Torture, Common Morality, and the Golden Rule: A Conversation with Michael Perry

Abstract

C r i ti c's Corner Torture, Common Morality, and the Golden Rule A Conversation with Michael Perry C EORCE H U NSI N C ERTorture is the refusal-the ultimate refusal-to recognize ourselves in others.It is not merely a failure of understanding. When undertaken in our name, it means the failure of our own humanity. Torture not only inflicts injustice on the victim; it also corrupts and degrades the perpetrator. Any nation that resorts to torture is doomed, in the end, to moral corruption and decay. A society that rewards those responsible for torture, instead of holding them accountable, is approaching spiritual death.In his book The Idea of Human Rights, Michael Perry, who holds the distinguished chair in law at Wake Forest University, understands torture and atrocities in this way: They represent, he says, a failure to see ourselves in the other. Torture and atrocities effectively require viewing the victims as subhuman or pseudohuman, even as threats to what is human-as vermin to be exterminated from the earth. They reject the claim that every human life is sacred. In other words, they 'deny that every human life has objective dignity and intrinsic value in itself.Perry himself rejects this viewpoint vigorously. He holds that "certain things ought not to be done to any human being and certain other things ought to be done for every human being." Yet at the same time, he arrives at a provocative conclusion. He denies that there is any intelligible secular version of the belief that all human life is sacred. "I conclude," he writes, "that there is, finally, no intelligible (much less persuasive) secular version of the conviction that every human being is sacred; the only intelligible versions are religious." He continues: "The conviction that every human being is sacred is, in my view, inescapably religious-and the idea of human rights, therefore, ineliminably religious."' George Hunsinger is the Hazel Thompson McCord Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, president of the Karl Barth Society of North America, and founder of Church Folks for a Better America.

Torture and Just War

“…This is truly embodying Christ because we must love our enemies and realize that it is only by God's grace that we are not in their shoes. Similarly, George Hunsinger argues that the Golden Rule requires you to put yourself in the other person's shoes (2006, 377). The failure to apply the role‐reversal test means that you are acting contradictorily to the humanity of others and yourself.…”

“…This is why the role‐reversal test does not necessarily rule out all acts of torture. Hunsinger cannot mean that we could never will that the use of force be used against ourselves, at least, not if he wishes to hold that the use of force is sometimes justifiable. In other words, the “Golden Rule” argument against torture does not work because we could still will that it, like other forms of force, should be used against us in certain circumstances.…”

What Kind of Person Could Be a Torturer?

“…14 14 On the morality and legality of torture, see Greenberg 2006; Hunsinger 2008; Kassimeris 2006; and Levinson 2004. See also Bangert 2005a, 2005b, 2006; Hunsinger 2006, 2008a, 2008b; Luban 2005; Porter 2008; Quinn 1996; Shue 1978; Stout 2004; Sussman 2005; and Twiss 2007. …”