Note: The ethical judgments on this page refer exclusively to the action — never to the person who carries it out. Every person possesses inalienable dignity, regardless of what they do or have done. Cf. note on ethical judgments.
Torture is the intentional infliction of severe physical or mental suffering in order to break, humiliate, or coerce a human being into a certain behavior. From the standpoint of personal ontology, torture constitutes one of the gravest forms of oblivion of the person: it treats the someone as a mere means and attacks the body-soul unity of the person at her most vulnerable point.
The torturer instrumentalizes the body of the victim in order to overpower her freedom and interiority. Since the human person is a bodily-spiritual unity, the attack on the body always strikes the person as a whole. The dignity of the person cannot be destroyed by torture — it is ontologically inalienable — but it is disregarded in the gravest conceivable way. The personalist norm excludes torture without exception: the person is never to be used merely as a means, not even for the attainment of ostensibly good ends.
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Kant, Immanuel (1785): Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Akademie edition vol. IV, p. 429 (the formula of the end in itself: never to use the person merely as a means). Transl. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
- Wojtyła, Karol (1969): Osoba i czyn. Kraków (English: The Acting Person, transl. Andrzej Potocki. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979). (The personalist norm as the foundation of the unconditional respect for the person)
See also: