Torture, Dignity, and the Rule of Law
It has been claimed, “If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. If you make this exception [and permit torture], the whole Constitution crumbles.” The ambition of this chapter is to provide the terms through which this judgment can be vindicated. The judgment’s pivotal assumption is that the prohibition on torture is in some manner foundational for any modern legal system. Three theses help to secure this foundational thesis: (i) Historically, basic rule of law and procedural due process requirements—most profoundly the doctrine of “innocent until proven guilty”—first emerge in the 18th century as the necessary legal bases for prohibiting judicial and penal torture. (ii) What is systematically implied by this historical process is that the modern rule of law is law’s own reflective effort to provide an absolute separation between the force of law and physical force, between legality or lawfulness and state violence. (iii) The rule of law’s emphatic separation between the force of law and the procedures of state violence presupposes that the object of law is the person with dignity, that is, a being possessing intrinsic worth. What dignity minimally means in the modern age is that while the state may deprive subjects of their liberty, it may not directly infringe upon their bodily integrity, or treat them in any manner that would infringe upon their equal intrinsic worth with all other legal subjects.