Torture: A Just War Perspective
James Turner Johnson Friday, 1 June 2007
I have been asked to bring a just war perspective to the contemporary debate over torture. I do not believe I have seen any effort to do this in the various sorts of discussions of the problem of torture I have read over the past several years. Rather, the discourse has been framed largely in terms of the "war on terrorism"—arguments over how to combat terrorism, how to protect the lives of those threatened by terrorist attacks, how to preserve United States national security in the face of the threat posed by terrorism, and so on. More specifically, what I have seen—in abundance—is various forms of consequentialist argumentation, including the balancing of lesser and greater evils and debates over whether torture actually works or not to produce useful intelligence.
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