Richard Matthews challenges the increasing acceptability of state-sponsored torture interrogation, repudiating any possible justifications. He confronts its various supporters - ticking time bomb and tragic choice theorists, utilitarians, legal scholars - and draws from philosophy, medicine, psychiatry, survivor and torturer narratives, history, feminism, the experience of working intelligence officials, anthropology, and game theory to illustrate that no moral justification for torture can be supported.
The Absolute Violation is essential reading for philosophers, lawyers, judges, human rights activists, military, police and intelligence officers, medical professionals, and anyone who is interested in forcefully countering the recent trend towards moral justification of torture.