Of all human rights violations, torture is the most universally condemned and repudiated. The prohibition on torture is so widely shared across cultures and ideologies that there is little room for disagreement about the fact that physical and psychological abuse, when committed in a widespread or systematic manner, constitutes a crime against humanity, akin to genocide and war crimes in that the world community has pledged to prevent its occurrence and prosecute and punish those who perpetrate it.

And yet despite this unanimity of thought around torture, it is practiced routinely and systematically in more than half of the countries...

By definition torturers are cruel. But the corpses proved that they could also be clever. The Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, reported Amnesty International in 1994, were strapping live prisoners to newly dead corpses and leaving them, eye to eye, to rot together in the sun.

What a simple, economical form of torture, I thought to myself as I read the report shortly after becoming executive director of Amnesty International U.S.A. Low-tech but terrifying.

As my tenure at Amnesty lengthened, as I began to learn more, to meet survivors of torture and to hear their stories, and then to go into prisons...

Torture has been around for a long time. The readings in this chapter are not meant to constitute a definitive taxonomy of the practice by any means. (For one thing, our focus is limited to Western history, though torture has been employed in virtually all cultures.) But they do suggest some of the ways torture has changed over the centuries—it is no longer codified in legal writ as it once was, for example—and some of the ways it remains the same—for instance it is often associated with discrimination against one class or set of victims. Does history...

Fortunately the vast majority of us will never experience torture firsthand. We can imagine something of what it is like from the occasions we have each endured pain—that is the starting point of the moral imagination—but there is far more to torture than the experience of pain. The readings in this chapter help us come just a bit closer to understanding what it is like to undergo torture—both physical and psychological. Some of the excerpts are fairly straightforward descriptions of what human beings have the capacity to do to each other. Others elucidate the consciousness that emerges...

What does it take to “make” a torturer? Are all of us susceptible, under the right circumstances, to the lure of cruelty? Or are torturers somehow a breed apart, “monsters,” utterly beyond human comprehension, much less empathy? Given how widespread torture has been throughout human history and how common it still is today, the world has either seen a great many instances of “abnormality” or the veneer of civilized behavior is much thinner than we like to think.

This chapter explores how men (and it is almost always men) become torturers; what may predispose them to torture; what appeal it...

What a curious relationship between torturer and victim. Nothing else quite compares to it. Not that between enemies in battle, who are, after all, at least theoretically both equipped and disposed to do away with the other. Not that between state judicial executioners and their subjects, if only because that relationship is generally more anonymous and antiseptic. Abuse of children and domestic partners begins to get at the quality of dysfunction at work and, indeed, much such abuse is accurately described as torture as Reading 7 attests, but in a political context torturer and victim rarely had a prior connection....

Much of what we have said to this point has focused on individuals or groups of individuals—victims of torture or perpetrators of it. But, as we saw in the chapter on the history of torture in the West, the practice is often embedded in a larger social understanding of truth, for example, that slaves, lacking a capacity for rational thought, are incapable of lying.

What in more contemporary times are the social conditions that may predispose a society to engage in and tolerate torture? One answer is that it may feel itself under dire threat from “terrorists” or others...

At first blush it may be hard to imagine that there could be any serious philosophical debate about torture. Certainly the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is unequivocal: “No one,” says Article 5, “shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Period. The Convention against Torture is just as absolute in its prohibition. Article 2 proclaims, “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” And yet, despite such clarity, the issue of...

By now, having read much of what this book has offered, you may well be feeling pretty discouraged. Not only is it painful to face what human beings do to one another; it is just as difficult to imagine that they will soon stop doing it. And yet the truth is that since the end of the Second World War, enormous progress has been made in the struggle to curtail human viciousness—or at least the officially sanctioned versions of it. One organization alone—Amnesty International—estimates conservatively that since it was founded in 1961, it has helped free at...