From the ongoing debate in the US about torture, here's a view - Richard Cohen's:
America should repudiate torture not because it is always ineffective... or because others loathe it but because it degrades us and runs counter to our national values.
This is echoed by Kathleen Parker:
When we ask if something is torture, the answer is another question: What kind of people should we be?
It's a point worth making, no question about it, but in terms of where the primary emphasis should be it gets things the wrong way round. It is important not to be a nation that tortures. But that is because of what torture is and what it does to people; it is because human beings have some rights from which there can be no derogation, not in any circumstances. It is because to torture is to violate a human right that is absolute and to violate a human being. For its own sake America - like every nation - should not want to be one that tortures, but the most fundamental reason for this is the violation of humanity that torture is. The nation that does it is degraded, but it is degraded through how others have been treated at its hands. While, for any 'us', it is about us, this is so because of what it does to some them.
There's another point than pedantic accuracy in noting the direction of the normative conceptual relationship. If you make this question one exclusively about 'us', it is that much easier to trade off aspects of our moral character against our safety - to argue that in extremis we may have to be worse in order to be protected against threats. But the barrier against resorting to torture is not about computing costs and benefits in this way. It is a peremptory norm of civilized law and morality, and may not be traded.
