Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Torture

  • War, Torture, and the Aporetics of Moral Rigorism

    Substack latest.

  • Hospitals and Torture Chambers

    We are strangely, insanely, conflicted.  We care lovingly, or at least dutifully, for the sick, the injured, and the dying. But we also torture people to death in ways that inspire envy in demons. The belief that humans are inherently good is one of the deepest of human delusions. Paradoxically, those who succumb to it…

  • Solzhenitsyn on Gulag Interrogation

    Here are some passages from The Gulag Archipelago that everyone should read.  A sample: If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would…

  • War, Torture, and the Aporetics of Moral Rigorism

    That the deliberate targeting of noncombatants is intrinsically evil and cannot be justified under any circumstances is one of the entailments of Catholic just war doctrine.  I am sensitive to its moral force. I am strongly inclined to say that certain actions are intrinsically wrong, wrong by their very nature as the types of actions…

  • Is Waterboarding Torture?

    Here is the opinion of a man who has both done it and had it done to him.  "I volunteered to be waterboarded myself and can assure you that it is not a pleasant experience. But no one volunteers to be tortured." Words mean things. They ought to be used responsibly. No good purpose is…