Torture and the Ticking Bomb (Blackwell Public Philosophy Series) | 
| Author: Bob Brecher
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 264498
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 136
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 0.5
ISBN: 1405162023
Dewey Decimal Number: 363.232
EAN: 9781405162029
ASIN: 1405162023
Publication Date: September 17, 2007
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Product Description
This timely and passionate book is the first to address itself to Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz’s controversial arguments for the limited use of interrogational torture and its legalisation.
- Argues that the respectability Dershowitz's arguments confer on the view that torture is a legitimate weapon in the war on terror needs urgently to be countered
- Takes on the advocates of torture on their own utilitarian grounds
- Timely and passionately written, in an accessible, jargon-free style
- Forms part of the provocative and timely Blackwell Public Philosophy series
Book Description
Do you really think torture is acceptable in any circumstances? The controversial arguments of Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz supporting the legalisation of torture in so-called 'ticking bomb' scenarios represent the most sophisticated and visible of recent attempts to make torture an accepted weapon in the war on terror. States and other agents engage in torture, as both sides of the debate accept. According to Bob Brecher, it is precisely because the general public are taking the "new realism" of Dershowitz and others seriously that there is a pressing need to expose the fundamental flaws in their arguments, lest the peoples of democratic societies lose their moral compass and fail to be vigilant in holding their governments properly to account. This timely and passionate book is the first to address itself directly to the arguments for the limited use of interrogational torture and to its legalisation. Brecher takes on those arguments, drawing out the practical implications for policy and confronting the empirical question of the efficacy of torture, as well as the ethical implications.
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| Customer Reviews:
Dershowitz is going to be pissed! June 20, 2008
I read the book "Torture: a Collection" which has Dershowitz's argument for torture warrents in it. The problem that I had was why if we knew everything why did we not know where the bomb was located. The ticking bomb question was one that did not make sense with my experience in intellegence. At the time I almost bought into the logic, but something still nagged at me, it just did not make sense. This book takes the ticking bomb analogy apart and examines it word by word and piece by piece to determine the logic and reasoning. Dershowitz is the most well known of the proponents of this argument, so he is going to have to deal with the burden of carring the majority of the criticism due to his not0riedty. I have to say that wether you agree with torture under certain conditions, or you believe that torture is not justifiable under any condition, this book is a must read to completely understand what the logic of the ticking bomb scenereo is. There is no other work out there that I have seen that equals this book in its analysis.
Essential reading June 3, 2008
Brecher's timely and powerfully argued book deserves the widest possible circulation. His convincing demolition of Dershowitz's and others' arguments for interrogational torture or its legalisation should help to save the U.S. from descending further into the barbarism entailed by the acceptance of torture.
William Podmore's review below gives an accurate sketch of Brecher's main lines of argument. I would only emphasize that Brecher, like the defenders of interrogational torture or its legalisation, argues entirely on utilitarian grounds. He makes no question-begging appeal to Kantian ethics or human rights. Furthermore, Brecher not only refutes Dershowitz and his ilk but helps his readers to fully appreciate the moral horror that torture is.
Brecher's book is thoroughly documented and includes a rich bibliography.
Brilliant demolition of the argument for torture November 14, 2007
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
Bob Brecher, Reader in Moral Philosophy in the School of Historical and Critical Studies, the University of Brighton, has written a splendid attack on the appalling idea of legalising torture. The American civil rights lawyer Alan Dershowitz proposed introducing a torture warrant, giving intellectual respectability to the practice of torture. He suggested that torture would be justified if it forced a terrorist to divulge the location of a ticking bomb.
But the ticking bomb scenario is incoherent. The more the urgency, the less the chance of getting the warrant in time. So, in practice, the legalisation, not the torture, would not happen. There are no examples of this scenario in reality. Yet torture's apologists cynically use the scenario to justify mass systematic torture.
However, Dershowitz's rule-utilitarianism does not lead towards the conclusion he wants. The presumed utilitarian argument that torture would save lives does not work. All experience shows that legalising the torture of suspects increases not diminishes terrorist bombings. For utilitarianism, what makes torture wrong is the total of all its consequences, including the unacceptable wider social consequences of instituting torture. Every moral code, including utilitarianism, condemns torture.
Yet interrogational torture is practised in all counter-insurgency wars, by the British in Malaya, Kenya and Northern Ireland, the USA in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the Israelis in the Occupied Territories. Zvi Aharoni, head of interrogation in the Israeli security service in the 1950s, said in 1997, "Let me tell you one thing, when I was head of the interrogation department, nobody could touch a prisoner. Sure, you could do all kinds of tricks, you could bug them, listen in on their conversation. But beating them? Torturing them? And today not only is it being done, it's legal, Arabs can be tortured. It's legal and in my country."
Brecher writes, "The proposal to legalize interrogational torture is so appalling because - for all that it is presented as a radical challenge - it in fact serves to justify what we are doing." And it doesn't even work. US Field Manual 34-52, the rulebook for US military interrogators, "prohibits the use of coercive techniques because they produce low quality intelligence."
Brecher sums up, "In the case of torture, though, inaction is right. The very occasional catastrophe (and remember that legalizing interrogational torture might, just possibly, prevent only a tiny fraction even of real terrorist actions) is a price we have to pay to avoid creating a torturous society. We need to do what we can to eliminate the conditions which give rise to bombs, ticking or not. If we fail, then it is too late." Occasional catastrophes "really are unavoidable on pain of the greater catastrophe of a torturous society."
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