Bob Brecher

This timely and passionate book is the first to address itself to Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz’s controversial arguments for the limited use of interrogational torture and its legalisation. Argues that the respectability Dershowitz's arguments confer on the view that torture is a legitimate weapon in the war on terror needs urgently to be countered Takes on the advocates of torture on their own utilitarian grounds Timely and passionately written, in an accessible, jargon-free style Forms part of the provocative and timely _Blackwell Public Philosophy_ series

I argue that the family remains integral to neoliberal capitalism. First, I identify two tensions in the neoliberals' advocacy of the traditional family: that the ?family values? advocated run directly counter to the homo economicus of the ?free market?; and the fact that the increasingly strident rhetoric of the family belies its decreasing popularity. The implications of these tensions for how we might think of the family, I then propose, suggest that earlier critiques are worth revisiting for what they have to say about the family?whether in biological or in social form?as a structure of ownership. Finally, I conclude with some embryonic thoughts about the ideological role of that state of affairs in shaping at once our understanding of ?politics? and our politics

For a few years in the 1980s, Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women appeared to have changed the intellectual landscape – as well as some people’s lives. Pornography, she argued, not only constitutes violence against women; it constitutes also the main conduit for such violence, of which rape is at once the prime example and the central image. In short, it is patriarchy’s most powerful weapon. Given that, feminists’ single most important task is to deal with pornography. By the early 1990s, however, the consensus had become that her project was a diversion, both politically and intellectually. Today, who would argue that pornography is a crucial political issue? I shall argue that Dworkin has in fact a great deal to teach us – perhaps even more today, as we are going through the neo-liberal revolution, than thirty years ago. Her argument is not a causal one, despite in places reading as if it were. The legal route she chose as the ground on which to fight may well be a dead end, but that does nothing to undermine the force of her analysis. Nor does the fact that she makes arguments that might not be recognized as professionally philosophical or social scientific undermine their substantive force. It may even be that pornography itself is not the sole key she thought it was to understanding and dealing with political realities; but even if that were so, the form of her analysis, far from rhetorical and/or fallacious, is exactly what is needed to counter the depredations of neo-liberal “common sense”. That she herself found it difficult to find a language beyond that of liberalism to express her argument is no reason either for ignoring or misinterpreting it.

The chapter argues that communitarianism is the ‘postmodern bourgeois liberalism’ that Rorty, probably the leading avowedly epistemological, rather than political, or merely political, communitarian, describes himself as espousing. Proceeding by way of a detailed discussion of Philip Selznick’s definitive ‘Social Justice: a Communitarian Perspective’-- in which he seeks ‘to reaffirm, and to clarify if I can, the communitarian commitment to social justice’ -- I show that rooted in the particular as communitarianism is, it cannot but reflect the values, beliefs and attitudes of the particular “community” in which it is variously found. Selznick's communitarianism, like any other, offers itself as a complement to, as well as a correction of, liberal principles: it could not do otherwise, since the institutional frameworks within which its values are to be realized are those of the modern nation-state and market econonmy. Communitarianism turns out to be the practice of postmodern liberalism

Even people who think torture is justified in certain circumstances regard it - to say the least - as undesirable, however necessary they think it is. So I approach the issue by analysing the extreme case where people such as Dershowitz, Posner and Walzer think torture is justified, the so-called ticking bomb scenario. And since the justification offered is always consequentialist - no one thinks that torture is in any way “good in itself” – I confine myself to consequentialist arguments. That is to say, I take the argument on its own terms, since any non-consequentialist objection to torture merely invites the response, ‘So much the worse for non-consequentialism’: if a moral theory insists that torture is wrong even if it would save thousands of lives that just shows how wrong the theory is . I focus only on the question of the moral justifiability of torture in the ‘ticking bomb’ case, and do not not ask whether, even if admittedly immoral, it should nonetheless be legalised (see Brecher, Torture and the Ticking Bomb, Wiley-Blackwell 2007)). My main argument is in two parts: (1) the “ticking bomb” scenario falls apart when analysed; and (2), even if it did not, the likely consequences of permitting torture would be worse than the bomb’s going off. Finally I briefly consider a genuine case. Further questions and readings are appended

Triage-like procedures for solving the problems of rationing cannot work. And anyway, why should health- and medical workers carry the can for the economic and political decisions of their managers and our politicians? To foist rationing decisions onto them is a political con-trick, a deliberate attempt to deflect managerial and political responsibility elsewhere. Those on the front line should simply toss a coin; expalin to patients’ friends and relatives that that’s what they’re doing and why; and go public that that's what they're doing

An argument often made against the genetic elimination of disability is that to prevent people with a particular genetic make-up being born is to disvalue, or even threaten, those people who actually have it. The thought is that the view that the world would be a better place without, say, Huntingdon’s Chorea, must imply that the world would be a better place without those people who currently have it. In opposition to this objection to the elimination of genetically based conditions, I argue (i) that there is no significant moral difference in this regard between the elimination of genetically based and other conditions; and thus (ii) that there is no such implication. As consideration of all sorts of non-genetic examples of a person’s condition shows, to disvalue that condition is not to disvalue the person whose condition it is. No negative attitude to polio sufferers is implied by the attempt to rid the world of polio, for example. Indeed, just the opposite conclusion can be drawn

This chapter considers the wider significance of torture, addressing the manner in which it represents a touchstone for any universalistic morality, and arguing that it offers a means of refuting any moral relativism, something that ties in closely with my long-term theoretical work in metaethics (eg Getting What You Want? A Critique of Liberal Morality (Routledge: London and New York, 1998; and ongoing work around the ultimate justification of morality). Since torture consists in the erasure of a person on the basis of their being an embodied rational agent, that is to say, of their being a person, it requires that the torturer at once recognise and negate the personhood of the person being tortured. The contradiction involved is immediate and integral: torture, one might say, is practical self-contradiction par excellence. For it is embodied rational agents who constitute the subject of any form, and thus of any theory, of morality -- and thus of global social and thus to torture a person is to both accept and deny our identity as embodied rational agents. This work also led to the opportunity for further collaboration with one of the editors, Heather Widdows, this time as part of a larger project on which I have been working for some time – both academically and as an activist -- namely to rescue work from the 1970s and 1980s for the Left. I have so far made two academic contributions: Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women – a Reassessment’, in eds H Marway and H Widdows, Women and Violence: the Agency of Victims and Perpetrators. Palgrave Macmillan: London, forthcoming 2013 and ‘The family and neo-liberalism: time to revive a critique’, Ethics and Social Welfare, forthcoming 2012

In responding to Thomas Magnell's notion of 'collapsing goods', I draw attention to how medical and health ethics practices are not innocent, but political; and to suggest something about their relation to the moral climate. More specifically, I show that to take them as innocent, or as politically neutral, is not only a misunderstanding, but one that is likely to impact on the moral climate as well as being already a reflection of it. Ethics, and the various practices and understandings of health and medical ethics in particular, may well turn out to be collapsing goods

In 2008, Samantha Newbery, then a PhD student, discovered a hitherto confidential document: ‘Confidential: UK Eyes Only. Annex A: Intelligence gained from interrogations in Northern Ireland’ (DEFE 13/958, The National Archives (TNA)). It details the British Army’s notorious interrogations of IRA suspects that led to the eventual banning of the ‘five techniques’ that violated the UK’s international treaty obligation prohibiting the use of torture and ‘inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’. Having decided that the document – Intelligence gained from should be put in the public domain, she invited me, along with the eminent lawyer, Philippe Sands and Brian Stuart, a former Secretary to the British Joint Intelligence Committee, to contribute commentaries. I concluded that even if the document was accurate in both what it stated and in what it left out, that use of the ‘five techniques’ (tantamount to torture) was unjustified, since the normalisation and institutionalisation of torture is far worse than failing to obtain the information thus gained. Whether or not this joint paper will make a difference to UK policy concerning the use of torture remains an open question; whether or not it should is not. This piece is an example of how my book on torture, deliberately written for a public readership, has made it possible for me to make interventions in practical policy, or at least to attempt to, whether in occasional writing for eg The Chartist and the web-based Open Democracy, or directly for activist groups, eg my ‘Ethical Opinion’ for Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, Report: Holding Health to Ransom: GSS Interrogation and Extortion of Palestinian Patients at Erez Crossing (2008)

The ‘Kantian ideal’ is often misunderstood as invoking individual autonomy rather than rational self-legislation. Le Morvan and Stock’s otherwise insightful discussion of ‘Medical learning curves and the Kantian ideal’, for example, draws the mistaken inference that that ideal is inconsistent with the realities of medical practice. But it is not. Rationally to be a patient entails accepting its necessary conditions, one of which is the ineliminable existence of medical learning curves. Their rational necessity, therefore, offers no grounds against a Kantian understanding of how morality might function in the practgice of medicine

I argue that neo-liberalism requires a managerialist view of our universities; and to the extent that managerialism cannot be ameliorated, to that extent neo-liberalism signals the end of universities as places of learning. Rather than calling for “friendlier” management practice, we need to organise opposition by articulating and rallying around some vision of what the ends should be of the university, and which managing such an institution should therefore serve. Such a vision, whatever exactly its details might consist in, would have to be in explicit opposition to the neo-liberal ideal of universities as providers of “flexible” workers for employers and compliant subjects for governments. A precondition of reclaiming our universities from the managerialists, whether they be committed neo-liberal cadres or reluctant bit-players, is to tell the truth; and to be able to tell the truth, one has first to identify it aright. Happily that attempt describes exactly what it is to be an academic

In order to illustrate how terms of reference themselves, such as those announced by ‘professional ethics’, delimit and distort moral consideration I start with an extended discussion of how Just War Theory operates to do this; and go on to discuss ‘the power of naming’ with reference to the British attack on Iraq. Having thus situated my approach to the politics of professional ethics in a broader political context I offer a critique of ‘professional’ ethics in terms of what is left out of the moral picture and how in particular political considerations are sidelined. Finally I argue that ‘codes’ of professional ethics are especially insidious

Has history assigned special obligations to Germans that can transcend generation borders? Do the grandchildren of Holocaust perpetrators or the grandchildren of inactive bystanders carry any obligations that are only related to their ancestry? These questions will be at the centre of this investigation. It will be argued that five different models of justification are available for or against transgenerational obligations, namely liberalism, the unique evil argument, the psychological view, a form of consequentialist pragmatism and the community-based approach. Only two of these models stand up to philosophical scrutiny. Applying the community-based model leads to the conclusion that young Germans do indeed have indirect, indeterminate, but strict obligations that transcend generation borders. However, it will be argued that only the obligation of compensation can be restricted to Germans. The remaining two Holocaust-related obligations of prevention and remembrance have to be seen as universal.

This timely and passionate book is the first to address itself to Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz’s controversial arguments for the limited use of interrogational torture and its legalisation. Argues that the respectability Dershowitz's arguments confer on the view that torture is a legitimate weapon in the war on terror needs urgently to be countered Takes on the advocates of torture on their own utilitarian grounds Timely and passionately written, in an accessible, jargon-free style Forms part of the provocative and timely _Blackwell Public Philosophy_ series

Can we have a real obligation to the dead, just as we do to the living, or is such a notion merely sentimental or metaphorical? Starting with the example of making a promise, I try to show that we can, since the dead, as well as the living, can have interests, not least because the notion of a person is, in part, a moral construction. ‘The dead’, then, are not merely dead, but particular dead persons, members of something like the sort of ‘transgenerational community’ proposed by Avner de–Shalit. More generally, I argue, we have an obligation to the dead that goes beyond the particularities of promise–making, on account of their role in having made us who we are. I then suggest, though only embryonically, that such obligations may appropriately be discharged by remembering the dead, who they were and what they did. Finally, I consider some possible objections.

What is immediately striking about the general problem of how to allocate resources equitably is that although the task cannot be done, it nevertheless requires to be done. Imperfection is the most we can hope for. But of course some instances of imperfection are considerably worse than others: and those evidenced in all too much of the thinking of medical specialists, whether in the current discussion concerning cancer care or, for instance, by those involved in the management of kidney transplants are frightening in their resolute refusal even to consider, let alone take adequately into account, the impact on the wider polity of their policies and practices.

Education has always occupied a contradictory position in society, expected to ensure compliance and continuity and yet to encourage critique and renewal. Since the early 1980s, however, successive UK governments have directly mobilised education, and higher education in particular, as an ideological tool in the task of embedding neo-liberalism as ‘common sense’. Modularisation has been in the vanguard, first in the universities, more latterly at secondary level. The effect has been disastrous: here as elsewhere, choice has become depressingly fetishised; knowledge, and with it learning, have been fragmented and commodified; academics, like others, have been de-professionalised; and students, like the rest of us, have been transformed into clients or customers. The details of the history and impact of all this are too close to readers’ experience to require elaboration here: its significance, however, has been too little considered. In particular, the question of how we allowed it to come about is one worth asking – if only so that we can learn from our complicity. Since, however, that judgement depends on the negative view of modularisation just outlined, I start by giving a summary argument for such an evaluation (section 1). I then offer some remarks about the specifically ideological character of modularisation (section 2) as an introduction to some initial reflections on our complicity in this aspect of the neo-liberals’ efforts to make universities safe in their attempt to ensure that the future belongs to them (section 3). Finally I offer a brief suggestion about what we might yet do to overcome the disaster (section 4)

A major obstacle in the way of any rationalistic understanding of morality is that the moral ‘ought' obliges action: and on the (neo-)Humean view, action is thought to require affect. If, however, one could show that “ordinary” practical reasons are by themselves action-guiding, then moral reasons – a particular sort of practical reasons – also have no need of desire to “move” us to act. So how does the practical ‘ought' work? To answer that, we need to ask what exactly it is to be ‘guided' by reason in theoretical matters. And then we find that, in fact, theoretical reason is to be understood on the basis of practical reason, and not vice- versa. The argument proceeds by way of the internalism/externalism debate; practical and theoretical contradiction; and a critique of Humean assumptions about motivation. If it is broadly right, then the ground may have been cleared for an understanding of moral obligation as rational obligation, which is the larger thesis I have in view. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.24(2) 2005: 109-120