Because It Is Wrong
Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
Elevating the torture and privacy debate, this book brilliantly challenges the knee-jerk responses of those in media and government.
Can torture ever be justified? When is eavesdropping acceptable? Should a kidnapper be waterboarded to reveal where his victim has been hidden? Ever since 9/11 there has been an intense debate about the government’s application of torture and the pervasive use of eavesdropping and data mining in order to thwart acts of terrorism. To create this seminal statement on torture and surveillance, Charles Fried and Gregory Fried have measured current controversies against the philosophies of Aristotle, Locke, Kant, and Machiavelli, and against the historic decisions, large and small, of Jefferson, Lincoln, and Pope Sixtus V, among many others. Because It Is Wrong not only discusses the behavior and justifications of Bush government officials but also examines more broadly what should be done when high officials have broken moral and legal norms in an attempt to protect us. This is a moral and philosophical meditation on some of the most urgent issues of our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The father-son writers responsible for this lucid, meticulous text draw on their individual scholarly backgrounds to scrutinize the ethics of torture and privacy violations in the Bush era. Charles Fried, professor of law at Harvard University, and son Gregory Fried (Heidegger's Polemos), chair of philosophy chair at Suffolk University, eschew a consequentialist approach in favor of determining the inherent ethical value of the "the two signal controversies" of the age accompanied by examples gleaned from visual arts, film, and history. The authors conclude that torture, insofar as it violates the physical and psychological wellbeing of human beings, can be considered "absolutely wrong." Conversely, they do not see privacy as absolute and sacred, and they make allowances for situations in which the government might need to violate it. While the authors agree that the Bush administration's torture program constituted a clear offense, they disagree about prosecuting those responsible one advocates for prosecution as a moral imperative, the other frames it as a practical and political matter in an impasse that provides a fitting conclusion for this intriguing academic inquiry.
