In remarks offered in 2006 at a conference at Princeton Theological Seminary inaugurating a National Religious Campaign against Torture, the legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron observed that in the recent debate over the use of torture, ‘the voices of Christian leaders – clergy and laypeople – have been silent’.Footnote ¹ Waldron admits that there may have been some exceptions to this generalisation; nonetheless: ‘Those of us who are actively engaged in this debate have listened for – yearned for and strained to hear – a contribution by the churches, and our impression is that interventions by church leaders in this debate have been late and hesitant at best.’Footnote ² This is particularly regrettable, in his view, because the resources of secular morality are ‘catastrophically inadequate in the case of the debate about torture and inadequate on many other issues as well’.Footnote ³ Many theologians, myself included, would agree with Waldron – at least in general terms – about the distinctiveness of Christian ethics and the limitations of a purely secular morality. But that only makes our general silence on the question of torture all the more puzzling and regrettable. Waldron's challenge to Christians, while gentle and courteous – more gentle, perhaps, than we deserve – is both justified and timely, and it calls for a response.

It would go beyond the scope of a single essay to develop a comprehensive theological perspective on the debate over torture. Nonetheless, in this paper, I would like to take one step towards developing such a perspective by addressing an issue that Waldron rightly identifies as central to this debate, and about which he expects Christian theologians to have something distinctive to say:

The ban on torture is presented, therefore, as an absolute prohibition which, in Waldron's words, ‘is not to suffer infringement, whatever the circumstances or whatever the advantages of violating it’.Footnote ⁵ If there are any moral absolutes, surely the prohibition of torture counts as such. Yet, as Waldron goes on to observe, many moral philosophers today would deny precisely that – that is to say, they would deny that there are any moral absolutes, even with respect to truly terrible kinds of actions such as torture. Consequentialists reject this claim on principle and, as Waldron puts it, ‘even deontologists furnish their ethics with some sort of “out” to accommodate the possibility of what Robert Nozick referred to as “catastrophic moral horror”’.Footnote ⁶ What is more, this reluctance reflects a genuine problem. If a prohibition against torture reflects a judgement that torture violates human dignity – as it surely does – then it is difficult to rule out the possibility, at least in principle, of setting it aside in order to avert a still more serious affront to human dignity, such as would arguably arise through the loss of many lives that might have been saved. To argue otherwise would seem to invite the charge of naive idealism, as Waldron suggests, or worse, fanaticism.Footnote ⁷

Is it nonetheless possible to formulate and defend an absolute prohibition against the use of torture? Waldron believes that it is, and he hopes to call on the aid of Christian theologians in this task: ‘a prohibition based on divine command has credentials that transcend all such calculations. As an expression of what God requires of us, individually and collectively, it is to be understood as categorical and uncompromising.’Footnote ⁸ Waldron does not want to presume that a Christian position on torture would necessarily reflect this ‘categorical and uncompromising character’ but, as he goes on to say, ‘a Christian will not immediately take it off the table as an option, as a consequentialist or even a secular deontologist might’.Footnote ⁹

To those of us who work within the field of Christian theological ethics, Waldron's remarks represent a more profound challenge than perhaps he realises. By no means is it the case that Christian ethicists generally regard moral norms as ‘categorical and uncompromising’; on the contrary, just this question has been subject to intense and sometimes acrimonious debate within the field of theological ethics for at least the past forty years. And yet – if we can identify any specific kinds of actions which are always contrary to God's will, and which therefore can never be justified, surely torture would count as one such kind of action. Admittedly, this has not been obvious through much of our history – those of us who identify ourselves as Christians must always remember, to our shame, that for centuries the church not only countenanced, but actually sponsored torture.Footnote ¹⁰ Even so, I think there can be very few Christian theologians today who would be prepared to defend the legitimacy of torture, even under extreme circumstances. And if this is so, it raises a particular challenge for Christian ethicists. What is the status of the norm prohibiting torture? Does it rest on a divine command (and if so, which one), or on some other basis? And in any case, can we defend a clear, uncompromising ban on torture, even in the face of what appear to be strong countervailing reasons to relax this ban? These are the questions that I hope to explore in what follows.

Divine commands, God's will and the prohibition against torture

Let me begin by looking more closely at Waldron's initial suggestion, namely, that the prohibition against torture rests on a divine command. As is well known, divine command theories of ethics raise fundamental questions, and it would go well beyond the scope of this paper to attempt to address them in any detail. There is one in particular that is especially relevant here, however. That is – if the prohibition against torture rests ultimately on a divine command, which divine command is it that prohibits this practice? This may seem like a frivolous question, particularly given the gravity of the issue. Yet it was not obvious to our Christian forebears that God forbids torture; there are no scriptural injunctions banning the practice, and for much of our history the common practices of society and theological considerations seemed to legitimate it.

Of course, we see matters very differently now. Torture is widely recognised to be a fundamental assault on human dignity. Given this key insight into what torture is, it seems plausible for the Christian theologian to conclude that torture is a violation – a particularly egregious violation – of God's fundamental command to love the neighbour in the fullest way that we can. As a matter of fact, I would argue that this is precisely the right conclusion. Notice, however, that this analysis moves from a judgement that a particular kind of action comprises an especially egregious violation of human dignity, towards the conclusion that this act violates God's will as expressed through the commandment of neighbour-love. Whatever we may take the significance of this conclusion to be, the appeal to God's commandment does not add anything by way of justification for the conclusion that torture is an assault on human dignity – the logic of the argument goes in the opposite direction.

What I am driving at is this. The idea of divine law is so attractive, in the context of debates such as this, precisely because it seems to offer a way of appealing from human judgements to a higher authority, whose decrees set boundaries on the legitimate range of human discretion. Yet it is difficult to see how we can account for the practical force of a divine command, or more generally for any kind of expression of divine will, without allowing considerable room for human discretion after all. If we are to translate general precepts into practically effective norms for conduct, we must formulate them in terms of judgements about prohibited and permissible kinds of actions – and these judgements, in turn, will inevitably be qualified both by our own individual and collective perspectives, and by the structures and circumstances of the society in which we live. Indeed, to a considerable extent at least, the norms, practices and institutions structuring any society will be constructed through just these processes of discriminating between permissible and impermissible kinds of actions.

If this is so, then it turns out that the distinction between God's law and human mores is not as sharp as we might have assumed. To put the point in another way – no matter what we take the starting points of normative reflection to be, whether we ground these in God's law or a natural law or the categorical imperative, these starting points can only become effective as norms through communal processes of reflection and practice, through which we determine (tacitly or expressly) which kinds of actions count as fulfilling mandates and avoiding wrongdoing. In a mundane and non-Kantian sense, we give ourselves a law, in and through the processes of interpreting whatever law may be said to be given to us. In this sense, the concrete norms through which a society conducts its common life will themselves be constructs of that society, at least considered at a level specific enough to be practically usable. I do not want to suggest that the norms by which we live are nothing other than social conventions; on the contrary, I would argue that there are objective normative considerations that place constraints on any well-formulated practical norms.Footnote ¹¹ But my point is that, even if one believes that the constraints in question are grounded ultimately in divine authority, it is implausible to construe practical norms, formulated at a level of specificity sufficient to guide action, as carrying the full weight of divine authority.

Does it follow that we cannot defend an absolute prohibition against torture? This conclusion would be too quick. Many philosophers and theologians have assumed that no moral prohibition can be categorical in the requisite way if it rests on (mere) human judgement. But it is not clear why this should be the case. To be sure, I would resist the claim that we can identify a set of distinctively moral norms which are categorical and overriding in virtue of some one quality or property that they all exhibit – their status as authoritative divine commands, for example, or alternatively, their status as formulations of a categorical imperative of practical reason or of an overriding principle or norm. The practical norms by which we live are too heterogeneous, and too clearly the products of unreflective practices and collective judgements, to be plausibly explained in these ways. When we turn from moral theory to examine these collective judgements, it becomes apparent that they reflect all kinds of considerations, including – in most instances – some which justify limiting the scope of a particular prohibition, or allowing it to be overridden for sufficiently serious reasons. Generally speaking, we allow killing in self-defence, and we allow taking what is another's to preserve one's own life. But we can also identify some kinds of actions which are so abominable that we conclude they cannot be justified under any circumstances. The prohibitions associated with these kinds of actions are truly categorical, unlimited in scope and not to be overridden by even the most serious countervailing considerations. As Waldron notes, the relevant legal prohibitions of torture – at the level of international law, at any rate – are prohibitions of just this kind, and so they should be.Footnote ¹²

If I am right in what I have said so far, the absoluteness of the prohibition against torture cannot be defended on the basis of its status as a supposed divine command. We may well judge that God does forbid this kind of action – so I would claim – but this judgement comes as the conclusion of a normative argument, not as its starting point.Footnote ¹³ Yet even for those of us who want to defend such an absolute prohibition, this would seem to square with our intuitions. There is something odd and ultimately unsatisfactory about prohibiting torture categorically simply because this is what God requires of us. Surely we are inclined to say that torture is never permissible, because of something uniquely terrible or destructive in the act of torture itself? This is the line of thought that I want to develop in the next part of my remarks. At this point, theological considerations do come into play – specifically, the consideration of what it means to violate one's victim, considered as an image of God, and what it means to violate one's own self through the act of torture.

Torture as an assault on the image of God

So far, I have been presupposing that we all know what torture is. Let me be a little more explicit about what I mean by torture, in order to explain why I think this kind of action should be categorically prohibited. We can all imagine acts that we would regard as torture, and to a considerable extent, at least, we could agree on a set of such examples – paradigmatic cases, if you will, which serve as a touchstone for evaluating the status of other, less evident cases. Stretching someone on the rack in order to induce her to admit to heresy would certainly be an act of torture; pulling out someone's fingernails to force him to betray the names of fellow spies would be another. These cases exemplify a recognisable kind of action – the infliction of great physical pain, with a particular aim, to force someone to do something against his or her will, to punish or intimidate the individual or to terrorise others by a display of ruthless power. Many of us would add other kinds of actions in which the suffering inflicted is mental rather than (immediately, or primarily) physical – for example, subjecting someone to the terrors of drowning through ‘waterboarding’, humiliating him by defacing his sacred scriptures – with the aim, again, of ‘breaking the spirit’ in order to induce someone to do something that he is deeply unwilling to do. In the words of Article 1 of the United Nations Convention against Torture,

I want to claim that this kind of action is, in Waldron's terms, abominable – there are no considerations that can justify it, and no limitations on the scope of the relevant provision.Footnote ¹⁵ It is abominable because it is cruel and, to many, nothing more needs to be said. But the very fact that the legitimacy of torture is once again an open question suggests that the cruelty of the practice, taken alone, would not altogether rule it out.Footnote ¹⁶ I base the claim that torture should be categorically prohibited on the further conviction that this kind of action represents an assault on the image of God that each human being fundamentally is. There are additional, related considerations that likewise justify a categorical prohibition against torture; while these are not so weighty, they are serious and I will comment on them as well.

But first – what does it mean to say that torture violates the image of God that each of us most fundamentally is? Once again, Waldron offers a good initial statement of the issue at stake:

I think it is safe to say that most theologians would agree with Waldron – indeed, the claim that moral norms are grounded in a respect for the human person as image of God has become something of a commonplace. And like many other commonplaces, this one strikes me as true and important, but at the same time too general to justify the absoluteness of the prohibition against torture. To put the same point in another way – if our commitments to one another rest ultimately on the status that each of us bears as image of God, as I believe they do, then how can we justify discriminating among different levels of stringency and scope in formulating these commitments? Why does respect for the image of God yield a categorical prohibition against torture, but not against, say, killing?

We are each of us created in the image of God, but at the same time, that image is expressed in and through the exigencies, needs and conflicting demands of human life. Our divinity, so to speak, does not obviate our humanity or our more fundamental status as creatures. If we try to attain a higher status of perfection than we can sustain, we run the risk of undermining the very ideals and standards to which we aspire. That is why respect for the image of God in each of us is consistent with a recognition that concrete moral standards must take account of the limitations and ambiguities of human life – or so I would argue. At the same time, however, there are some kinds of actions which constitute a direct and immediate assault on the human person, considered precisely as the image of God – and these kinds of actions are not only harmful, not only reprehensible, but intolerable. They represent the most serious kinds of harm that one person can do to another, while at the same time they also represent the most direct kind of sacrilege. Nothing can justify actions of these kinds.

At this point, I am presupposing a particular account of just what it is that constitutes the human person as the image of God – an account that would be controversial, but has deep roots in the patristic and medieval tradition, and rests on strong scriptural and theological foundations.Footnote ¹⁸ In the words of Aquinas, referring to the early Greek theologian John of Damascus, ‘the human person is said to be made to the Image of God insofar as through the Image is signified “understanding and free judgement and power over oneself”’. Thus, he adds, the human person is God's image ‘insofar as he too is the principle of his works, as it were possessing free judgement and power over himself’.Footnote ¹⁹ On this view, the image of God in the human person is grounded centrally in the human capacities for rational judgement, choice and free action in accordance with that choice – rational freedom, in other words, together with a whole range of values stemming from and expressed through that freedom. It is worth underscoring that the image of God, thus understood, is present in every human person without exception, including those who are unable to exercise the relevant capacities due to immaturity or illness, or in those who exercise their rational freedom in sinful and destructive ways. The image cannot be altogether extirpated from the human soul, even in Cain, as the scholastics frequently remark, or in the damned themselves. The capacities which constitute the image of God are at the same time constitutive of the soul itself, and therefore it cannot lose the impress of that image so long as it continues in existence.

Yet it is possible to destroy someone's abilities to express his or her capacities as an image of God, and to experience him or herself as such, through the coercive force of intense physical pain, humiliation, fear or other kinds of mental suffering. Torture is a kind of coercion, of course, but that is not its worst aspect. Other kinds of coercion force the individual to do something that she or he does not want to do; torture subverts the will itself by assaulting or undermining the delicate psychic forces that sustain the individual's integrity, sense of well-being and self-command. The victim of torture experiences him or herself as degraded, compromised and self-betrayed – not only a victim of outside assaults or bodily suffering, but someone who must live with the memory of having in some way betrayed his or her deep commitments. Let me be clear: in no way do I want to suggest that the victim of torture is morally culpable for whatever he or she is compelled to do. As Aristotle long ago remarked, there are some things that no human being can be expected to bear, and no blame attaches to the individual who cannot bear them. Nonetheless, the assault to one's integrity inflicted by torture, and the experiences and memories of oneself as in some way self-betrayed, are among the worst experiences that one can undergo.

The malice of torture – as an older moral theology might have put it – is forcefully expressed in these remarks of Dianna Ortiz, who was tortured by the Guatemalan security forces in 1989:

Even after she was released, Ortiz goes on to say, ‘I lived in a world created by my torturers. They had told me, as so many other tortured persons have been told, “Even if you survive what we have done to you and tell the world, no one will believe you. No one will care.” That is the world I lived in: No one cared. No law, no God, no justice, no peace, no hope.’Footnote ²¹ Eventually, Ortiz was able to regain her faith in God and to move beyond recurrent thoughts of suicide. Nonetheless, the world created by her torturers is still, in one way, ‘the world I continue to live in. I do so not by choice, but because of the truth that once tortured, always tortured.’ She goes on to quote the Austrian philosopher Jean Amery, who was tortured by the Nazis: ‘Anyone who has been tortured remains tortured. Anyone who has suffered torture will never again be at ease in the world, the abomination of the annihilation is never extinguished. Faith in humanity, already cracked with the first slap in the face, then demolished by torture, is never acquired again.’Footnote ²²

Faith in God, faith in humanity, reliance on the simple goodness of creation and the kindliness of one's fellow men and women – these are fundamental elements of the scaffolding that sustains the human spirit, making it possible for men and women to conduct their lives as free, self-governing agents. It is a terrible thing to assault and undermine the faith and integrity of another human being – whatever forms these may take for any individual, and regardless of whether the victim is morally admirable or depraved, innocent or guilty. What is at stake here is an assault on the victim's capacities to experience him or herself as a spiritual creature and to act accordingly, and such an assault can in no way be justified by the judgement – whose judgement? – that the victim is somehow misusing those capacities. For the Christian, at least – and I do not say, only for the Christian – there can be no justification for this kind of assault. As Aquinas observes, the good of the individual and the common good are inextricably intertwined, in such a way as to justify demands on the individual for the sacrifice of private goods; yet he also claims that some individual goods, those pertaining directly to the person's character and his or her standing before God, are greater in kind than the common good of the community, and take precedence over it.Footnote ²³ The spiritual goods which are attacked and undermined by torture are goods of precisely this kind. The good of the soul, the integrity of the image of God within the individual, his or her capacities for faith, hope, and love – no considerations of personal or national security, nor even the possibility of widespread loss of life, can justify an assault on these. For many, this will be a remarkable – in some ways, a scandalous – judgement, and yet I believe it is precisely the judgement compelled by Christian faith. This, it seems to me, is the fundamental theological reason why the prohibition against torture should be regarded as absolute, never to be overridden whatever the costs of doing otherwise, and in my view this consideration in itself would be decisive.

Two further considerations

At the same time, the moral boundaries that we draw are usually overdetermined, in the sense that they are informed by a range of overlapping and mutually supporting considerations. I mentioned above that two further considerations support the claim that torture should be categorically prohibited. While neither of these is as weighty as the one just considered, they are important, and furthermore, related to the first. Let me say something about each.

The first of these has to do with the effect that the practice of torture has on the person who carries it out. Torture is cruel, and it inevitably renders its practitioners cruel. Someone might want to challenge that this is inevitably the case, on the grounds that someone who tortures for justifiable reasons would not be acting out of a desire to inflict pain, in contrast to the genuinely cruel individual who takes pleasure in the suffering of others. In other words, because ‘justifiable’ torture would not be cruel – since cruelty is by definition the unjustified infliction of pain – the practitioner of justifiable torture would not be rendered cruel by the practice of inflicting pain. This objection presupposes that we can insulate ourselves from the immediate effects of our actions, in such a way as to keep our dispositions towards others detached from what it is that we are actually doing, from the immediate relation between ourselves and the world that this act, here and now, establishes. We hope that our good intentions will determine our dispositions from above, as it were, in such a way as to save us from the natural effects that our actual actions have on the dispositions that inform our character.

To paraphrase Kierkegaard, I would be very glad to be told this, at least sometimes, but I cannot believe it. We cannot be as detached from the immediate dynamics of our own actions as that, nor can we keep ourselves from feeling, and responding to, the effects that those actions have on others. This consideration has to be taken into account even with respect to the infliction of genuinely justifiable kinds of harms. There is a fine line between preparing a soldier to kill, and disposing him or her to take a predator's delight in killing. I think we can draw this line, precisely because there are instances in which the act of killing stems from a natural and legitimate impulse to protect oneself or another. Still, killing another human being is potentially corrupting even when it is justifiable – that is one of the reasons why it is so difficult, and yet so necessary, to sustain a sense of moral boundaries, reinforced by a sense of military honour, even on the battlefield.

Torture, it seems to me, is intrinsically cruel, no matter what countervailing considerations might seem to justify it in this or that case. It involves the deliberate and sustained infliction of pain and suffering on a fellow human being, and as such, it requires the torturer to override the natural aversion to hurting with which most of us are endowed. If he or she lacks this aversion (and some people do), the practice reinforces that deficiency and may well prove to be enjoyable. In short, the practice of torture initially requires, and then fosters, a willingness to hurt another, which can readily lead to positive pleasure in the infliction of pain and humiliation. If such a disposition does not count as cruelty, then it is difficult to know what would. Any practice that fosters such a disposition is intrinsically corrupting, and as such, it harms the perpetrator in a deep, quite possibly irreversible, way. What is more, the cruelty fostered by the practice of torture would inevitably undermine the capacities for detachment, and for a genuine concern for the well-being of others, needed to draw the kinds of boundaries envisioned by those who imagine that torture can sometimes be justified. It is impossible to set oneself over against another human being by deliberately inflicting pain, while at the same time remaining responsive enough to the claims of his or her humanity to inflict just enough – a golden mean? – of suffering on one's victim. And someone who is willing deliberately to hurt another individual, in sustained and atrocious ways, can scarcely maintain the sensibilities necessary to judge accurately what the well-being of other persons might require.Footnote ²⁴

This brings me to a final reason why torture can never be justified. I have already mentioned more than once that we do consider the infliction of some kinds of harms to be justifiable. At the same time, we are careful to delimit and maintain the boundaries between permissible and impermissible kinds of harms, particularly when the stakes are high – with respect to killing, for example, or depriving another person of liberty of action and movement. In modern Western societies, these lines emerged together with the nation-state, at least in certain key respects, in such a way as to locate the relevant lines along a division between publicly constituted authority and private initiative. Thus, there are certain classes of acts which are regarded as justifiable only if they are carried out by an agent of the state, on behalf of the common good. That is why the state may legitimately authorise its agents to kill in wartime or (more controversially) through capital punishment, but any act of killing by a private individual, at least apart from killing in self-defence, is regarded as murder.

While the application of this distinction may be questioned in some instances, in general, it seems to me to reflect a sound insight. That is to say, there are some kinds of actions which may be justifiable for sufficiently serious reasons, but which we nonetheless have good reasons to take out of the realm of private judgement, except perhaps in the most urgent and extreme circumstances. We have a stake in limiting these actions because of their destructive effect, of course. But beyond that, we have very strong reasons indeed to forestall the thought that one individual, acting in his or her private capacities, might legitimately hold the power of life and death over another, or deprive him or her of freedom of action and movement. To continue with the example of killing, we recognise the legitimacy of killing in self-defence, or in defence of a third party, but these are cases in which one's act of self-preservation or protection and the act of killing are, in effect, one and the same. In other instances, even a seemingly justified killing, carried out by a private individual, would embody a judgement to the effect that one individual stands over against and above another, in such a way as to judge that the other deserves to live, or has a life worth living – or not. This is pride, and it is very dangerous indeed. Not only can we not reliably make these judgements about one another's lives – the attempt to do so is itself corrupting, in so far as it encourages us to overlook the manifold limitations of our judgements, the ways in which they can be skewed by our self-interests and our fears. By no means is it the case that the judgements of the state, in wartime or in capital cases, are infallibly accurate and just – we know all too well that this is not so. Nonetheless, at least these are subject to public procedures, and reflect the impersonal and overarching claims of the community rather than the determinations of one individual standing in a relation of self-legitimated authority over the other.

I have elaborated this point in some detail, because an analogous argument can be made for the legitimacy of torture, at least when carried out under the auspices of the state in accordance with legally established procedures. Yet I want to argue that this line of argument fails with respect to torture – in other words, torture cannot be justified, not even on behalf of the nation-state, not even within the constrains of legal processes. Most fundamentally, torture cannot be justified, even under these conditions, because of the direct and uniquely terrible way in which it assaults the image of God within the individual person. But in addition, state-sanctioned torture cannot be justified because of its effect on the nation-state itself, on the rule of law, and on the common life of the individuals and communities that the nation-state is meant to sustain and protect.Footnote ²⁵

In my view, the nation-state emerged, and continues to endure, because it offers a viable solution to problems of organisation, self-governance and mutual protection in the conditions of modern society. It is not the only solution possible, and we may well see it superseded in our lifetime by other forms of political organisation, but for the moment it is a fact of our political and social lives and it can be a force for great good. At the same time, however, it represents a tremendous concentration of power, and as such, it is potentially dangerous, to its own citizens as well as to those outside. Again, I hardly need to elaborate on this point. If the nation-state, through its arrangement of political authority, offers a way of limiting the private judgements of individuals, it is equally true that the power of the nation-state itself must be limited in order to be tolerable. Over the course of time, a number of mechanisms have been devised for placing limits on the power of the nation-state, including democracy, a constitutional division of powers and, most fundamentally, the institution of ideals of due process and the rule of law under the auspices of an independent judiciary.

Ideally, these and similar arrangements work together to ensure that the power of the nation-state is expressed through forms of political authority appropriate to the governance of free citizens, without subjecting them to the collective good or to private rule – without subjecting them to servitude, in other words. The constraints set by democratic arrangement and the rule of law serve important limiting functions, but just as importantly, they have a positive value that the Christian can and should endorse. The observance of just laws, even at the cost of one's own individual advantage or security, is itself a great good for the individual, perhaps the greatest of the purely human goods that we can attain. Through participating in the just laws of her community, the individual enjoys the greatest connatural goods possible to a rational creature. He or she acts in accordance with the individual's own proper principles of action, namely, reason and the capacity for self-determination, in this way existing and acting as the image of God that each person most fundamentally is. What is more, the individual acts in accordance with the social and relational character of human existence, participating in a network of communal relations, within which he or she enjoys a secure and respected place. Finally, the individual identifies with and contributes to communal values that transcend and outlast one's personal interests and projects, thus respecting our shared nature as reflective rational creatures who are aware of our individual mortality.

These considerations must be kept in mind whenever we are tempted to disregard the claims of human dignity and justice in the name of national security. Of course, national security is an important good and a central responsibility of the nation-state in particular, but it is a mistake to think that it can be weighed over against the fundamental principles governing our common life. It is not the case that we can trade a little justice here for a bit more security there and then go on with our lives as if nothing had changed. The principles on which we act in pursuit of discrete social goods will themselves set the conditions under which those goods are enjoyed – and by the same token, by embracing unjust means to attain good social ends, we constitute ourselves into an unjust society, one in which, for example, we ourselves might be detained without trial or tortured in the name of security, or some other social interest. This kind of liability constitutes a kind of insecurity in itself, and what is more, it transforms our identities as members of our society from free subjects to the servile objects of others' aims and plans. What is even worse, to the extent that a society is unjust, it forecloses the possibility of enjoying those individual goods that can only be attained in and through participation in communal structures of justice, including the opportunity to act as a free and rational agent in concert with others and shared participation in communal ideals and values. Probably no community could ever be so thoroughly corrupted as to foreclose all such possibilities for its members; but to the extent that the enactments of a given society are unjust, it inflicts a grave wrong on all its members, and not only those who are victimised by the injustice in question.

While these considerations would apply generally to any kind of injustice sanctioned in the name of collective security, they are particularly exigent with respect to torture. Torture constitutes an absolutely inappropriate and supremely dangerous exercise of state power, for just the same reason that it constitutes an intolerable assault on the individual as image of God. That is to say, it reflects an attempt to undermine and destroy the individual's capacities to function as a rational creature, not only through coercion, but by assaulting the psyche itself, breaking the spirit and subverting the will so far as that is possible. It is intolerable that the nation-state should turn its tremendously concentrated power against the individual in this way – and by the same token, the authorisation of the state cannot justify anyone's participation in this kind of tyranny. The historian Kenneth Pennington once remarked that ‘Torture fundamentally undermines any idea of due process’, and while these may appear to be inadequate terms of condemnation, they capture the important point that the practice of torture undermines the very rationale for political authority.Footnote ²⁶ Or as Waldron says:

Renouncing abominations: the call to courage

This brings me to a final point. It is sometimes said that we should be all the more prepared to renounce the practice of torture because torture does not work. This may well be the case; nonetheless, anyone who advocates an absolute ban on torture must acknowledge the possibility that torture really does work, at least in some circumstances. Indeed, it may well be that, in some circumstances, torture offers an effective means, and perhaps the only means, to avert widespread and far-reaching loss of life and destruction. It is harder to imagine how the practice of torture would be necessary to preserve the very existence of a political community and the way of life it embodies – particularly when we consider that torture undermines the existence of any social life worth having. But let us assume for the purposes of argument that even this is a possible scenario.

Even in these extreme circumstances, the ban on torture should be regarded as absolute and categorical – or so I would argue. But at the same time, we must acknowledge that a serious, legally effective ban on torture will call for a collective exercise of courage. Do we – and here I mean specifically, we Christians – have the right to ask for this kind of courage from our fellow citizens, on what are admittedly (in part, but a key part) theological grounds?

I am not sure that I can answer this question fully, but let me offer two observations that incline me to say yes. The first is very simple – that is, if Waldron is right, we Christians have in effect been asked to enter the debate over torture, in such a way as to bring the distinctive perspectives of faith to bear on this very difficult question. Recall his comment: ‘Those of us who are actively engaged in this debate have listened for – yearned for and strained to hear – a contribution by the churches . . .’ If this is so, then presumably our fellow citizens, including many who do not share our faith commitments, want to hear what we have to say. It is incumbent on us to respond, and to do so drawing on what we affirm, in all humility, to be a perspective ultimately grounded in the self-revelation of a loving God, which we as the church hold in trust for humanity at large.

Second, as I hope I have indicated, we as Christians do have something to say in this debate that is distinctive, and yet not altogether foreign to others’ perceptions. As Waldron remarks, the idea of the sacredness of the human person is not unknown to secular philosophers; indeed, this sense seems to me to be more widely diffused than he recognises.Footnote ²⁸ Christian theology provides a way of making sense of that perception and drawing out its normative conclusions. Why shouldn't we offer this account to our fellow citizens, straightforwardly and in all humility, without prejudging whether and in what ways they will find it persuasive or helpful? Men and women are persuaded by whatever persuades them, and that will depend in each instance on a complex set of considerations, among which explicit religious beliefs, or their absence, may well be less important than we might expect.

At any rate, if we Christians are to have any impact at all on the wider debate over torture, then we ourselves must confront this question, more carefully and systematically than we have so far done. If we are to call on the courage of our fellow citizens in supporting an effective ban on torture, we must ourselves find the courage to examine this question and to bring our distinctive perspectives to the table. If the analysis developed in this article is sound, then at the very least we must find the courage to speak out against those in public life who promote this abominable practice, even against those who in other contexts we might regard as allies. Ultimately, I believe we must find the courage to renounce any kind of security that would require the practice of torture, and to make it clear, through whatever ecclesial or lay agencies are appropriate, that that is what we are committed to doing. Paul exhorts the Thessalonians not to grieve for the dead as do those who have no hope (1 Thess. 4:13). If we who do have hope cannot find the courage to renounce security at such a price, then we can hardly expect such courage of our fellow citizens. But courage itself is a gift, which we can ask for and hope to receive – and to the extent that we do so, the witness of that courage may well have an impact of its own, even apart from the perspectives that we bring to the public square.