Macquarie University Research Centre for Agency Values and Ethics Seminar Tuesday 7 June 2011 11am-1pm W6A 708 The Right Not To Be Tortured Jessica Wolfendale (West Virginia University) Jeff McMahan has recently argued that the right not to be tortured can be forfeited in classic 'ticking bomb' scenarios. McMahan claims that the terrorist's responsibility for creating the threat of the ticking bomb makes him 'morally liable' to be tortured, and thus the terrorist has no right not to be tortured. This view of the right not to be tortured was adopted by the Bush Administration in the torture memos, and is shared by other philosophers, included David Rodin and Stephen Kershnar. In this paper I argue that the right not to be tortured is derived from the right to be treated as a person - a right that cannot be forfeited even in cases of extreme wrongdoing. I argue that the right to be treated as a person is grounded in the features of persons that enable them to be rational moral agents capable of maintaining a unified sense of agency. This right generates a correlative duty to refrain from actions that undermine or attack the capacities for personhood, of which torture is a paradigmatic example. The right to be treated as a person (and so the right not to be tortured) cannot be forfeited because there is a fundamental connection between personhood and moral accountability. Holding agents morally responsible requires seeing them as persons, as only persons may be held morally accountable for their actions. This requires that we continue to see them as persons, and as such they are entitled to the respect due to persons by virtue of their capacity for agency.
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