Uwe Steinhoff,On the Ethics of Torture

Uwe Steinhoff, On the Ethics of Torture, State University of New York Press: Albany, NY, 2013; 191 pp. (including index): 9781438446219, $75 (cloth), $24.95 (pbk)

In this highly polemical and contentious work, Uwe Steinhoff is entrenched in a bitter feud with his “absolutist opponents of torture”. Meanwhile, the rest of us are kept on the sidelines wondering what game is being played and by whose rules. In the preface, he writes: “In fact, however, it is they who commit the mistakes and many more, so this book will turn the tables on them” (p. ix). Clearly, taking the “lesser evil” path toward justifying torture, Steinhoff adopts the right to self-defense argument, even though he emphasizes that the book is not pro-torture. What drives his analysis is not the debate over the “terrorist threat” but rather the German Daschner child-kidnapping case.

Confusion begins in Chapter 1, “What is torture?” as Steinhoff ignores widely accepted international laws (e.g. Convention against Torture) and offers his own definition: “Torture is the knowing infliction of continuous or repeated extreme physical suffering for other than medical purposes” (p. 7). He does not explain why “medical purposes” got tangled up in his definition. Moreover, an endnote brings us to an extension of his argument in which he claims that strategic bombing can also amount to torture. To many criminologists studying state crime, such bombing might better fall into a category of war of aggression; nonetheless, Steinhoff moves forward according to his self-serving definitions and lengthy endnotes.

Confusion continues in Chapter 2, “The moral justification of torture”. Here Steinhoff defines self-defense. His legal reasoning is difficult to challenge since it rests on German law. Unless one is well versed in German law (and language), Steinhoff makes sure that he gets the benefit of the doubt. So as to support his position on self-defense, the Daschner case is explained further. A criminal kidnaps a child and hides her in a remote location where she is likely to suffocate if not rescued in time. Police capture the kidnapper who refuses to divulge the whereabouts of the girl. Police threaten to torture the criminal and he eventually complies. Tragically, the child was already dead. To his credit, Steinhoff’s selection of the Daschner case for this analysis is a good one since it raises serious moral dilemmas. However, rather than trying to shed light on the ethics of police interrogation, he unleashes a fury of sarcasm against his detractors:

I will surely be forgiven if I point out that one might also think that anyone claiming that torture is at least as bad as death would need to say something about what death actually is. Unfortunately, however, Brecher, Wisnewski, Emerick, and many other absolute torture opponents provide no reference whatsoever to the literature on death. Maybe that explains their deficient grasp of the phenomenon. So allow me to enlighten them: Death is the irreversible loss of the properties of living matter – that is to say, death is the cessation of life. It is when the body shuts down its machineries of life, never to start up again. (p. 30, emphasis in original)