Torture, Terror, and Trade-Offs: Philosophy for the White House
Jeremy Waldron
Language: English
Pages: 400
ISBN: 0199585040
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Jeremy Waldron has been a challenging and influential voice in the moral, political and legal debates surrounding the response to terrorism since 9/11. His contributions have spanned the major controversies of the War on Terror including the morality and legality of torture, whether security can be 'balanced' with liberty, and the relationship between public safety and individual rights. He has also tackled underlying questions essential to understanding the practical debates - including what terrorism is, and what a right to security would entail.
This volume collects all Waldron's work on these issues, including six published essays and two previously unpublished essays. It also includes a new introduction in which Waldron presents an overview of his contribution, and looks at the problems currently facing the Obama administration and the UK Government in dealing with the legacy of the Bush White House.
The volume will be essential reading for all those engaged with contemporary politics, security law, and the continuing struggle for an ethical response to terrorism.
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liberties to pin too much hope on the judiciary in times of crisis. . . . In this regard, the current Court is no different from its predecessors, all of whom—when confronting the ‘blood-swollen god’ of war—nearly always deferred to the president in trading liberty for security. According to Professor Tribe—in the same article—there seemed to be a much greater prospect that Congress would be a check on an overreaching executive in this sort of crisis than that the Supreme Court would be. ² See
net threat from the state goes up as the power accorded to the state increases. Secondly, even though the terrorist threat is very real, the hypothesis that an increase ⁴³ I infer this from the recent case of Jose Padilla, held for having talked about the possibility of detonating a radiological bomb in Washington D.C. See Benjamin Weiser with Dana Canedy, ‘Traces of Terror: the Bomb Plot,’ The New York Times, June 12, 2002, p. A24: ‘Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, speaking to reporters in
indispensable for its status as government— namely the ability to command and mobilize a large civilian population. By rendering or threatening to render the population mindless with terror, the intimidator deprives the target regime of something it needs, a population capable of rational choice. One might even say that it deprives the target regime of an object of Jack Benny-style coercion: with a terror-stricken population, the target government can no longer exercise the ordinary coercion
or ‘One man’s clergyman [neutral or positive] is another man’s purveyor of superstition [negative] ’). An individual can be both a freedom-fighter [end, described positively] and a terrorist [means, described negatively] if he uses terroristic means in his struggle for freedom; or he can be one or the other or neither of these things. We might privilege one of these descriptions over the other to express the view that terroristic means are always wrong, no matter what end they are aiming at, or
against the general background in which most citizens’ liberties are unaffected. In this chapter, we have seen that it is also true for security. Some of the changes that are advocated and undertaken for the sake of security actually have uneven impact on that security; they protect the security of some while neglecting or actively undermining the security of others. To point this out, with regard to liberty and security, is not to deny that changes might need to be made, and that these changes