Torture: A Collection.

• Author: Diamantis, Mihailis E.
• Position: Book review

Torture: A Collection, edited by Sanford Levinson

Publisher: Oxford University Press (2004)

Price: $29.95

"Pandora's box is open." (1) While we may at first shirk at the possibility of openly discussing the brutal practices signified by the word "torture," either out of revulsion for the topic itself or out of a fear that doing so opens the conceptual possibility of its being legitimated, torture is a fact of life. Despite absolute prohibitions in international law on state use of torture, "torture is practiced on a regular basis in more countries than ever." (2) It is in this present shroud of secretive decisions to violate some of our most fundamental human rights that Sanford Levinson has sought to play a part in the rightfully public debate and in the resolution of the difficult questions that the practice of torture raises. In his Torture: A Collection, Levinson has assembled contributions from some of the most influential thinkers dealing with torture. The resulting panoply is engaging if only for its diversity of approaches--from the strictly historical to the strictly legal, from the abstractly philosophical to the brutally pragmatic. Believing that "[i]t is vitally important that we discuss what is being done in our name," (3) Levinson has attempted to bring essays that engage in the "increasingly important debate over the possibility that torture, at least in some carefully specified circumstances, might be a 'lesser evil' than some other 'greater evil' that menaces society." (4)

Oren Gross asserts in his contribution that "[t]he debate about the moral and legal nature of the prohibition on torture is often conducted as if there is no middle ground." (5) That is to say, the contending positions in the debate most often are those of the absolutist, who asserts that torture can never be justified--e.g. Ariel Dorfman's impassioned proclamation: "[N]o torture anytime, anywhere, no to torturing anyone; no to torture" (6)--and those who believe that there are moral, and that there should consequentially be legal, exceptions to the general prohibition against torture. Gross's "middle ground" proposes that there be an "absolute legal ban" on torture, (7) but that we "call[] on public officials having to deal with the catastrophic case to consider the possibility of acting outside the legal order while openly acknowledging their actions and the extralegal nature of such actions. Those officials must assume the risks involved in acting...