Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror
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.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.