'Self-awareness, living ethicality, and the primordial unjustifiability of torture'

Abstract

This study seeks to investigate whether torture is fundamentally wrong and, if so, whether its status is a question of morality or of that which is prior to morality. According to the thought of Jacques Derrida, the play of différance makes it syntactically impossible for any term to signify meaning outside of the interplay of mutually opposing signifiers. Since Deontological and Utilitarian moral principles unfold within this differential play, they are syntactically incapable of signifying a concrete and constant moral status for torture. Even though différance is the syntactic possibility of being, I argue that there is a second and distinct category of experience. Drawing on the writing of Emmanuel Levinas and Bernard Lonergan, I contend that this category is our subjectivity as self-awareness, which always-already unfolds anterior to, as the primordial possibility of, and as otherwise than both différance and being. As an irreducibility constitutive of each person, the alterity of such self-awareness constitutes an absolute and singular relation of otherness between persons; this proximity functions as an absolute obligation and, in fact, constitutes ethics itself. Each subject therefore becomes an individual living ethicality. On this basis, it is always-already incoherent to identify any subject with any idea that we might have of him/her, including the idea of a person as a means to our ends. Since torture intentionally violates the living ethicality of the victim, it follows that torture must be ethically unjustifiable by primordial necessity under any and all possible circumstances. The ethical unjustifiability of torture therefore precedes all moral structures, although I suggest that torture may become permissible under certain practical circumstances, if saving human lives is at stake.

Keywords: Torture; self-awareness; alterity; living ethicality; otherwise than being; différance; Emmanuel Levinas; Jacques Derrida; Bernard Lonergan.