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Christopher Finlay, Fighting hurt: rule and exception in torture and war. By Henry Shue, International Affairs, Volume 92, Issue 6, November 2016, Pages 1517–1518, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2346.12757
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International Relations theory*
Fighting hurt: rule and exception in torture and war. By Henry Shue. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2016. 528 pp. £50.00. ISBN 978 0 19876 762 6.
Henry Shue's Fighting hurt brings together 22 essays, all but one published since the beginning of the ‘war on terror’. Their common concern is with the ethics of war and the use of violence—particularly torture—by states and those acting on their behalf. One of Shue's central preoccupations, and a thread running through many of the pieces, is the vexed question of how moral, legal and political philosophers ought to think about cases in which important norms come under pressure to bend for the sake of morally important values. These putative ‘exceptions’ arise in scholarly debate from a variety of sources.
Sometimes it is the legal philosopher or ethicist who introduces them as a thought experiment. Shue is generally wary of the temptation to take the initiative in starting or accelerating debate in this way, by putting forward hypotheticals in which the bombs are known to be ticking; the captive is certainly a terrorist and knows where the bombs are, and the interrogator has no other choice but to use torture, etc. This sort of theory, he thinks, raises important questions about how philosophical accounts of practical ethics ought to orientate themselves vis-à-vis political practice and human behaviour in institutional contexts. But Shue maintains that ethics ought to take the complexities of practice as a starting-point rather than ‘applying’ an ethical theory that has been prepared in abstraction from them. One of the many great strengths of Shue's work is the way it engages, at multiple levels, not only with philosophical issues narrowly conceived, but also with the legal and political ramifications of putting into practice principles that have been shaped around hypothetical hard cases.
