The bombings of September 11, 2001 (hereafter 9/11), abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and mass rapes and murders in Darfur have kept terrorism, torture, and genocide in the global public eye through the first decade of this century. Responses to atrocities are a continuing source of controversy within and without congress halls and university walls. Although terrorism, torture, and genocide are today's paradigms of evil, each has been itself a response to perceived or threatened evils. A motivation for this book is the hope that atrocity victims and governments can learn to respond without doing further evil and that they can model, instead, humanitarian values. That hope takes seriously the concept of evil from a secular moral point of view.

Increasingly since 9/11, philosophers are giving sustained attention to that precise secular sense of “evil” in which it refers to especially heinous wrongs (Bernstein 2002, 2005; Grant 2006; Kekes 2005; Lara 2007; Morton 2004). At the same time, others (such as Cole 2006) remain skeptical of the value of rehabilitating the concept of evil after Friedrich Nietzsche's critique (Nietzsche 1969, pp. 24–56). Many have worried about its use as a political club and rallying tool that has the potential to stir up mass hatreds.

In this passage Immanuel Kant says “as a species.” But he goes on to ­discuss the individual human will and argues that for it there is no middle ground. I call this view Kant's “moral excluded middle.” Kant's view on this point is shared by many who hold that only those who are good deserve heaven and those who are evil deserve either purgatory or hell. The idea that human beings can eventually be sorted into those who deserve to go to heaven (people of good will) and those who deserve purgatory or hell (people who lack good will) presupposes that of those who are capable of morality, any who are not good are evil and that of those who are evil, some may be redeemable, but others are not. Kant rejects the idea of diabolical evil as inapplicable to human beings. But he accepts the idea that a will that is not good is evil. In this chapter, I disagree with Kant's moral excluded middle. But I defend a distinction between diabolical evil and lesser evils.

A widely shared common-sense view is that good and evil, unlike right and wrong, are not contradictories. They are contraries.

Philosophers who reflect on torture tend to focus almost exclusively on options and choices of potential torturers and their ratifiers, to the relative neglect of the experience of the tortured. That is the approach represented in chapter 7. The focus changes in this chapter to the harm that torture does to its victims. Since torturers and ratifiers are the only free agents in the case, a focus on them might be thought ethically appropriate. Yet the experiences, positions, and agency of the tortured should not be neglected.

It is in terms of harm to victims that the claim has been made that the harsh procedures authorized for use in counterterrorism programs of the United States after 9/11 do not amount to torture. Darius Rejali calls these procedures “clean tortures” (Rejali 2007, p. xvii) since they need not leave marks (although some can and do). When it is said that a procedure is not really torture, the procedure is apt to be presented abstractly rather than considered in contexts where it is combined with other procedures and carried out repeatedly over a long time. It is apt to be presented with no mention of such conditions as continuous solitary confinement or incommunicado detention.

A PARADOX

It was argued in chapter 6 that rape can be terrorist and in chapter 8 that it can be torture. Drawing on the understanding of genocide as social death, this chapter examines the idea that mass rape, even when aimed at forced pregnancy and births, can be a strategy of genocide. It is not difficult to see how rape can be a terrorist practice and at the same time torture. It may be less obvious that mass rape can be genocidal, especially when it is aimed at mass impregnation. International documents mention rape explicitly as a violation of human rights. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 states, “Women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault” (Human Rights Watch 1996, p. 30, n. 46). The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) considers rape to be among the grave breaches specified by that convention (Human Rights Watch 1996, p. 30, n. 46). In 1995 Justice Richard Goldstone, Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), affirmed that rape can constitute torture (Human Rights Watch 1996, p. 32). The ICTY at The Hague and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) at Arusha explicitly include rape among crimes against humanity (Gutman and Rieff 1999, p. 108).

“Counterterrorism” in the United States today has come to be regarded as a military concept. Yet it is unclear to what extent a military model is really the model that has been used by the US for fighting terrorism since the attacks of September 11, 2001 (hereafter, 9/11; Luban 2002, pp. 9–14). Military policies are governed by International Humanitarian Law (IHL), which rules out most terrorism. Counterterrorist measures need not be terrorist. But the temptation for responders to use terrorist means is there. This chapter explores that temptation and takes up the question of whether there can be a moral justification, or at least a moral excuse, for a ­government-sponsored program to fight terrorism with terrorism.

John Rawls had a lifelong concern with issues of religious freedom and intolerance. In his social and political philosophy course at Harvard and in his writings he addressed the question of whether principles of justice impose any obligation to tolerate even those who are intolerant (Rawls 1999b, pp. 92–94). By the intolerant, he had in mind religious sects (although the same issue arises for political sects) that do not accept the principle of equal liberty.

Most evils are not dramatic attention-getters. Martha Nussbaum's contrast of terrorism with poverty may be true. But how would we know? The ability to make that observation seems to presuppose a high-profile paradigm of terrorism, at least that terrorism is as visible as poverty. Yet terrorism is far commoner than its high-profile paradigms suggest. Most of it is not very public and is not identified or documented as terrorism. Under oppressive regimes, in racist environments, in organized crime, in inner cities policed by gangs, and in the everyday lives of women, children, and elders everywhere who suffer routine violence in their own homes, systematic uses of terror degrade the environments of ordinary people without capturing any more public attention than most poverty does.

High-profile paradigms include the French Resistance, British carpet-bombings during WW ii, activities of the Weather Underground in the United States and the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany during the 1970s, and even ongoing anti-abortion terrorism in the US. But most terrorism is very low profile, unspectacular, except to those who suffer it. It is mostly executed with no pretense to justification or moral excuse. The ­previous chapter focused on international terrorism, which is relatively high profile.

PROLOGUE

Social death is not necessarily genocide. But genocide is social death. Social death has many sources – slavery, banishment, disfigurement, illness, even self-chosen isolation. It can be an evil or not, depending on the harm it does and whether it results from inexcusable wrongs. Self-chosen isolation ordinarily leaves open many possibilities for reconnecting. Even when isolation is not self-chosen, a person who is shunned is not ordinarily cut off from a shared language, history, traditions, and the like. Genocide is an extreme of social death.

The intentional production of social death in a people or community is the central evil of genocide. That is so not only when a genocide is mainly cultural but even when it is homicidal on a massive scale. Social death distinguishes the evil of genocide, morally, from the evils of other mass murders. Even genocidal murder can be understood as an extreme means to the primary goal of social death. Social vitality exists through relationships, contemporary and intergenerational, that create contexts and identities that give meaning and shape to our lives. Some of those relationships are with kin, friends, and coworkers. Others are less personal and mediated by basic social institutions – economic, political, religious, educational, and so on.

Much of this chapter is devoted to clarifying what it means for non-sentient entities, including plants, species, and ecosystems, as well as human groups, to suffer harm (as distinct from being wronged) and what it means for that harm to be intolerable. More of this chapter is taken up with plant life, species, and ecosystems than with human groups. But chapters 9 and 10 revisit at greater length issues of harm to human groups. Environmental atrocities are not represented in Part ii of this book, although torture of laboratory animals is considered in chapter 8. Yet, in responding to atrocities, it is important to avoid not only evils to other people but environmental atrocities as well. It is part of the agenda of this chapter to give sense to environmental atrocities as not entirely human-centered or even pain-­centered. Thinking about harm to human groups, insofar as they are not sentient entities, benefits from thinking about harm to non-sentient entities in the natural environment. And so, most of the focus in this chapter on harm to human groups is reserved to the penultimate section.

CONTEXTS AND PROBLEMATIC CASES

In The Atrocity Paradigm, I baldly asserted that evils are done to trees and ecosystems and then deferred indefinitely the task of explaining how or what that would mean.

April may or may not be the cruelest month. But in 2009, it was a month of revelations of cruelty and of responses to cruelty. In consecutive issues of The New York Review of Books Mark Danner published a two-part essay on the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Report on the Treatment of Fourteen “High Value Detainees” in CIA Custody (Danner 2009a, pp. 69–77; 2009b, pp. 48–56). The ICRC report, submitted as a confidential document in 2007, became available in April 2009 on the Internet. Danner poses the moral question whether torture is ever justified. He also presses the factual question whether the use of torture “really did produce information that, in the words of the former vice-president [former United States Vice-President Richard Cheney] was ‘absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack in the US’” (Danner 2009b, p. 55). Even if critical information was obtained, the question remains, as pointed out by US President Barack Obama in a nationally televised news conference (29 April, 2009), whether enough information could have been obtained by other methods. President Obama also went on record regarding waterboarding at that conference, stating without qualification that waterboarding is torture.