

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But at least that's a strong possibility.

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And it's this idea of having a personality that's able to form goals and goals of its own to form a motivational set around them.

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That is pretty much the core of what I am thinking of as the integrity of human personality, as a first aspect of human dignity.

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And the second I mentioned is, of course, that. Of sharing equally high status with all other humans.

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And you can connect this with practices of imprisonment as well,

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which oftentimes involve a kind of symbolic degradation of saying that this person will be treated harshly in prison.

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Precisely because we want to show that they are lower than other people.

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The historian James Whitman has argued that that explains many of the United States practices of imprisonment.

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Okay. Now I want to put these together. The first the emphasis on integrity of the personality, you might say, focuses on the individual.

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The second on the equality. The equal status of people is a more relational concept of dignity, and they go together.

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If you destroy someone's human personality, then you are reducing her to a lower level.

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And systematic subordination of somebody is an assault on the personality.

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So at this point, let's turn to the topic of torture and what its specific evils are.

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And I'm going to begin with physical torture,

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although part of my argument is going to be that physical torture and mental torture lie

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on a continuum with each other and that they should not be separated from each other.

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Now let's go back to torturing the dog. Where we focus on the pain of the dog.

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Why isn't talking about the pain of torture enough to explain its distinctive evil?

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I mean, one answer is simply that pain by itself isn't necessarily an evil.

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Now you write, Focus on the experience of any woman who has willingly undergone natural childbirth,

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where the pain, I'm told, is more excruciating than anything that any man could bear.

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I don't know how anyone would know that, but I'm willing are having having been in the room when both my children were born,

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I'm willing to say that I would have been screaming for the epidural off.

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But of course, they were associated with a joyful event.

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And it's not an evil and I mean, it's got evil aspects, but it's not itself an evil.

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So the point here is that context counts in determining whether pain is an evil or not, and what makes the pain of torture.

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Evil is a particular kind of context. Now here I'm going to draw on the authority of the stoic writer Seneca in one of his letters,

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who I think had extremely perceptive things to say about torture and the evils of torture.

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Seneca says that even the stoic sage who prides himself on being completely indifferent to what the world can inflict on him,

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quails his heartbreaks, his courage breaks when he's confronted with the spectacle of seeing the instruments of torture displayed in front of him.

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And one of the things that's important about what Seneca says is that it is the spectacle itself.

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And he says the spectacle overcomes those who would have patiently withstood the suffering.

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Now, I don't know if that means that the spectacle is worse than the suffering,

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but certainly that the spectacle is one of the things that's constitutive of the evil.

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Now it's the spectacle involves a kind of terror.

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What is it terror of? Here's what Seneca says. That which shakes us most is the dread which hangs over us from another's power, over us.

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So it's knowing that you are in the power of somebody, knowing that you are at the mercy of someone who is completely merciless.

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Now I want to pick up on that element of mastery, of being somebody else in somebody else's power and offer a definition of torture.

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This is going to be quite different from the legal definition.

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I'll come back to that in a moment. But it's meant to capture just these aspects of torture.

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So here it is. A torture is the display of unlimited power over absolute helplessness,

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accomplished through the infliction of suffering on the victim that the victim is meant to

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perceive as the display of the torture is limitless power and the victim's absolute helplessness.

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Now, that's a little complicated, and let me try to pick it apart.

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The the main ideas here are, first of all, that torture involves a display of somebody's mastery of the torturers, mastery over the victim.

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And what it's a display of is that power relation. I'm absolutely helpless.

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You have. Limitless power over me. Limitless power.

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You can do anything to me that you want and that that mastery, that radical inequality, that display is accomplished through the infliction of pain.

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That's the medium through which the unlimited power is displayed.

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Now, the legal definition is, at its core, torture as the intentional infliction of severe mental or physical pain or suffering on someone.

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And there are other aspects to it that in most legal definitions by government agents, not for purposes of punishment or law enforcement,

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but the core is the intentional infliction of severe mental or physical pain or suffering.

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Now, I don't want to say that that definition is wrong, but I think it leaves something out.

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And the reason that I'm offering a substitute definition is that the part that it leaves out

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is this element of the elements of mastery and the spectacle of mastery that's driven home.

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To set the context for the suffering that the torture victim undergoes.

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So it's a certain relationship of absolute inequality that's at the centre of the context that makes the pains of torture evil.

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Now, the aim of torture is to break the victim. It is meant as an all out assault on the victim's soul.

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And now here, the two aspects of human dignity that I singled out earlier on the integrity of the

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personality and equal human status are linked to understand the nature of the violation.

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We understand that the torture is trying to break the soul of the victim,

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to break the mind of the victim, to break the will of the victim, to break the spirit of the victim.

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I mean, the way that Elaine's scary in her book On the Body in Pain describes the pains of torture,

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is that that's an intensely privatising experience, because as anybody knows who's experienced really bad pain, it's so it's too distracting.

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It makes it impossible for you to think about anything else. It brings you back into yourself.

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It doesn't even have to be extreme pain. Anybody who desperately has to go to the bathroom in the middle of a lecture where it's too

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embarrassing to get up and stalk out of knows how you can't really think about anything else.

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So that's the sense of an assault on the victim and the powers of the victim's personality.

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And it's done precisely in order to turn the victim into someone who's utterly subservient to somebody else.

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John Kerry was all a prisoner of the Gestapo who wrote a famous essay about the torture that he underwent.

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And he says when it has happened and the torturer has expanded into the body of his fellow man and extinguished what was his spirit,

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he himself can then smoke a cigarette or sit down to breakfast.

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Now, I've been focusing on physical pain and physical torture.

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It seems to me that the same phenomena go on with mental torture.

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Now there's a history of mental torture that I want to mention.

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And the modern research by intelligence agencies into mental torture is often traced back to a series of experiments done by a scholar,

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an American psychologist named Martin Seligman of On Dogs, published in a paper called Learned Helplessness.

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And what Seligman's experiments consisted of was administering electrical shocks to dogs,

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but not in the usual way of training that they to make the dog aversive to one thing, make the dog want something else.

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But they're completely random and there's no behaviour of the dog that can do anything to make the shocks stop.

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And what Seligman discovered was that after a while, the dogs no longer even made an attempt to get away from the source of the electrical shock.

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That was the learned helplessness. Now, human researchers picking up on Seligman's ideas discovered several things.

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One was that very small disorientation, hooding, somebody depriving them of sleep or making their sleep combat uneven, unpredictable hours.

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This was what other of the CIA referred to is the frequent flyer program of waking somebody up every couple of every hour and then every 2 hours.

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But really, it kind of ran. Intervals, moving them to a different cell, not letting the victim know what time it is.

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Noise. Flashing lights. Manipulations of temperature.

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Too hot, too cold. That just the accumulation of those small,

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disorienting experiences can reduce somebody to the status of Seligman's dogs to a state of learned helplessness.

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Add on other techniques of so-called torture light slapping as not punching or beating the kind of

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thing that's torture heavy but an insult slap on an insult grab plus other forms of humiliation.

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Forced nudity. Forced grooming. Prisoners at Guantanamo had their beards shaved.

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Sexual taunting,

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sexual humiliations that all of these can completely break the personality and reduce the victim to a kind of infantile submissiveness.

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So I'm kind of Stockholm syndrome in a way in which now they just want to please.

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Okay, this is more helplessness. So here's a Guantanamo example.

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This is from an interrogator's log in the 50 day interrogation of a man named Mohammed al Qahtani.

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I'm told detainee that a dog is held in higher esteem because dogs know right from wrong.

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Began teaching the detainee lessons such as stay calm and bark to elevate his social status up to that of a dog.

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Detainee became very agitated. That was from the that was from the of the log.

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Now, what you see here is exactly the same pattern of complete.

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I mean, I think the dog training example is a perfect illustration.

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I'm the master. I'm above you. It's through these aversive techniques that I will reduce your will to being a suburb of my own will.

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Now, I'm going to give one other example from of a Guantanamo technique.

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This was from an Army investigation.

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A detainee was given the following threat, and I'm quoting from the official report He will disappear and never be heard from again.

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His very existence will become erased. His electronic files will be deleted from the computer.

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His paper files will be packed up and filed away, and his existence will be forgotten by all.

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No one will know what happened to him, and eventually no one will care.

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Now, I'm sure that that threat was written with lawyers in mind.

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Under U.S. law,

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the only the only kinds of threats that count as mental torture are threats of death or of severe pain to yourself or to somebody else.

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So this one is very carefully contrived so that the threat, which is bureaucratic oblivion, can't count under US law as a form of mental torture.

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Nevertheless, it clearly is mental torture. And circling back to the place that I began.

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It's mental torture of exactly the same kind that the German court was talking about with life without parole.

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It is that the torture has the power without inflicting civil pain, simply to erase my existence.

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Now, I want to I want to make a couple of comments, a couple of more comments, and I'll stop milder in some sense,

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but in some sense more severe than life without parole is long term solitary confinement, isolation.

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And in fact, it's isolation is one of the techniques that has been used by interrogators in order to break detainees.

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And in fact, the US government entered a pleading in court saying We can't give lawyers to detainees because if they have lawyers,

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they'll have human contact with somebody other than the interrogator.

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Isolation is what we're using in order to produce the kind of servility that will lead this person to give us useful information.

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So the government is saying we have to do this now. In fact, in the United States, there are 25,000 prisoners in long term solitary confinement.

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The problem with long term solitary confinement, besides the obvious one,

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is that it destroys the personality of a psychologist explains that are who we are

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and how we function in the world around us is nested in relation to other people.

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So that over a long term, a period, long term isolation, one sense of self is undermined.

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It. Mine's your ability to regulate your own emotions.

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The appropriateness of your feelings and your thoughts is impossible to index because you're lacking the

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feedback from other people that will tell you whether what you're feeling right now is normal or abnormal.

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So it becomes a struggle to maintain sanity.

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And this, once again, is something that's in, seems to me, the same family as life without parole, as the various forms of torture,

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light and disorientation that are all meant to inflict severe mental suffering on somebody in order to display the torturers mastery.

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And it seems to me that this is clearly a violation of human dignity,

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understood in the twofold way that I've been proposing of maintaining of equal status of all people and the integrity of the individual's personality.

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And I think that's that's what I'll stop here. Ray, thank you.

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And thanks for sticking to time as well. So I do want to take us on.

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Yes, indeed. Thank you very much. It's a very, very great honour to be on the platform with these people.

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And on a serious subject, it might seem from that, from some points of view,

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talking about dignity as the basis of the objection to torture doesn't quite get at what's involved.

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David mentioned this at the beginning of his comments, you know, to say of torture,

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that it's disrespectful to say of torture, that it doesn't give people the respect that they're fundamentally entitled to.

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Seems to be such an understatement, and it does seem intuitively.

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Do we want to concentrate directly on elements of cruelty, cruelty that would be explained as wrong,

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not in terms of the dignity of the human being, but as David has suggested, in the same way that cruelty to animals would be would be explained.

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So I think like him, the part of our work here today is to explain why.

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Nevertheless, the concept of dignity is an idea that has great power and does a lot of work in making the case for the kind of ferocious prohibitions

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on torture that we find in the legal systems of the world and international humanitarian law and international human rights law.

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Dignity is an interesting concept because when it's used affirmatively, when we talk about respecting human dignity,

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we can note a picture of the nobility of the human being,

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the full exercise of her faculties of reason and moral agency and love, and figuring things out for herself.

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We convey a very elevated view of the human being, sometimes associated with image of God and religious conceptions,

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sometimes associated, as David mentioned, with some sort of vice agency for God in the world.

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It is a very high elevation view when dignity is used to condemn such practices.

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Often we're talking about a precipitous and momentous fall down into the depths of degradation and the depths of misery.

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And I think it is a no tribute to our species that we have had to develop this one concept that can do both sorts of work.

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But affirmatively it refers to a high elevation of the nobility of the human being, negatively in the prohibitions upon assaults on dignity.

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It refers to some of the worst things that humans can suffer.

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Some of the worst degradations like the treatment can be associated with some of the worst things that people can do to one another.

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In between, we have a funny little concept which talks about the dignified and the undignified.

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And although there is certainly something undignified about being tortured and although, as David has just mentioned,

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the nakedness is associated with that, the helplessness is associated with that, the various forms of humiliation are associated with that.

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The notion of the undignified is so far above on this great moral cliff, above the notion of a direct assault on human dignity,

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which goes much deeper into the awful evils that humans can inflict on one another.

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So I wanted to mention that upfront,

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just to sort of pay tribute to the fact that if we just think about dignity in the in the sense of making sure we are, according to humans,

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all the respect that the high calling invites, we're not going to be able to capture the other end of it,

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which is the refraining from these massive assaults on human dignity.

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Whether we like it or not, most of the provisions in human rights codes and in constitutions which limit the abuse of coercive,

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painful and penal treatment that people can be subject to.

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Most of those are associated either explicitly or implicitly with ideas of dignity.

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So, for example, the provision of the United States Constitution, the Eighth Amendment,

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which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, the courts have long held that this is a dignitary and proposition.

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They held this when they made a de nationalisation, a prohibited form of punishment.

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They held it on both occasions when they held that the capital punishment was per se cruel, unusual,

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and when they readmitted capital punishment, they nevertheless re-echoed the notion that the Eighth Amendment was a big material dignitary,

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an idea the European Court of Human Rights has said very similar things about Article three,

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the prohibition on torture and inhuman and degrading treatment.

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I'm going to say much more about that a little bit later on that even though the term dignity is not used in the text of the article,

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these are nevertheless provisions that are designed to combat the worst kinds of assault on human dignity and in the legal system of Israel.

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The basic law is the law of dignity and liberty. And in the cases that have dealt with torture,

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the 1999 case on shaking and other torture like techniques that were being used by the Israeli security forces,

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dignity is peppered all over the judgement, which holds that things like shaking, slapping and stress positions are prohibited methods.

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They harm the suspect's body, they violate his dignity.

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Stress positions are degrading and they infringe upon an individual's human dignity.

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The term is used over and over again, so it's there in the law.

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It's evidently a resource that the law, I believe, has largely created for itself.

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I'm not a great believer in the idea that dignity is primarily a moral or a philosophical idea.

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I think it may well be an idea that is doing legal work from start to finish.

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And I argued this in my recent book, Dignity, Rank and Rights, which was a town of lectures I gave in Berkeley in 2009.

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I do think we need to understand dignity, just the work that it does do in and around law as a legal principle, a distinctively legal value.

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The of course, it is cited in other areas of human thought as well.

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And I don't want to disparage those. I don't want to disparage the great work that has been done in philosophy by Henry

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David Susman in some recent work by Charles and Gregory Freed in their little book,

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because it is wrong in their account of the wrongness of torture.

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And I do think there are important things in the Kantian conception of human dignity,

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which have played a great role in German law and more broadly in the in the in the development of the modern concept of human dignity.

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But there are parts of this conception that don't have a whole lot to do with the conceptions of dignity that we have to talk about.

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We can't suggest, as we know, and the groundwork to the metaphysics of morals.

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But dignity is a term that we use to contrast with things that have a price.

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Everything has a price. Every value has either a price or a dignity.

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It has a price that is substitutable, fungible for something else of similar price.

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If it has a dignity, it is irreplaceable. It is valued beyond price.

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Regarding humans, by virtue of their moral autonomy as valuable beyond price is tremendously important.

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But it's not going to give us a direct route to the the wrongness of torture or anything else.

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Although I do believe that Kantian motions of treating people as ends in themselves

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and not merely as means and the currency an idea of what moral autonomy is,

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which is this remarkable and on his view,

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momentous capacity to oppose moral agency to the power of one's inclinations and to the power of one's feelings.

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I think those matters are indirectly relevant to the case about torture,

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because one of the things that the torturer does is to say implicitly to the person in front of him,

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Oh, so you think you are a person with free will and with a moral ability to choose what to do with this remarkable contra into.

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However, that can't be regarded as so momentous in you and in everybody.

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I'm going to raise your inclinations to the highest screaming pitch,

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and we'll just see what becomes of your world and see what becomes of your agency.

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So it is certainly true that in that deeper sense of moral autonomy,

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torture is a direct assault and it is an attempt to turn the body and turn the information of the person against that

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person's will and against that person's agency to shatter their agency and sacrifice it on the altar of their pain.

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That content idea, I do think is is very important and very deep.

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And there are discussions and council works not on the ground work, but elsewhere in the metaphysics of morals,

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oddly, in the doctrine of virtue, part of the metaphysics of morals,

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rather than the doctrine of right about certain forms of punishment and

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maltreatment of criminals being absolutely prohibited in virtue of human dignity.

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So I don't want to push the the the moral philosophy altogether aside, over the last ten years,

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like many of us have become wary of moral philosophers ability to contribute to the torture debate.

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I know of only three or four moral philosophers who are prepared to countenance an absolute prohibition on torture.

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One of them is sitting beside me. Wiggins is another.

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But ever since I started to write on this, my philosopher friends regarded the notion of absolute prohibitions as absurd,

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as almost inevitably discredited by their implication with religion and so on.

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So by and large, moral philosophers have not distinguished themselves in work that needed to be done over the last over the last ten years.

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Ask the moral philosopher about torture. Normally, the first thing they will say is, Well, first thing to say is it's not absolutely prohibited.

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Yeah. The first thing to say is that we can imagine a ticking bomb situation in which it is required,

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and we're talking about threshold ontology and things like that.

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And I we have to get that straight. First of all, maybe there are pragmatic reasons for having a legal prohibition, blah, blah, blah.

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But the most important thing to know is it's not absolutely prohibited.

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That's been the legacy of most moral philosophers on this matter.

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There are non-legal accounts of dignity in religious traditions.

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David Luban mentioned the image of God idea and the notion that torture might in

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some sense assault and desecrate the divine significance of the human person.

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This is not just a Roman Catholic idea.

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One of the most powerful anti torture documents is the Evangelicals Against Torture manifesto,

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produced by David Gushee and other national evangelicals in the United States and published.

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You can access it on the on the website for the Evangelicals Against Torture.

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Very, very powerful, but very specifically religious case against this form of assault on the divine status of the human person.

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And I said, I want to step closer to law and jurisprudence and to explore dignity as a specifically legal idea.

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And I wanted to pursue four things.

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One is to think of dignity, not necessarily so much as a foundation of human rights or even as a foundation of this particular right,

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the right not to be tortured, but to think of dignity as a sort of status.

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That people have. And that law recognises a status that comprises demanding rights and exacting responsibilities.

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A status like I don't know the status if you think of differential hierarchical status as

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the status of being a judge has certain rights and responsibilities associated with it,

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the status of being the Queen or the status of being a parliamentarian, the status of being a married person.

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And there are low status as to like bankruptcy and and and alien age and infancy and so on.

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But law sometimes identifies statuses and all those together clustered together certain rights and responsibilities.

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We now, I think, recognise in modern legal systems a very high status of ordinary human standing and associate with it,

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as I said, demanding rights, human rights and quite exacting responsibilities as well.

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It comes close to the notion of the status of a citizen. But it's not just a citizen idea.

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It's the status of any person.

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Any person is to be treated as a being of high mobility and of having this very high array of rights and responsibilities.

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And from that point of view, the status of human dignity is high.

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It is equal, as David said, and that its relation to torture is that the rule against torture is a forgery.

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One of the things that is comprised in the high status of the dignity of the human

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person makes dignity do rather different work than being simply a foundational idea.

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Although I don't think it's incompatible with doing some foundational work as well.

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And I do think David is right that there are some formal elements of that dignity status, namely the radical,

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contrived inequality of the mastery and the helpless person in front of the torture, which it is the purpose of torture to create and enact.

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It's also the case that torture was for a long time and in times past a form of treatment reserved for low status persons,

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a form of treatment reserved for low status persons.

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Slaves could not give evidence in an Athenian court except under torture,

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and by insisting now that nobody is to be tortured, whatever the circumstances,

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we are generalising high status treatment and we are working within the tradition

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that James Whitman in the book Harsh Punishment that David referred to,

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has described as the the generalisation,

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the upwards generalisation of high status treatment to try to apply it to all persons and not just high status persons.

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Very, very interesting book about harsh punishment. Harsh Justice.

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Harsh Justice, Harsh Justice by Day by James Whitman. Dignity.

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Secondly is important because it's a matter of status that unlike some status,

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this is inalienable and non forfeit in talking about dignity in the context of torture is very important to make that point.

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People will often say, Well, these are not regular human beings. These are terrorists.

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This is not a good person. This is a bad person.

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This is a person who has already declared war on mankind, who would be ready if he were let loose to bomb and maim and kill.

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This is a person who may have forfeited whatever rights that they had.

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The idea of dignity and its modern legal usage conveys that that's not possible.

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Dignity is retained by all persons under all circumstances, no matter what they do.

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May I quote another Israeli case? This from the case on targeted killing from 2005 where the Supreme Court of Israel was

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considering and possibly permitting targeted killing like President Obama's drone killing.

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And one of the premises they said was terrorism poses an existential threat to the people in the state of Israel.

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And the second premise, said President Emeritus Barack.

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Unlawful combatants. Terrorists are not outlaws.

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God created them as well in his image. They too have human dignity.

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Their status is to be respected by law and by customary international law.

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It didn't settle the issue, but it drew up shock that this was a serious matter.

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We were not against dogs. We're not just dealing with a rabid dog here.

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We're dealing with a person with human dignity who has chosen appalling actions, but whose dignity is not is not lost by virtue of that.

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And it is. Again, I was very fascinated by David's suggestion that it's part of the strategy of torture

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sometimes to try to erase that sense of inalienable or non-profitable rights.

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So I think that element of the legal notion of dignity associated with modern

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human rights law and international humanitarian law is tremendously important.

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Thirdly, and now getting just a little bit more specific,

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I think we can learn a lot from some of the language that the law uses to express its stigmatisation requirements.

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And here I want to focus particularly on Article three of the European Convention on Human Rights,

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which prohibits not just torture, but inhuman treatment or punishment and degrading treatment and punishment.

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Now,

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some of you will be familiar with the way in which the lawyers have parsed that they have suggested that these might be three grades of ill treatment,

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not all degrading treatment as inhuman, not all inhuman treatment of torture.

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But looking at it in the other direction, it would normally be accepted that torture is characteristically inhuman treatment,

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even though not all inhuman treatment is torture.

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And torture is characteristically degrading treatment, although not all degrading treatment is torture on these accounts.

392
00:44:47,950 --> 00:44:52,749
And so concentrating on the degrading aspects of torture and concentrating on the

393
00:44:52,750 --> 00:44:57,790
inhuman aspects of torture and what those predicates mean can be quite helpful,

394
00:44:57,790 --> 00:45:00,700
I think, in our thinking about dignity on these matters.

395
00:45:01,060 --> 00:45:09,310
Degradation goes with dignity and the sense of dignity as a matter of the high rank accorded to people, whether they are high rank and a hierarchy.

396
00:45:10,000 --> 00:45:14,139
So that Guinness is being degraded on the Bridge of the River Kwai by being

397
00:45:14,140 --> 00:45:18,430
required to work as though he were a common soldier or high rank and the equal

398
00:45:18,430 --> 00:45:23,139
human dignity idea where a person is degraded by being treated as though there

399
00:45:23,140 --> 00:45:26,290
were several ranks of human beings and they belong to one of the lower ones.

400
00:45:26,740 --> 00:45:31,750
All right. We now have high ranking ideas of of of human being.

401
00:45:32,110 --> 00:45:42,070
And torture characteristically aims to diminish and assault that high rank, either by inducing a regress into something like infancy,

402
00:45:43,360 --> 00:45:49,870
where a person is left lying naked in their own waste because they are not able or permitted to

403
00:45:49,870 --> 00:45:55,210
take care of their own bodily needs in the way that adult human beings characteristically do.

404
00:45:56,290 --> 00:45:58,119
Or when people are treated like animals.

405
00:45:58,120 --> 00:46:07,239
There was an attempt to force them into just bestial recoil from pain or the other more complicated and disturbing relations.

406
00:46:07,240 --> 00:46:15,280
The pain that David Luban talked about, or when people are treated just as famous, although no torturer ever treats his victim just as a thing,

407
00:46:15,850 --> 00:46:20,830
he reminds his victim all the time, You are a human being and I am treating you as a thing.

408
00:46:21,310 --> 00:46:27,910
Doesn't just treat him as an animal or as an object or the enormously important sexual element associated with torture.

409
00:46:27,910 --> 00:46:35,379
In almost every circumstance, in almost every context, torture involves sexual degradation.

410
00:46:35,380 --> 00:46:40,930
Often that involves rape or threats of rape or things like rape often involves sexual depravity.

411
00:46:41,260 --> 00:46:46,839
And we know it's one of the gateways through which quite demonic forms of depravity enter the world,

412
00:46:46,840 --> 00:46:53,770
no matter what the high aspirations are, of the philosophers who defend its use to defuse ticking bomb.

413
00:46:54,670 --> 00:47:02,620
So the the notion of degradation operating at the foot of this precipitous cliff that

414
00:47:02,620 --> 00:47:08,440
I talked about sometimes conveys a sense of of why of why dignity is important.

415
00:47:09,250 --> 00:47:18,700
I think the notion of inhumanity does as well, although the term inhuman in Article three is difficult to parse, doesn't mean the same as inhumane.

416
00:47:19,330 --> 00:47:22,660
That is treatment that is not particularly kind of benevolent.

417
00:47:23,350 --> 00:47:31,570
Inhuman means what it says. It refers to something like either a form of treatment that no human ought to be able to inflict,

418
00:47:32,710 --> 00:47:40,900
a form of treatment that no human ought to be expected to suffer or to be expected to be able to bear.

419
00:47:41,440 --> 00:47:46,240
I don't just mean that it's a general negative term of approval treatment that shouldn't be inflicted.

420
00:47:46,900 --> 00:47:52,210
The idea is that somewhere in the interface between psychology and normativity,

421
00:47:52,720 --> 00:47:57,310
we say this is not a form of suffering that humans ought to be expected to put up with.

422
00:47:57,790 --> 00:48:05,920
And this is the last legal idea I want to expound some of the work that I've been doing recently, hesitantly and tentatively,

423
00:48:06,670 --> 00:48:12,640
has been devoted to the idea of whether we can think of there being such a thing as respectful coercion.

424
00:48:14,890 --> 00:48:27,550
The law we know is force law we know can become a law and legal systems use threats of penalties and they impose penalties.

425
00:48:28,330 --> 00:48:33,910
And law and law official and law enforcement officials use force evicting people from places,

426
00:48:34,030 --> 00:48:39,009
stopping people from going to places, putting an end to an assault, seizing goods and so on.

427
00:48:39,010 --> 00:48:47,800
So law is forceful, but law and it's modern conception, it seems to me, limits itself to certain kinds of force and certain kinds of penalties.

428
00:48:48,640 --> 00:48:54,130
And the notion is that law will not use just any means necessary to get its way.

429
00:48:54,400 --> 00:48:58,750
It will not be. Use means. I talked a little bit about this in torture, terror and trade-offs.

430
00:48:59,080 --> 00:49:09,760
It will not use means which are just simply brutal, calculated to smash or destroy the agency of those who are who are subject to its coercion.

431
00:49:10,450 --> 00:49:16,870
It will certainly threaten penalties that are unwelcome and penalties that may be difficult to put up.

432
00:49:18,220 --> 00:49:25,330
But the idea of legal penalties in modern conceptions of law this is the idea that I'm exploring is that legal penalties,

433
00:49:25,330 --> 00:49:29,140
while unwelcome and coercive, must nevertheless be bearable.

434
00:49:30,250 --> 00:49:36,920
It must be possible to bear the term of imprisonment to which you sentence, Goodness me, even if you're sentenced to death,

435
00:49:36,920 --> 00:49:41,950
the sentence must be carried out in a way that you can in some sense, although it's very,

436
00:49:41,950 --> 00:49:49,690
very hard what you think bear the form of execution, walk to your execution, that there is a procedure that you can go through,

437
00:49:50,020 --> 00:49:53,320
but you don't have to break down and become something less than a human being.

438
00:49:53,620 --> 00:50:02,080
And bearing this punishment and that that is a limit to the coercion, there is a limit to the power of the threats that law can make.

439
00:50:02,230 --> 00:50:07,389
And torture aims specifically to go way beyond that torture aim specifically to

440
00:50:07,390 --> 00:50:11,320
go way up to the ends of the or beyond the edge of the envelope of the variable.

441
00:50:11,890 --> 00:50:15,700
Torture does take the any means necessary approach to coercion.

442
00:50:16,270 --> 00:50:23,380
And so I want to say there's something profoundly important about the laws antipathy to torture.

443
00:50:23,620 --> 00:50:26,860
Law works, by and large in all of its operations,

444
00:50:27,520 --> 00:50:33,219
both at the top of the cliff and at the bottom of it by respecting human agency and by

445
00:50:33,220 --> 00:50:37,930
operating forms of coercion that nevertheless allow human agency to take its place.

446
00:50:38,380 --> 00:50:46,540
Law depends on people's application of most of its norms, including most of its punitive norms.

447
00:50:47,350 --> 00:50:54,370
Law does not seek to break the spirit or the will or the personality or the agency of

448
00:50:54,370 --> 00:50:59,650
those who are subject to a threat or an extremist to its penalties and to its force.

449
00:51:00,580 --> 00:51:04,090
Now, it is true, as Blackstone reminded us a couple of hundred years ago,

450
00:51:05,470 --> 00:51:09,550
that torture in the hands of the English has usually been an instrument of the state,

451
00:51:09,880 --> 00:51:18,610
not an instrument of the law, a very frequent instrument of the state, and not just the sort of grubby complicity associated with the present regime,

452
00:51:19,240 --> 00:51:24,130
but by insisting on these legal elements, we are insisting on a substantive,

453
00:51:25,540 --> 00:51:30,250
the substantive importance of bringing state operations under legal and the legal control,

454
00:51:30,550 --> 00:51:33,850
bringing them under the control of the spirit of the law, which, as I say,

455
00:51:33,850 --> 00:51:39,040
in modern jurisprudence, is often something coercive but not something brutal.

456
00:51:39,520 --> 00:51:43,390
And I do think it's worthwhile working on that interface as well.

457
00:51:44,350 --> 00:51:51,460
Great. Thank you very much. We do have a couple of seats at the front if you'd like to come down.

458
00:51:51,670 --> 00:51:54,700
So we'll get to Henry. Thanks, David.

459
00:51:56,860 --> 00:52:00,129
When one condemns a certain practice such as torture,

460
00:52:00,130 --> 00:52:07,300
one of the challenges is to specify the features of the practice sufficiently narrowly that the features

461
00:52:07,300 --> 00:52:14,590
involved do not turn out also to characterise other somewhat similar practices that ought not to be condemned.

462
00:52:16,030 --> 00:52:25,270
If one fails to keep the characterisation narrow enough, one will cast the net too widely and end up with an implausibly broad position.

463
00:52:25,900 --> 00:52:32,350
For example, quite often where I speak against torture is never being acceptable in any circumstances.

464
00:52:33,310 --> 00:52:38,920
Someone will object by saying that they suppose. I'm simply opposed to all tough interrogation,

465
00:52:39,700 --> 00:52:49,600
which means I would leave authorities facing terrible opponents with no means of forcing them to reveal anything that they do not want to reveal.

466
00:52:50,740 --> 00:53:00,280
This lack of effective means of interrogation the objector would not accept, but the objection is mistaken.

467
00:53:01,540 --> 00:53:07,930
Tough interrogation need not be. Torture tortures far more than merely tough interrogation.

468
00:53:09,100 --> 00:53:13,450
But drawing the line between torture and tough interrogation is not easy.

469
00:53:15,280 --> 00:53:19,780
In particular, I have no doubt that torture violates human dignity.

470
00:53:20,680 --> 00:53:26,110
But I wonder whether some tough interrogation that is not torture also violates

471
00:53:26,110 --> 00:53:31,870
human dignity while nevertheless being permissible in some extreme circumstances.

472
00:53:32,980 --> 00:53:39,460
If this is correct, it complicates the role of the appeal to human dignity in arguments against torture.

473
00:53:40,690 --> 00:53:45,310
At least these are the questions I want to raise in order to get your views.

474
00:53:46,510 --> 00:53:56,100
Are there some forms of interrogation that one are not torture to, or at least in extreme cases,

475
00:53:56,110 --> 00:54:04,210
morally permissible, but three are nevertheless disrespectful of human dignity.

476
00:54:06,930 --> 00:54:16,650
She uses my example, the form of interrogation advocated by Matthew Alexander, a pseudonym, and his 2008 foot.

477
00:54:17,760 --> 00:54:28,200
How to Break a Terrorist. The US interrogators who used brains, not brutality, to take down the deadliest man in Iraq.

478
00:54:30,450 --> 00:54:35,489
Matthew Alexander is the pseudonym for a U.S. Air Force interrogator who was

479
00:54:35,490 --> 00:54:41,070
instrumental in locating the rural safehouse in which Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,

480
00:54:41,580 --> 00:54:50,070
the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, was hiding so that he could be killed by an air strike on 7th June 2006.

481
00:54:51,750 --> 00:54:58,920
The choice of verb and the title of his account, How to Break a Terrorist, is for reasons that Jeremy just alluded to.

482
00:54:59,490 --> 00:55:09,030
Unfortunate because for Alexander, it does not mean what break means in the CIA torture paradigm that David also talked about.

483
00:55:09,540 --> 00:55:14,670
There's no assault on the personality structure of the person being interrogated.

484
00:55:15,720 --> 00:55:24,750
Quoting Alexander. Break is the jargon we use to signify getting a prisoner to open up a little like cracking an egg in quote.

485
00:55:26,800 --> 00:55:36,310
Alexander has only contempt for the American torturers with whom he had to serve in Iraq, but mostly because of their incompetence.

486
00:55:37,600 --> 00:55:47,320
Quoting Alexander again, who's quoting one of his colleagues, right when he says, tear down his self-respect, that should level the playing field.

487
00:55:48,370 --> 00:55:52,060
End of quote from the other person. Alexander goes on.

488
00:55:52,570 --> 00:56:02,260
I can't believe I'm hearing this. If you tried to crush an American colonel's sense of self with words alone, would it work in quotes?

489
00:56:03,280 --> 00:56:06,880
In any case, Alexander gives his prisoners the opposite treatment.

490
00:56:07,390 --> 00:56:15,730
Quote, Still, I've given him hope, and hope is the most powerful weapon in quote.

491
00:56:17,650 --> 00:56:21,430
So is Alexander interrogating with kindness.

492
00:56:22,990 --> 00:56:26,920
Far from it. The hope he gives is false hope.

493
00:56:28,060 --> 00:56:37,870
He pretends and tricks and lies to his prisoners, treating them in ways that in almost any other circumstances would be clearly immoral.

494
00:56:38,770 --> 00:56:43,300
Quote The best interrogators are outstanding actors.

495
00:56:43,930 --> 00:56:48,010
Once they hit that booth, their personalities are transformed.

496
00:56:48,640 --> 00:56:56,140
They allow a doppelganger to emerge. What doppelganger is most likely to elicit information from a detainee?

497
00:56:56,680 --> 00:57:04,420
Changes from prisoner to prisoner. Sometimes I must have a wife or children so I can swap stories with the prisoner.

498
00:57:05,110 --> 00:57:12,400
No, I have neither. In quote, The interrogation that Alexander practices does not make a pretty picture.

499
00:57:13,330 --> 00:57:18,160
He coercively manipulates his prisoners. They are not treated as humans.

500
00:57:18,760 --> 00:57:28,420
They're used instrumentally to obtain information. Some people will certainly feel that it's morally wrong ever to treat people like this.

501
00:57:29,380 --> 00:57:33,610
It does not obviously respect their dignity as human beings.

502
00:57:34,870 --> 00:57:44,290
The centrepiece of Alexander's book is his account of how he interrogated the man who in the end gave him the location of al-Zarqawi safehouse.

503
00:57:45,490 --> 00:57:51,010
After a number of days of free cigarettes and general chat,

504
00:57:52,270 --> 00:58:01,750
the man confided in Alexander that he was very unhappy with his wife and began to complain about his wife.

505
00:58:02,470 --> 00:58:07,330
Alexander responded In effect, You think your wife is difficult?

506
00:58:08,500 --> 00:58:12,680
Let me tell you about my wife, because Zander has no wife.

507
00:58:12,700 --> 00:58:19,330
But then for days they traded stories about what a pain their respective wives were.

508
00:58:20,020 --> 00:58:31,120
And after some more days of this, the prisoner mentioned to Alexander that he actually was very much in love with

509
00:58:31,120 --> 00:58:36,790
the mistress and that the one thing he wanted most was to marry his mistress.

510
00:58:37,000 --> 00:58:44,470
But he couldn't because divorce was contrary to Islam as he understood Islam.

511
00:58:46,240 --> 00:58:49,420
This was the opening that Alexander had been waiting for.

512
00:58:50,530 --> 00:58:55,780
He said to the prisoner, You know, the Americans run the country now.

513
00:58:56,260 --> 00:59:04,270
I'm sure I can find a judge who would rule that your for your initial marriage was not valid and that you're really not married,

514
00:59:04,660 --> 00:59:13,030
and then you'll be free to marry your mistress. And the prisoner admitted that that would have fulfilled his greatest dream.

515
00:59:13,930 --> 00:59:18,130
And Alexander, of course, said, But I need something from you.

516
00:59:18,790 --> 00:59:22,420
I need to know the location of Zarqawi safe house.

517
00:59:22,840 --> 00:59:25,900
And after a few days, the prisoner gave it to him.

518
00:59:26,590 --> 00:59:33,580
Alexander gave the location to the Air Force, and they blew the house to bits, killed Zarqawi.

519
00:59:35,740 --> 00:59:40,540
And Alexander did nothing ever to help his prison.

520
00:59:42,860 --> 00:59:49,190
Alexander's technique is unrelenting until he obtains the information he wants.

521
00:59:50,930 --> 00:59:57,140
But it's not, I think, torture. It is not mercilessly cruel and destructive.

522
00:59:58,160 --> 01:00:02,600
No severe pain or suffering, physical or mental was inflicted on prisoners.

523
01:00:03,530 --> 01:00:10,040
The struggle is a battle of which the prisoner's values and beliefs are not respected.

524
01:00:10,490 --> 01:00:16,100
He is, if he can be tricked into betraying them, is treated as an enemy.

525
01:00:16,640 --> 01:00:23,030
Now with it is possible, but the soundness of neither his mind nor his body is undermined.

526
01:00:24,560 --> 01:00:31,160
He's not shamed and humiliated like the men at Guantanamo who were forced sometimes to wear women's underwear and other

527
01:00:31,160 --> 01:00:41,690
times made to obey dog commands like stay and bark in order in both cases to mock their values and undermine their dignity.

528
01:00:43,070 --> 01:00:50,930
Alexander's prisoner will surely ultimately regret that his interrogator outsmarted him and obtained the wanted information.

529
01:00:51,920 --> 01:00:56,810
But his regret will be possible because his mind will have remained silent.

530
01:00:57,470 --> 01:01:06,470
Unlike the minds of some of those assaulted by the CIA torture method, his personality structure was not undermined.

531
01:01:07,250 --> 01:01:11,780
He was offered a fraudulent deal that he could have refused to take.

532
01:01:13,310 --> 01:01:18,260
Quoting Alexander, We don't have to become our enemies to defeat them.

533
01:01:18,860 --> 01:01:29,690
In, quote, David Rubin's insightful definition of torture is, quote, the display of unlimited power over absolute helplessness,

534
01:01:30,410 --> 01:01:39,799
accomplished through the infliction of severe suffering on the victim that the victim is meant to perceive as the display of the torturers,

535
01:01:39,800 --> 01:01:44,420
limitless power and the victim's absolute helplessness, unquote.

536
01:01:46,340 --> 01:01:54,620
Alexander's subject is in a weak position. He has been captured by the military forces of his enemy and imprisoned.

537
01:01:55,640 --> 01:02:01,580
But he is not utterly helpless, like the nameless prisoners in CIA's black sites.

538
01:02:03,020 --> 01:02:06,530
And Alexander has considerable power over the prisoner before him.

539
01:02:07,400 --> 01:02:12,080
But he is not all powerful because he chooses to limit his own power.

540
01:02:12,890 --> 01:02:17,510
He will not reduce his prisoner to a weeping infant, begging for mercy.

541
01:02:18,020 --> 01:02:29,420
Like the inmates at Guantanamo. Alexander offers his prisoner a deal, a rotten deal, a deal he should and could refuse.

542
01:02:30,710 --> 01:02:34,250
But his subject chooses to gamble that he can trust Alexander.

543
01:02:35,480 --> 01:02:43,300
He can't. Does Alexander's technique respect the dignity of his subject?

544
01:02:45,190 --> 01:02:55,180
The short answer is that I do not know, and I am eager to see what Jeremy and David, who find more of a dignity than I have and the rest of you think.

545
01:02:55,960 --> 01:02:59,470
But here are some brief, relatively random thoughts.

546
01:03:01,270 --> 01:03:05,230
Alexander's technique consists, I would say, primarily of trickery.

547
01:03:06,430 --> 01:03:10,120
Such trickery is a standard element of warfare.

548
01:03:11,500 --> 01:03:17,050
When the Allies decided to land at Normandy, they sent their bombers to hit Calais.

549
01:03:18,070 --> 01:03:25,450
This was a trick that invited the German forces defending the French coasts to send more of their forces to Calais,

550
01:03:26,020 --> 01:03:29,500
ideally pulling some of them out of Normandy.

551
01:03:31,120 --> 01:03:40,360
Earlier, the Allies have gone to enormous lengths to create the impression that the southern front would be opened in Greece, not Sicily.

552
01:03:41,380 --> 01:03:48,430
This is one way one fights wars. But in one respect, Alexander's trick is worse.

553
01:03:49,660 --> 01:03:59,980
It relies on a betrayal of trust. If German commanders moved troops to Calais, it was not because they trusted the allies not to deceive them.

554
01:04:00,760 --> 01:04:05,200
They simply thought they had evidence from which they could reliably infer a conclusion.

555
01:04:06,310 --> 01:04:09,400
You don't waste bombs on a place you're not going to attack.

556
01:04:10,090 --> 01:04:13,120
So you must be planning to attack the place you were bombing.

557
01:04:14,500 --> 01:04:22,270
The Allies hoped the defenders would make this inference, but they did nothing to invite or create trust in themselves,

558
01:04:23,020 --> 01:04:25,870
to invite the inference or to create trust in themselves.

559
01:04:26,380 --> 01:04:34,690
Alexander, on the other hand, spends weeks building up his subjects trust, carefully constructing an elaborate lie.

560
01:04:36,310 --> 01:04:40,030
And even during war, one kind of trickery is prohibited.

561
01:04:40,780 --> 01:04:44,019
Perfidy is Alexander.

562
01:04:44,020 --> 01:04:57,220
Perfidious perfidy consists of according to the first Geneva Protocol of 1977 quote acts inviting the confidence of an adversary

563
01:04:57,820 --> 01:05:07,959
to lead him to believe that he is entitled to or is obliged to accord protection under the rules of international law,

564
01:05:07,960 --> 01:05:16,000
applicable in armed conflict with intent to betray that confidence in, quote, Article 37.

565
01:05:16,960 --> 01:05:20,800
Examples of perfidy given in Article 37 include, quote,

566
01:05:21,130 --> 01:05:38,080
a the feigning of an intent to negotiate under a flag of truce or of a surrender to be the feigning of an incapacitation by rules or sickness.

567
01:05:38,890 --> 01:05:48,700
C the feigning of civilian non-combatant status in quote, someone who does not care about civilians.

568
01:05:48,870 --> 01:05:54,610
Although wounded will not be tricked into coming forward and making herself vulnerable.

569
01:05:55,360 --> 01:06:02,500
Only someone who's committed to respecting civilians or assisting the wounded will expose herself to danger,

570
01:06:03,310 --> 01:06:06,880
and thus only she will be tricked into her own death.

571
01:06:08,050 --> 01:06:16,690
She will be tricked because and only because she is committed to abiding by the rules, but by the limits on war.

572
01:06:18,670 --> 01:06:22,719
Does Alexander commit perfidy? Certainly.

573
01:06:22,720 --> 01:06:28,240
Practices intention is sorry deception with the intention of betrayal.

574
01:06:29,320 --> 01:06:36,910
He pretends that his non-existent wife makes him so miserable that he understands the desire to marry the mistress

575
01:06:37,930 --> 01:06:46,150
because he wants his target to give him something for the help for the mistress that he has no intention of providing.

576
01:06:47,890 --> 01:06:51,070
But Alexander is not exporting commitment to the laws.

577
01:06:51,070 --> 01:06:57,250
Limited in conflict or commitment to any other principle is exploiting misery.

578
01:06:58,630 --> 01:07:03,220
Alexander's deception may be a dirty trick, but it's not perfidy.

579
01:07:04,210 --> 01:07:13,000
Perfidy does not violate personal trust. It violates commitment to principle and the exploitation of self-interest.

580
01:07:13,870 --> 01:07:20,560
Even the interest in escaping misery and attaining happiness and even through the violation of trust

581
01:07:21,190 --> 01:07:29,020
does not seem to me analogous to the exploitation of concern for others or commitment to law.

582
01:07:32,200 --> 01:07:34,330
But is it respectful of human dignity?

583
01:07:36,190 --> 01:07:46,910
It certainly shows no respect for the ends being pursued by the subject of the interrogation, but neither does war or law enforcement in war.

584
01:07:47,140 --> 01:07:56,770
One seeks to impose one's will on another to see that their ends are not served and that one's own conflicting ends are served.

585
01:07:58,000 --> 01:08:02,050
But many warriors respect their adversaries. In fact,

586
01:08:02,470 --> 01:08:06,520
it's quite common to find fighters who have more respect for their adversaries

587
01:08:06,970 --> 01:08:11,170
than for the politicians on either side who have made them into adversaries.

588
01:08:12,070 --> 01:08:16,900
And they still try to outwit and sometimes to kill each other.

589
01:08:19,480 --> 01:08:22,570
Alexander does not discuss respect or dignity.

590
01:08:23,410 --> 01:08:32,710
I doubt that. In fact, he sees himself as very interested in them, but could have respected the man he has betrayed.

591
01:08:34,900 --> 01:08:42,730
I think so. Compare two of the characters in Tim O'Brien's novel about the war in Vietnam.

592
01:08:43,480 --> 01:08:49,360
The Things They Carried. An American has just killed his first member of the Viet Cong.

593
01:08:50,410 --> 01:08:54,970
One of his comrades is disrespectfully jubilant.

594
01:08:56,260 --> 01:08:59,500
Oh man, you [INAUDIBLE] trash the [INAUDIBLE].

595
01:08:59,830 --> 01:09:03,490
You scrambled his sorry self. Look at that. You did.

596
01:09:04,030 --> 01:09:08,980
You laid him out like shredded [INAUDIBLE] Louie Rice Krispies, you know?

597
01:09:09,580 --> 01:09:14,280
On the dead test, this particular individual gets A-plus.

598
01:09:16,360 --> 01:09:21,970
But the man killed the Viet Cong reflects very differently.

599
01:09:24,130 --> 01:09:29,980
He thinks he may face up in the sense of betrayal.

600
01:09:30,880 --> 01:09:35,950
A slim, dead, almost dainty young man.

601
01:09:37,090 --> 01:09:41,740
He had bony legs, narrow, waist long, shapely fingers.

602
01:09:42,850 --> 01:09:47,260
His chest was sunken in poorly muscled scholar navy.

603
01:09:48,490 --> 01:09:54,190
His wrists were the risks of a child. He'd been born maybe in 1946.

604
01:09:55,990 --> 01:10:01,420
He would have been taught that to defend the land was a man's highest duty and highest privilege.

605
01:10:02,230 --> 01:10:08,020
He had accepted this. It was never open to question. Secretly, though, it also frightened him.

606
01:10:08,060 --> 01:10:12,730
He was not a fighter. His health was poor. His body small and frail.

607
01:10:13,510 --> 01:10:18,010
He liked books. He wanted someday to be a teacher of mathematics.

608
01:10:18,910 --> 01:10:25,600
At night, lying on his mouth, he could not picture himself doing the brave things his father has done.

609
01:10:27,250 --> 01:10:30,310
He hoped in his heart he would never be tested.

610
01:10:31,270 --> 01:10:34,960
He hoped the Americans would go away soon.

611
01:10:35,110 --> 01:10:48,790
He hoped. Tim O'Brien's character sees the man killed as a fellow human being, one who loved mathematics and feared fighting.

612
01:10:50,560 --> 01:10:57,910
Alexander is so well able to trick his subject precisely because he understands him too.

613
01:10:58,480 --> 01:11:09,130
As a fellow human being with an interior consciousness, one who's fed up with his wife longs for his mistress in an odd way.

614
01:11:09,700 --> 01:11:16,870
It is Alexander's capacity for empathy that makes him so good at the betrayal he practices.

615
01:11:18,400 --> 01:11:23,110
O'Brien's character must fight. Alexander must interrogate.

616
01:11:24,100 --> 01:11:27,310
Each seeks to thwart the purposes of his adversary.

617
01:11:27,880 --> 01:11:33,640
But neither, it seems to me, needs to deny his adversaries fundamental humanity.

618
01:11:35,260 --> 01:11:39,610
Is this enough? Enough to acknowledge human dignity?

619
01:11:40,810 --> 01:11:44,260
Enough to be permissible in the circumstances?

620
01:11:45,850 --> 01:11:50,200
Thank you. Well, we've been very privileged, I think,

621
01:11:50,200 --> 01:11:58,300
to have three really fascinating and illuminating and insightful reflections on the relationship between dignity and torture.

622
01:11:58,630 --> 01:12:03,130
And we've now got about 40 minutes that we can take for this one.