[Avodah] defining torture

Zev Sero zev at sero.name
Tue May 15 17:54:58 PDT 2012


On 15/05/2012 8:49 PM, Micha Berger wrote:
> On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 08:35:49PM -0400, Zev Sero wrote:
>> On 15/05/2012 8:33 PM, Micha Berger wrote:
>>> There is an issur against causing pain to others.
>
>> Torture is *not* "causing pain".  Not by any definition.
>
> Not all pain is torture, but all torture involves physical or mental
> pain by every definition I've found.

However it involves much more than that.

> Since pain is assur, the fact that one component of torture is that
> it involves pain does put it under the issur.

But any discussion of whether there's an issur on torture only makes
sense in a situation where the issurim on hitting and causing pain don't
apply.  We must have already got a heter for those things, or the issue
of torture wouldn't even come up.  Therefore you can't use them to show
that torture is assur.


> We've gone back-and-forth on this now in dozens of emails, and I still
> fail to see how you avoid this conclusion. It seems obvious to me that
> there is no torture without pain against the will of the victim, and
> that means questions of issur veheter.

Here's an example: there's a discussion of whether one must make kiddush
on yom kippur, and whether one must say yaaleh veyavo in benching.  But
no such discussion makes sense without assuming that the circumstances
allow eating in the first place.

-- 
Zev Sero        "Natural resources are not finite in any meaningful
zev at sero.name    economic sense, mind-boggling though this assertion
                  may be. The stocks of them are not fixed but rather
		 are expanding through human ingenuity."
		                            - Julian Simon



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