Human Rights and Justice for All: Demanding Dignity in the United States and Around the World by Carrie Booth Walling (review)

Abstract

them. For too long, the argument about whether governments should torture has been conflated with the efficacy of torture. The absolutist thinking that accompanies questions about purposefully inflicting pain on a (at the moment, at least) powerless person leaks into arguments about torture’s effects—those who believe one should never torture find themselves easily receiving claims that torture never works, without evidence or reasonably sound logic. This book, in some ways, mirrors the rhetorical brilliance of the early liberal International Relations theorists, who granted Realists their fundamental assumptions about anarchy, and still showed that states should be expected to cooperate in that world. Here, with empirical evidence of some torture efficacy, we can still conclude that torture is an overall bad policy. In this, Hassner has done academics and policymakers a great service. He dared to ask whether torture worked, despite his philosophical abhorrence for it, which he strongly hints at in the epilogue. (And Cornell University Press, to their credit, bravely published it). Let that sink in. An anti-torture individual undertook a rigorous archival exploration that may have led him to a conclusion that would have potentially had dissonant repercussions for his beliefs, to say nothing of the years spent doing the research and writing the book, as well as the potential reputational costs for being incorrectly labeled a torture apologist. But he endeavored to explore anyways. His book, then, has lessons that reach further than torture in the 15th and 16th centuries, or even torture now. It dares us to ask questions that make us and others uncomfortable. It is in these forbidden interstices that science presents the power to uncover greater truths.