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Undergraduate CSU-LAW-DEG-2023
Bachelor of Laws
A fully-registered foundation qualification in law
Take your first steps towards a future in law. Get an introduction to the Australian legal system before specialising in subjects that interest you. Upon completion of further study, you may become a lawyer in Australia.
Available loans
Australian Higher Education Loan Program (HELP)
Study method
100% online
Total subjects
100% online
CSP Available
Credit available
Applications Close
- No dates available
Charles Sturt University is Australia's most experienced online uni, and has the country's highest graduate employment rate. From agriculture, arts, healthcare and IT, to business, law, social work and teaching—you'll get the latest skills in your field, and learn from academics who are connected to industry. Add in 24/7 IT support, scholarships and a vibrant student community, and you can take your next, or first, career step with confidence.
Learn more about CSU.
Explore CSU courses.
QS Ranking 2024
Times Higher Education Ranking 2024
Degree details
What you'll learn
At the completion of this degree students will be able to:
- Demonstrate cognitive skills to review critically, analyse, consolidate and synthesise knowledge in the practice of law
- Demonstrate a broad level of knowledge of the principles and practices of law including policy, procedures, legislation and statutory compliance
- Demonstrate the academic skills, information literacy, and law research skills necessary to interpret and evaluate statutory and common law, together with relevant precedents and policy documents, and to apply this knowledge to legal situations in particular contexts
- Demonstrate the capacity to exercise their own initiative and judgement by analysing complex legal problems, develop solutions, and communicate these solutions to a variety of audiences
- Demonstrate the ability to communicate a clear, coherent and independent exposition of knowledge and skills appropriate for legal and non‐legal audiences, in both oral and written form
- Demonstrate an in‐depth understanding of Indigenous law and customs, including native titles, cultural heritage and collaborative solutions
- Demonstrate the ability to interpret and apply International Law in specific contexts
- Demonstrate professional skills in traditional aspects of law, including advocacy and alternative dispute resolution, appropriate for regional, rural and remote Australia (RRR)
- Demonstrate the ability to continue to learn in their professional development, and to thrive in environments of complexity, ambiguity and change
- Demonstrate a critical understanding of social justice issues particularly relevant to regional, rural and remote Australia, including domestic violence, legal access, financial constraints, and the tyranny of distance
- Demonstrate professional legal, ethical and personal conduct in the practice of law, including an awareness of ethical obligation and competency
- Demonstrate a broad understanding of the nature of different worldviews and culture, including respect for Indigenous cultures and histories
- Demonstrate the application of knowledge and skills through personal autonomy, well‐developed judgement and responsibility, in contexts that require competency and learning
- Demonstrate the application of knowledge and skills with responsibility and accountability for their own learning and professional practice and in collaboration with others.
Career opportunities
Graduates with legal qualifications are sought in almost every field and every industry.
- Work for government and non-government organisations
Pursue a career in government agencies, legal aid or community legal centres, mediation and dispute resolution, or social justice advocacy. Roles are also found in domestic or international non-government organisations specialising in human rights, environmental law, or native title and Indigenous affairs.
- Move into private enterprise
Pursue a legal career in commercial law firms or small, medium or large businesses.
- Explore opportunities with further study
With further study, you could work in private practice as a solicitor or barrister, or pursue a career in academia or research.
Professional recognition
The Bachelor of Laws degree has been developed to meet the Legal Profession Admissions Board of NSW accreditation requirements. The course aims, objectives and core curriculum are based on the Priestley 11 Standards provided by the Legal Profession Admission Rules 2015 (NSW).
Entry requirements
Higher education
Successful completion of 1 year (full time equivalence) of a Bachelor degree or AQF equivalent.
Successful completion of LAW112* and either LAW113* or LAW116* as part of a CSU Bachelor degree or as Single Subject Study.
*please note above subjects are available directly through CSU and cannot be enrolled through OUA.
Secondary education
A completed High School Certificate (or equivalent) with an ATAR of at least 80 (including adjustment factors).
Work and Life
Successfully completed the Special Tertiary Admission Test (STAT) with a minimum score of 172 following a completed Higher School Certificate and demonstrated paid employment in the legal service field of no less than 2 years (or fulltime equivalency).
Demonstrated academic/professional achievement for example completion of a Diploma of Conveyancing or Associate Degree in Policing Practice; and paid employment in the legal service field of no less than five years (or full time equivalence), for example, a paralegal, Court Officer, Police Officer or Licensed Conveyancer.
English Proficiency Requirements
Minimum CSU English Language Proficiency Requirements apply.
Credit for previous study or work
Law subjects belonging to the Priestley 11 category completed in a course not accredited by the Legal Professions Admissions Board of NSW, or equivalent interstate registration boards, cannot be credited towards Charles Sturt Bachelor of Laws.
The three-year Bachelor of Laws from Charles Sturt University is an internationally unique undergraduate law degree. As well as teaching the traditional law curriculum, including a wide range of electives such as technology law, family law and succession law, the course incorporates Indigenous Australian content, embeds cultural competence and includes specialised regional law topics.
Intensive teaching
The degree is available entirely online and there are no on campus requirements. In addition to optional online weekly meetings, most of the core law subjects (other than LAW314) include an optional two-day online intensive. The subject LAW314 includes a compulsory two-day online intensive school.
Degree structure details
Recommended Study Pattern
Core Subjects
- JST123 Indigenous Australians and Justice: An Introduction
- LAW112 Introduction to the Australian Legal System
- LAW113 Criminal Law
- LAW114 Law of Torts
- LAW116 Writing and Communication for Legal Professionals
- LAW212 Evidence Law
- LAW213 Criminal Procedure
- LAW214 Contract Law
- LAW216 Property Law
- LAW217 Civil Procedure
- LAW218 Equity and Trusts
- LAW219 Company Law
- LAW308 Constitutional Law
- LAW309 Professional Legal Conduct
- LAW311 Administrative and Government Law
- LAW313 International Public and Private Law
- LAW314 Community Law and Culture: Regional, Rural, Remote and Indigenous Contemporary Issues (16)
- LAW321 Natural Resources Law
Restricted Electives
- Choose five subjects (40 points) from the following list of Restricted Electives: JST220 Gender and Crime
- JST318 Human Rights and Social Justice
- JST339 Sentencing Law and Practice
- LAW202 Family Law
- LAW222 Technology Law
- LAW223 Succession Law
- LAW240 Industrial Law
- LAW300 Environmental Law
- LAW301 Taxation Law (Principles)
- LAW302 Taxation Law (Issues)
- LAW318 Jurisprudence
- LAW370 Law of Employment
- LAW316 Dispute Resolution: Methods and Results
- LAW317 Mediation: Processes and Uses
Key Subjects
- LAW112 Introduction to the Australian Legal System
- LAW113 Criminal Law
- LAW114 Law of Torts
- LAW116 Writing and Communication for Legal Professionals
- LAW212 Evidence Law
- LAW213 Criminal Procedure
- LAW214 Contract Law
- LAW216 Property Law
- LAW217 Civil Procedure
- LAW218 Equity and Trusts
- LAW219 Company Law
- LAW308 Constitutional Law
- LAW309 Professional Legal Conduct LAW311 Administrative and Government Law
Award Requirements
Students are required to complete 192 points which comprise of 18 core subjects (152 points) and five restricted electives (40 points).


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I heard this excellent expression today in the same radio ad as the word "quandary".
"Fantastic!" I thought, "Two great words for the price of one!"
I eagerly waited to find out what brand the ad was promoting. It might have been something to do with cars (I think boots and bonnets may have been mentioned). But it never became clear.
What a waste of good wordage.

subset: commoncrawl


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Welcome to Warm Home Malta
If you want to enjoy your time in a very comfortable home and make unforgettable your staying in Malta, you are in the right spot. We are pleased to show you what kind of programs and services you can get from us, as your hosts of Warm Home Malta. Come and have a look how many self-catered accommodations and special programs we provide you.
Warm Home Malta Programs
And what kind of programs can you choose during your staying in Malta? Come and have a look how we want to make remarkable your travel. Our mission is to take care not only of your body, of your interest, but to nurse also your soul. Our programs are about your complete existence: your body, your mind and your soul.
Why we like - and you will also like Malta
Malta is like a little magic box. The smallest country in the EU, however: a week is rare to discover. If you look around carefully you see countless faces of nature. Rocks, cliffs, sandy beaches, cities with a style of previous centuries and modern trading and cultural areas.
The island is full of life: lots of restaurants, cafes, bars and barbecue spots on the beach. Its Mediterranean ambiance offers a bustling life, while you can go to the streets of the tortuous points.
The crystal clear sea, the rocky coastline, the sandy beaches and the small caves are real attractions. Besides Malta is a huge museum where the air is passed through history and legends. Its 7,000-year history has offer a wealth of historical, cultural, architectural, and sight-seeing programs.
Nevertheless, Malta is a bare, rocky island, where are no mountains or rivers, yet it shows its own beauty and special charm. Orange and lemon trees, flowering rhododendrons, olive trees and thousands of other plants lurk along the roads.
Dry, hot summer and mild, humid winter is beneficial not only for plants, but also for people's mood. Especially since the number of sunny days is over 300.
The Mediterranean atmosphere is captivating, and the people here are lazy and tedious. Though they are temperamental, as they gesticulate, talk loudly, and often cling to each other. They are very friendly and rarely argue really. Their second language is English as their secondarily mother tongue, which making easy the communication with them.
These are mainly also the reasons why we selected this country as our new home. So we really feel this island and our apartments Warm Home Malta.
Thank you to have chosen us as your partner for your recreation time. Wish you a wonderful vacation full of experiences as we want to make your holiday a truly memorable stay.
Contact us
Privacy Policy | General House Rules
© 2019 Warm Home Malta. All Rights Reserved


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Please Follow our measurement guide and size chart.
Measurement Guide ? ? ?Size Chart?
Fabric: Organza Satin
Details: Look Amazing For Your Big Day In This Chic Wedding Dress. It Is Made Of Organza Satin That Features Sweetheart Neckline And Natural Waistline In Mermaid Silhouette. Elegant Pleats Richly Decorated The Dress, Making It A Glamorous Look. The Tiered Of Ruffles On The Side Add A Touch Of Glamour To The Dress. It Will Be Your Love.
QUESTIONS & ANSWERSAsk a Question
Has anyone plus size bought this dress?
hello dear buyer,if your size chart is not fit you,you can send us youe correct size,we can free custom it for you. You can contact our customer service directly via:firstname.lastname@example.com
hi, i would like this dress for the first week of august . please tell me when is the best time to order.
Around July 1st to 5th will be ok :)
If i ordered thus dress today would i receive it by October 31, i need in a size 22
Hi, the time is sufficient for us, please don't worry, you can receive the dress before Oct 31.
Is this item really real? i if i order it will i actually get it because i am in love with it
1.Yes,it is our own design gown.


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Coaching Requirements
Coaching requirements for all divisions can be accessed on the Softball BC website.
List of Coaches Clinics available now can be found HERE.
National Coaches Certification Program – Code of Ethics
The NCCP Code of Ethics are a set of values organized into a series of core principles that contain standards of behaviour expected of all PMFSA members while they perform their duties. Click on the link to view the NCCP Code of Ethics.
Criminal Records Review Program
All PMFSA coaches are required by law to complete a BC Criminal Record Review.
The access code provided below is unique to the PMFSA organization. This code will be required by coaches when submitting an online request:
Online Link: https://justice.gov.bc.ca/eCRC/
Access Code: WA2PY8MURV
Please keep this information in a safe place for your reference. The results of the criminal record check will be sent to your organization's authorized contact person via e-mail.
All PMFSA Coaches should:
- Instill the highest ideals and character traits into their players.
- Be enthusiastic and show enjoyment of coaching
- Be self-confident, assertive, consistent, friendly, fair and competent.
- Have a sense of humor.
- Have thorough knowledge of the rules, techniques and tactics.
- Have a basic understanding of first aid.
- Be dressed appropriately.
- Be a role model.
- Maintain discipline.
- Be organized (for sessions and the year)
- Be able to justify, if necessary, why things are being done, or ask for suggestions when not sure.


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Co. Cork
Cork cinemas
Moore & Crabtree
St. Patrick's Street Cork
1932 – Former Savoy Cinema, St. Patrick's Street, Cork
Architect: Moore & Crabtree
The former Savoy Cinema had a jazzy Art Deco façade but the interior was atmospheric in style. A narrow street frontage on Patrick Street led into a long entrance hall which led to a cinema which had over 2,000 seats. It could also be used as a full theatre as it had a Proscenium arch with forestage & flying facilities. The fine Compton Cinema Organ is now in the University Concert Hall, Limerick. The Savoy was redeveloped as a shopping arcade in 1976.


text: ImmunoReagents is the direct US manufacturer of quality antibodies and reagents used in research and in vitro diagnostics. Our products include a wide range of secondary antibodies covering a broad spectrum of immunoglobulins from various species and cross absorbed to provide high specificity. Primary polyclonal antibodies to hormones, cancer markers, cardiac markers and serum proteins are also available. Our knowledgeable and experienced staff can provide custom absorptions and purifications to meet specific requirements, including bulk manufacturing. All products are manufactured within cGMP guidelines and ISO quality system standards.


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Far more importantly, we make special elements in accordance to supplied drawings/samples and warmly welcome OEM inquiries. we offer you one-cease solution for the obtain of mechanical electrical power transmission products in China. We have exported our products to Korea, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, Italy, Norway, the Usa, Canada, etc. 12V 24V 36V 48V DC Brushed Worm EPT EPT with Manufacturing unit Cost
PG36M555 Series
voltage: 3VDC 6VDC 9VDC 12VDC 24VDC
Speed selection: 3000-9500rpm
EPTT: three.3-13w
Typical purposes: EPT air-conditioning valve, Amusement equipment, Coin
Refund products, Grill, Oven, Peristaltic pumps, ATM bank
EPTT system, Robot, Medical gear, Place of work
EPT, EPTT EPTs, EPTT actuator.
Excess weight: 320~400g/PCS(approx)
EPTT details: CTN dimensions: 32X28XH26cm 40PCS/CTN G. W. 16Kgs
EPTT Introduction


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Thrust Bearings
Axial deep groove ball bearings comprise shaft locating washers, housing locating washers and ball and cage assemblies. The bearings are not self-retaining; the ball and cage assembly and bearing washers can therefore be fitted separately. In addition to the series with flat washers, series are also available with spherical housing locating washers for the compensation of static angular misalignment. These designs are normally used in conjunction with seating washers. Axial deep groove ball bearings are available in single and double direction designs. Both designs can support high axial forces but cannot be subjected to radial loads.


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titchy flat xmas decor
15 December 2011
26 comments
I agree, Christmas trees look soo much better lighting up the darkness.ReplyDelete
I had that exact make of scooter in the seventies, seeing it made me feel all nostalgic and brought back loads of happy memories!:)
What a gorgeous lil chubby tree in a basket so simple love it! Of all the decorations to see the acorn is my fav!ReplyDelete
All looks beautiful, especially the mantlepiece. Can't wait to put our bits up over the weekend.ReplyDelete
I love your paper garland! I don't think I could bring myself to chop up a book, though (maybe a really bad one...). Your little tree is adorable, also. Merry Christmassss!ReplyDelete
Plimsoll is not trying play soccer with ornaments?ReplyDelete
- Anonymous15.12.11
Thanks for showing the pictures of your carpet. It seems like we're all taught to aspire to have smooth floorboards and white walls - but I really love carpet!ReplyDelete
Looks really beautiful! And I remember thinking last year how stunning our Christmas crackers were, they still are!ReplyDelete
Oh God, I love this! Actually, I love Christmas season. I also decided on a smaller tree for this year and we're having a real one for the first time - couldn't love it more! :)ReplyDelete
Merry Christmas! **
That whale is simply sublime! I love to collect extravagant christmas ornaments and I think that whale is awsome! Love your whole style of decoration.ReplyDelete
Awww it all looks so lovely! I am off to get our tree today :)ReplyDelete
Love your blog Artemis, you have inspired me to make my own :)
Merry Christmas
Sarah x
"Everyday Plimsoul wonders why we have brought a tree into the house."ReplyDelete
HAH! :-) Laughed out loud at that, and kitters's perfect expression. Awesome.
Your paper decorations are so pretty, and I love the edible gold balls. Your whale is just simply marvelous.ReplyDelete
Your tree is lovely. So are the DIY decorations! And your puddy tat :)ReplyDelete
I love the decorations you did with book pages!ReplyDelete
yay! your place looks perfect - lovingly and artfully decorated. i keep making little dingle-doo things to put up, and decorate the tree with too... my tree is in a vintage ceramic pot, but i love the basket look of yours too!ReplyDelete
i am going to make a star now for my tree.
happy holidays to you! ^__^
The paper decorations are wonderful!ReplyDelete
Perfect. I covet your acorn decoration (not sure if that sounds a bit wrong?!!) :)ReplyDelete
This is my first time i visit here. I found so many entertaining stuff in your blog, especially its discussion.bass fishing tipsReplyDelete


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You are likely to avoid what you don't understand; however, this often leads to missed opportunities. There are many different situations, issues with properties, and reasons for selling. When the time comes to sell your home, the traditional market and all the trappings of a real estate agent aren't always a perfect fit. So, it's worth investigating all possible methods of home sales to find what suits you best.
Read on to discover four reasons to sell your Florida house directly.
One of the top reasons many homeowners consider selling their homes on their own is to save the real estate commissions for themselves. However, if you would like to sell without going through all the hassles and headaches of listing your own home, marketing, showing, and negotiating with buyers, then you should sell your Florida house directly. A direct buyer like those from Fair Offer Florida will outline what you would profit from the sale should you list with a real estate agent so you can compare it to the offer we make, which you will agree is fair. And at Fair Offer Florida, our direct buyers don't charge any commissions to help you sell your home, and no hidden fees await you at the closing either.
Perhaps you've already been forced to move out of Florida, carrying the financial burdens of holding two properties. Or maybe your circumstances have changed, and you can no longer afford the property. Whatever your reasons, if you are in a hurry to sell your home, a convenient solution is to sell your Florida house directly. Unlike real estate agents who cannot give you a closing date, by working with a direct buyer like those at Fair Offer Florida, you can have a guaranteed closing date in as little as seven days. Now, if that's moving a little too fast for you, then don't worry; Fair Offer Florida is glad to work with you and set a closing date that's convenient for your move.
For many homeowners, the thought of strangers walking through their property and touching their belongings is uncomfortable; for others, it downright concerns them to have their home exposed to so many people given recent health considerations. Making the property available at nearly any time for showings increases the odds of selling; let's face it, if you're having an off day and it's not a good time for you to leave your home, you could lose a sale by turning a buyer away. So if you'd rather not have to keep your house cleaned at all times and jump at the drop of a hat to vacate your home, you should sell your Florida house directly and skip the showings altogether. The direct buyers at Fair Offer Florida will arrange to have the house cleaned after your moving day; just take what you want and leave the rest to Fair Offer Florida.
The seller must jump through hoops for the buyer's mortgage financing approval and pay professional inspection and appraiser fees with traditional listings. The lender could deny the loan if the house doesn't appraise. If the inspector finds significant problems and the buyers don't' walk away, they are likely to counter with outrageous credit towards making the repairs themselves. When you sell your Florida house directly, you don't need to lose any more sleep worrying about the unknown of the inspection and appraisal contingencies. When you work with a direct buyer like those at Fair Offer Florida, we buy homes for cash, as-is.
Fair Offer Florida makes it easy! So, why not keep more of your money, save time, avoid showings, and sell your Florida house directly?! Contact Fair Offer Florida at (727) 316-2181 today!


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USS was another band that I kept hearing people talk about during Music Matters and Music Matters Live. Naturally, I'm curious as to what is it about them that made people talk about them.
After watching their performance at The Arena and the main stage at Fountain Square, I can see why people are talking about them. They're kinda weird on stage. I mean the antics they get up to on stage; the things they did on stage left a deeper impression in my mind than their music. Don't know if it is a good or bad thing.
Anyway, here's one of their music videos so you can decide for yourself if you like their music:
I think it's alright albeit not exactly a genre that I listen to.
Finally, the photos with the group and their autograph:


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John Galinato
- Co-founder
Cornell, BS Elec Engr and MEE, 1968
Hobbies: Building, sketching and strumming the guitar
Heroes: Ali, Don Quixote, Popeye
Favorite Quote: "You can't win if you don't bet."
Liu Huan
- Partner
MIT, BS, MS Computer Sc / EE, 2011
Hobbies: I love robots!
Home Town: Shanghai, China
Heroes: Yao Ming, Fox Mulder, Richard P. Feynman
Aleksya Aguirre
- Business Developer
MIT, BS Mech Engr 2015
USC, MS Product Engr 2017
Hobbies: Singing, drawing, and volleyball
Home Town: El Paso, Texas
Heroes: Link from The Legend of Zelda
Favorite Quote: "The power of imagination makes us INFINITE" Muir
Skills Wanted: Super good dancing skills
Personal Website | BIY Site
Mary Moore
- Business Developer
Harvard, PhD Planetary Science 2014
Rutgers, BS Meteorology 2008
Hobbies: Teaching, reading YA, playing in the snow
Home Town: Boston, MA
Heroes: Wilson 'Snowflake' Bentley
Brent Scione
- Workshop Leader / Developer
YouTube & Google!
Hobbies: Wrestling, 3D graphics, Web design, Business, Drawing
Home Town: Methuen, MA
Heroes: Akira Toriyama, Japanese artist
Favorite Quote: "Change is the only constant." - Heraclitus
Selene Hewes
- Workshop Leader / Developer
McGill, BS Civil Engr 2016
EPFL, MS, Civil Engr 2018
Hobbies: Photography, violin, building things, sailing
Home Town: Ireland
Skills Wanted: Speak many languages. Play many instruments.
Michael Lu
- Developer
MIT, BS, EE and CS 2023
Hobbies: Running, Walking (After Too Much Running)
Home Town: Long Island, NY
Heroes: Mom, Dad, and Patrick Star
Skills Wanted: Cooking (well)
Wen Yu
- Art Director
San Francisco Academy of Arts, MFA 2015
Boston University, Masters in Arts Administration 2017
Hobbies: See the world/universe, fine art, keep fit
Home Town: Suzhou, China
Heroes: Mom & Dad, Steven Hawking, Mattew Barney, art history professor
Lucian Covarrubias
- Workshop Leader / Developer
MIT, BS Computer Sc 2023
Hobbies: Playing guitar, doing ceramics or art, and building Arduino projects
Home Town: Los Angeles, CA
Heroes: Nicola Tesla
Skills Wanted: To be able to speed read
Mariana Barradas
- Graphic Designer
Veracruz, BA Arch, MS Education
Hobbies: Dancing, Performance, Reading
Home Town: Xalapa, MX
Heroes: Marianela Nu�ez, Ken Robinson
Favorite Quote: : "And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music" - Nietzche
Berman Bai
- Workshop Leader / Developer
Arizona, BS Computer Sc 2022
Hobbies: Soccer, Music, Computer Games
Home Town: Guangzhou, China
Heroes: Bayern Munich
Sixia Chen
- Workshop Leader
Cornell, MS Chem Engr, 2018
Hobbies: Music/movies
Home Town: Xiamen, China
Heroes: "Tomorrow is another day" "three-body problem"
Goal: I could do things following my heart mostly
Wish: The people I love in this world will always be healthy and happy
Steve Yao
- Technical Advisor
Northeastern, MS Digital Media, 2013
Hobbies: Soccer, Movies
Heroes: Steve Jobs
Favorite Quote: Technology alone is not enough-it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing. Apple
Sandra Abago
- Developer
BS Chem Engr, MIT 2015
MS Material Science, BU
Hobbies: Laughter and Stories
Home Town: Uganda
Goal: Eradicate poverty
Julian Hernandez
- Developer / Workshop Leader
MIT, BS Computer Sc 2021
Hobbies: Making games, playing games
Home Town: Florida
Heroes: Jim Henson, Mr. Rogers, Squirrel Girl
Goal: Be a game designer
Favorite Quote: "Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow." Wilde
Yilin Lu
- Developer / Workshop Leader
Cornell, BS Computer Sc 2021
Home Town: Shanghai, China
Heroes: Alan Turing
Goal: make beautiful websites
Least Favorite Thing to Do: wait for buses in the rain
Skills Wanted: master the art of hacking!
Jide Nwosu
- Developer / Workshop Leader
Cornell, BS Elec Engr + Info Sc 2019
Hobbies: Building, playing basketball, making music
Home Town: Nigeria
Heroes: Kobe Bryant, Barack Obama
Goal: Inspire kids to be builders, and in turn have them inspire me!
Favorite Quote: "It's a magical world Hobbes, ol' buddy... lets go exploring!" - Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes)
Skills Wanted: Speak lots of human and computer languages.
Duoer Jia (DJ)
- Developer / Workshop Leader
Cornell, BS CS & Theater 2021
Hobbies: Traveling, tasting all kinds of food, acting
Home Town: Inner Mongolia, China
Least Favorite Thing to Do: Walking bare foot
Skills Wanted: Flying / Eat as much as I want
Will Chou
- Platform Developer
Cornell, BS, MS, Computer Science, 2009
Hobbies: breakdancing, volleyball, and computer games
Heroes: My dad
Favorite Quote: "The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." - Bertrand Russell
Resume , Bboying Video
Andy Gauthier
- Project Manager
Cornell, BS, MS Mech Engr, 2013
Hobbies: Tennis, Ultimate Frisbee, Formula 1
Heroes: Pinky and the brain
Fav Distraction: What if?
Fav Quote: "Almost only counts in horseshoes, darts and hand grenades"
Adia Wallace
- Content Developer and Workshop Leader
Harvard GSE, MEd, 2015
Hobbies: Reading, Making 3D things, Online window shopping
Heroes: Mae Jemison, Michael Jordan in "Space Jam," Hayao Miyazaki
Fav Quote: "Want to change the world? There's nothing to it." - Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, "Pure Imagination"
Aditi Dugar
- Workshop Leader / Developer
Cornell, BS Mech Engr, 2011
Hobbies: Singing, piano, running
Heroes: Sara Bareilles, Steve Jobs
Favorite Quote: "A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words." - C.S. Lewis
Stephen Wong
- Workshop Leader / Developer
Cornell, BS Elec Engr, 2011
Hobbies: Building things (working on Parkour'ing)
Heroes: Dad, Steve Jobs, Oda Eiichiro
Yin Liu
- Visual Developer
SMFA / Tufts University, MFA Studio Art 2015
Hobbies: Board Games / Adventure (Exploring everything unkown)
Heroes: Nature (Sun, Moon, Stars, Jungle, Ocean, Wind, Snow...)
Skills wanted: Fly / Communicate with any species
Anna Polonyi
- Workshop Leader / Writer
Harvard, BA History & Literature, 2010
Hobbies: Photography, making things for other people
Heroes: The Little Prince, Baron Munchausen, Shel Silverstein
Least Favorite Course: Latin
Skills Wanted: Flying
Wenyu Zhang
- Platform Development
Purdue, BS Computer Science, 2012
Hobbies: Computers, Robots, Math, Flute and Guitar
Heroes: KITT and Alan Turing
Favorite Quote: "Let's do it the engineer's way!"
Resume | Website
Jamie Mckiernan
- Graphic Designer
Mass Art, BFA Animation & Illustration, 2009
Hobbies: Animation, gaming, watching movies from the 40's
Heroes: Bill Watterson, Fred Astaire, Pixar Animation
Favorite Quote: "A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men." ~ Willy Wonka
Jacob Bredthauer
- Platform Developer / Workshop Leader
MIT, BS Math & Computer Science, 2011
Hobbies: MIT a capella group
Heroes: My Parents; Tom Osborne
Favorite TV shows: Lost, 24, Heroes
Lindley Graham
- Workshop Leader
MIT, BS Aeronautical Engineering 2010
Hobbies: Reading, hanging out with friends
Heroes: My parents
Xiaofei Fu -
Content Development
CCMU, Beijing, BS Pharmaceutical Science, 2010
UMass, MS Chemistry, 2014
Hobbies: Cooking and traveling
Heroes: Taylor Swift
Follow Us:
Membership | Programs | Parents | Program Directors
About Us | Testimonials | Contact Us | Stock Room | Lessons | Projectware
Partners | Jobs | Safety | Privacy | Refund and Delivery Policy | Copyright


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Having lent our old Monopoly game many years ago and not got it back, it was time to purchase a new game. The idea being; lets introduce the children to the world of Monopoly. Its Christmas and board games are traditional in the downtime between Christmas and New Year.
At the very least it will help the children with their maths and may start to help them understand the value of money.
All very admirable you may think. Yes I guess it was.
That was until we started playing and rule memories / strange-ties started surfacing. It turns out that both Mrs H. and I remember different additional rules not present in the rule book of our 2009 edition. Namely:
- Each player should circumnavigate the board at least once before purchasing any sites - Mrs H.
- If the player lands directly on GO, they collect double salary: £400 - Me
- You need to throw a total of seven, eleven or a double to get out of Jail - Me
- Speed Monopoly (if desired) - shuffle and deal the site cards to evenly to each player - Me
Or is it the "dumbing down" of a classic?
Sure a quick Google would solve all of this, but where's the fun in that?
- Chris


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Netsville presents our top 5 Best of the Week picks for Internet Marketing stories and developments from across the web.
If you see a story or feature that you'd like to suggest for Best of the Week, please include it in the comment section below!
4 Critical Areas to Consider When Performing AdWords Audits
"Auditing a prospective client's Google AdWords account is a tried-and-true sales tactic when hoping to win business. By reviewing accounts, missed opportunities may be found, while issues with campaign structure, settings and optimizations can be addressed. Many…"
Read more at Search Engine Land.
Twitter's AI Play is Good for Marketers, and for AI
"Last week, Twitter announced that it is now using AI—specifically, deep learning technologies—to personalize content in users' twitter feeds, making the platform much more relevant for its users, and potentially marketers. 'Twitter's dive into AI is absolutely a positive…'"
Read more at DMN.
How Marketing Psychology Can Improve Your Bottom Line
"Small changes can make a huge difference. We often underestimate the value of the little things: a sentence, a button, a color. Those who've spent any time conducting A/B split tests know, though, that small changes can lead to surprising results. Marketing…"
Read more at Entrepreneur.
6 Best Practices For Monetizing Mobile Video
"Video viewing on mobile devices is exploding. Smartphones are becoming the prevalent channel to discover content and explore products before purchasing As a result, a growing percentage of ad budgets are being directed toward mobile video ads. According to the IAB, advertisers are spending more…"
Read more at MediaPost.
3 Social Media Marketing Tactics to Help Improve Your Conversion Rates
"Social media is in virtually everyone's hands at this point: With a phone or tablet, you're connected. In fact, there are 2.3 billion active users on social media presently and those numbers are on the rise. This is great news for any business owner who is social media…"
Read more at Entrepreneur.
Check back next week for more Netsville Internet Marketing picks from across the web!
Based in Rochester, New York, Netsville is an Internet Property Management company specializing in managing the Digital Marketing, Technical, and Business Solutions for our customers since 1994. For more information, please click here.


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So if you are still running an insecure HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) website, many of your visitors might already be greeted with a 'Not Secure' message on their Google Chrome browser warning them that they can't trust your website to be secure.
By displaying 'Not Secure,' Google Chrome means that your connection is not secure because there is no SSL Certificate to encrypt your connection between your computer and the website's server.
So, anything sent over a non-HTTPS connection is in plain text, like your password or payment card information, allowing attackers to snoop or tamper with your data.
Cracking the Code: Learn How Cyber Attackers Exploit Human Psychology
Ever wondered why social engineering is so effective? Dive deep into the psychology of cyber attackers in our upcoming webinar.Join Now
The non-https connection has been considered dangerous particularly for web pages that transfer sensitive information—like login pages and payment forms—as it could allow a man-in-the-middle attacker to intercept passwords, login session, cookies and credit card details as they travel across the network.
Timeline of Not Secure Warning on Google Chrome
Initial Stage — Starting with the release of Chrome 56 in January 2017, Google began its mission to make the web a more secure place by displaying 'Not Secure' warning in the address bar for those HTTP websites that collect passwords and credit card information on their customers.
Transitional Stage — Later in October 2017 with the release of Google Chrome 62, the web browser started labelling all those websites as 'Not Secure' which had any kind of text input fields to enter data over an insecure HTTP site as well as on all HTTP pages visited in Incognito mode, where users may have higher expectations of privacy.
Final Stage — Today, 24th July 2018, Google has released Chrome 68, giving the entire web a push towards secure and encrypted HTTPS connections by marking all websites that do not use the secure HTTPS encryption as 'Not Secure,' even if they don't handle sensitive data, communications, or information.
What Next? Move Your Site to HTTPS
According to Google's transparency report, 75 percent of websites visited in Google Chrome on Windows is using HTTPS, and 81 out of the top 100 sites on the Internet today use HTTPS by default.
6 Reasons Why You Should Enable HTTPS On Your Website
- HTTPS improves Google rankings and SEO
- HTTPS improves website security and privacy
- HTTPS increases credibility and improves customer confidence
- HTTPS improves website speed, as HTTP2 is faster than HTTP
- HTTPS makes surfing over public Wi-Fi safer
- HTTPS is now free!
If you do not yet have SSL implemented yet, your website with the Not Secure warning is going to scare your visitors.
Today, installing an SSL certificate and enabling HTTPS on a website is neither expensive nor a tough task. You can merely use automated services like CloudFlare or Let's Encrypt that allow anyone to obtain free SSL certificates for their web servers.
Google has also published a technical tutorial on how to migrate a website to HTTPS.
Besides this, with the release of Google Chrome 69 in September this year, the company is also planning to remove the "Secure" label on HTTPS web pages, giving users the idea that the web is a safe place by default.


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In Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror,[1] Gregory Fried and I argue that—unlike illegal surveillance, for example—torture is always wrong and cannot be condoned no matter how urgent the reason for resorting to it. Torture has been the subject of much reflective writing ever since our own territory was spectacularly shown on 9/11 to be vulnerable to terroristic attack by a well-organized and determined enemy. The interest was only heightened by the revelations that our government authorized and carried out torture in response. In this context, it is impossible to avoid mentioning the spur to such reflection provided by the popular television series, 24, with its now iconic protagonist, Jack Bauer. There is nothing unusual about condemning torture. What is less standard is refusing to allow even in theory any exceptions to the moral prohibition against torture: not for ticking bombs, not for child kidnappers, not for anything or anyone.
To be sure, many—perhaps most—commentators have ended up condemning torture in terms that leave little or no room for any justified use, though on reasoning that seems to leave some room for it after all. Henry Shue's 1978 essay[2] exemplifies the type. Having set out what is so morally awful about torture and also having distinguished it from killing in combat—distinguishing it in terms very like ours—Shue concludes by acknowledging that what he calls interrogational torture might in theory be justified, although terroristic torture could never be.[3] But he locks this theoretical door with a practical key, one which many invoke in a strategy of confession and avoidance: Interrogational torture almost always has a terroristic element to it. We cannot have the requisite certainty that this is a ticking bomb case in the sense that the bomb will go off unless defused in time, that we do not have other means to defuse it, that we have the right person and that he was culpably involved in planting the bomb, that the torture will reliably produce the needed information, and, most important of all, that the use of torture can be institutionally confined to just such a rare case—that it will not have institutional, social, and psychological metastatic effects. Jeremy Waldron expressed the last concern most powerfully in his article Torture and Positive Law: Jurisprudence for the White House.[4] He argues that torture cannot be allowed by law because then law becomes corrupted in its essence.[5] But in the end, even Waldron's account is about law, leaving open the possibility that if one were willing to sacrifice—or risk sacrificing—law, there may be occasions when an individual or an official may be justified in torturing, perhaps even be morally obliged to torture.
Others are more forthright. Alan Dershowitz famously and with admirable rigor concludes that because there will be instances in which torture is justified—and more importantly, will be used whether it is allowed or not—the law and society are best protected against the metastatic effect of allowing torture by regularizing it in a judicial warrant procedure: his torture warrant proposal.[6] It should be said that this is not so far off what actually happened in the George W. Bush Administration. The highest levels of government—perhaps the President himself—gave explicit permission to use certain techniques in some very limited cases. Surely this was a higher bar than a magistrate's warrant. And yet, we know that even then the metastasis took place, and quite virulently.[7] Richard Posner, on the other hand, acknowledging the evil of torture but also its necessity on rare occasions, concluded that it would be best to ban it outright but to make unacknowledged exceptions in rare cases, because any regularized procedure would lead to routinization and overuse.[8]
Implicated in this controversy is a line of argument that goes back at least to Machiavelli and has been restated and honed by Max Weber in his essay Politics as a Vocation,[9] discussed further by Michael Walzer in his remarkable Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,[10] and definitively surveyed by János Kis in his Politics as a Moral Problem.[11] Machiavelli, Weber, Walzer, and Kis all affirm that certain acts are morally wrong (none talk about torture; lying and killing innocent persons are the examples they use), but concede that political actors may be justified in committing them if done in the public interest.
The thesis of Because It Is Wrong and of this Essay is more radical: Torture is never morally permissible—not under any circumstances, and not by any person, private or official; not because allowing it sometimes might lead to other bad consequences, but because it is always wrong. Even if it led to nothing other than itself. Even if it led to very good consequences. Even if it averted disastrous consequences. In order to make the point as emphatically as possible, the book puts at the head of the introductory chapter Leon Golub's painting, Interrogation I, by way of ostensive definition: You must never do that; you must never order that it be done—no matter what. In that painting, a naked man hangs from the ceiling by his feet, his hands tied behind his back. On either side of him stands a jackbooted soldier, one of whom holds a truncheon, poised to strike the body before him. The faces of the two soldiers are business-like, indifferent. The victim's face is indistinct because his head is bent backward and his teeth clenched in pain.
It is this absolute position against torture that has met with objections even from sober, thoughtful, humane individuals. Surely, it has been objected, if an atomic bomb on a delayed fuse were planted somewhere in Chicago and a terrorist who knew where it was had been captured, it cannot be that the President would not (and should not) authorize that the man be tortured if necessary to find and defuse the bomb. Particularly disturbing is the fact that, in 1978 in Right and Wrong, I wrote:[W]e can imagine extreme cases where killing an innocent person may save a whole nation. In such cases it seems fanatical to maintain the absoluteness of the judgment, to do right even if the heavens will in fact fall. And so the catastrophic may cause the absoluteness of right and wrong to yield, but even then it would be a non sequitur to argue (as consequentialists are fond of doing) that this proves that judgments of right and wrong are always a matter of degree, depending on the relative goods to be attained and harms to be avoided. I believe, on the contrary, that the concept of the catastrophic is a distinct concept just because it identifies the extreme situations in which the usual categories of judgment (including the categories of right and wrong) no longer apply. At the other end of the spectrum, there is the concept of the trivial, the de minimis where the absolute categories do not yet apply. And the trivial also does not prove that right and wrong are really only a matter of degree. It is because of these complexities and because the term absolute is really only suggestive of a more complex structure, that I also refer to the norms of right and wrong not as absolute but as categorical.[12]
I was wrong in 1978.[13] I argue here and in Because It Is Wrong that torture is morally a clearer case than killing. Many think this is compounding the unreasonableness of our position. As Moshe Halbertal pointed out, when the torture is over, you are still alive. Who would not rather be tortured than killed?
Look again at Golub's painting. "God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him."[14] That is the image of God that hangs between the two jackbooted officers. Many find this line of argument disturbing, not because it substitutes evocation for argument but because it seems to make the argument depend on religious premises that many do not share, rather than on weaker—that is, more general—premises. The argument about the absolute prohibition of torture does not depend on such religious premises—premises that in any event I would be quite reluctant to affirm. Hence the title of this Essay. Is an absolute prohibition on torture plausible, apart from an appeal to a heaven in which everything comes out for the best after all? The appeal to heaven, it should be said, is a kind of supernatural utilitarianism after all, while the energy in the argument is to reject a universal, overriding consequentialism. More to the point is an appeal to the sacred, a value than which none is greater.
Now, ticking bombs and Jack Bauer notwithstanding, the absolute prohibition of torture is not so far-fetched as not to be worth reflecting on. After all, not only has such a prohibition been adopted in international treaties[15] and a federal statute[16] and proclaimed in the 1993 Papal Encyclical Veritatis Splendor[17]—which, given the Catholic Church's long association with torture, is a problematic authority—but, most compellingly, the prohibition was included in the 1863 Lieber Code, the first codification of the laws of war and promulgated on the orders and authority of Abraham Lincoln. In Article 15, the Code states quite realistically that "military necessity admits of all direct destruction of life or limb of armed enemies, and of other persons whose destruction is incidentally unavoidable in the armed contests of the war;" but in the next Article the Code states categorically that "military necessity does not admit of cruelty—that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge, nor of maiming or wounding except in fight, nor of torture to extort confessions."[18] And if this might be thought not to refer to torture for life-saving rather than judicial purposes, here is what Francis Lieber, author of the Code, said in his lectures on the law and usages of war at Columbia Law School:[C]ruelty consists of inflicting pain for the sake of pain . . . . We mean by "cruelty" in the law of war unnecessary infliction of pain, pain for its own sake to satisfy the lust of revenge or a fiendish hatred; we even call cruel in modern law of war infliction of pain though it were considered necessary. No doubt the whole world would condemn it as cruel, if pain were inflicted upon an enemy to extract an important secret—e.g., by application of torture. Nay, we go further in modern times. Although the salutary fear of retaliation is one of the most efficient regulations and curbs in modern Law of War, yet would we not approve of cruelty by way of retaliation against savages or those who have sunk back into this state. The late proclamation of General Halleck, declaring himself ready for retaliation concerning destruction of property, where necessary, but distinctly telling his officers and soldiers not to retaliate cruelly, is in the true spirit. Can we roast Indians, though they may have roasted one of our own?
Simple infliction of death is not considered cruelty.[19]
Nor is torture the only act that is absolutely wrong. I would include in such a list judicial killing of an innocent person (judicial murder),[20] abuse of children, sexual violence and degradation, and more complexly the enslavement of innocent persons. But let torture be the stand-in for all of these. I want first to set out the logical structure of such absolute prohibitions. This is best introduced by a plausible, but incorrect, account of all such evils. Might it not be said, on this account, that they share the characteristic that they are all very bad? That is, the harms they do are exceptionally weighty.
This account is wrong for several reasons. First, I would not want to say that there is no good that can outweigh evils, as if outweighing were the issue. Take slavery: If it were a matter of outweighing, might not some enormous accomplishment—say, the construction of a road system that will serve millions for decades to come—outweigh the enslavement under mild conditions for a limited time of a not-large number of people? And as for torture, might not the waterboarding[21] of a single individual to save a city present a balance of good and bad such that the former far outweighs the latter? But that is just the claim I deny. Nor can the outweighing be accomplished by giving a very large weight to the evil aspect of the equation.
All this seems a philosopher's game about how to reformulate a puzzle so that it may seem to be made to disappear. But of course it does not disappear. The perfectly understandable response of reasonable people is to dismiss what Gregory Fried calls hypertheticals as so unrealistic that they are the equivalent of asking about the laws of physics in some alternative universe. Another way of dealing with such hypertheticals[22] is the one I took in Right and Wrong: At the margins there are cases either so trivial or so extreme that our ordinary ethical reflexes and premises do not apply.[23] János Kis makes the point that deontological constraints (because that is what we are talking about) "admit of a threshold."[24]
To make an analogy to physics: Within the range of ordinary experience, Newtonian addition of velocities works very well; it is only when we pass certain thresholds that relativistic analyses must the invoked. And so also with quantum mechanical indeterminacy. But these analogies in fact should intensify, rather than assuage, our perplexities and unease. After all, relativistic and quantum mechanical physics cannot be and have not been relegated to the laboratory or the lecture hall: They are in daily use in practical applications, applications on which we have come to rely. Similarly, there is a burgeoning literature on the analytics of very low probability, high value (positive or negative) events—for instance, an asteroid impact that would have an effect similar to the great Cretaceous extinction.[25]
But less fantastically, the threshold thesis is vulnerable to probabilistic probing. How certain must the threshold-crossing catastrophic threat (ticking bomb) be to authorize an otherwise morally forbidden act? As the certainty goes down—and the standard confession-and-avoidance responses depend on the uncertainty either of the event or of the efficacy of torture as a response—do we then re-cross the disaster threshold so that ordinary moral prohibitions obtain?
The threshold analysis is also vulnerable along another axis: Just how many persons must be threatened by the terrorist's bomb? It has been suggested that saving even one innocent life might justify recourse to torture. The famous case is that of the German police officer who successfully threatened to torture a kidnapper in order to discover his young victim's whereabouts.[26] The officer was disciplined and the victim sadly was already dead. Did the officer really do the wrong thing? Would he have been wrong to carry out his threat? Would it have mattered if there had been not one but several victims? How many? Finally, there is another qualitative, not quantitative, axis: Even if it were justifiable to torture the terrorist himself, what if for some reason he were immune to torture—psychologically hardened to it or beyond reach? Would it then be justifiable to torture his young child, if that might work? And of course, this case too can then also be moved along the several quantitative axes.
So neither the threshold analysis nor the confession-and-avoidance response truly avoid the confrontation between the strong moral intuition against torture and the permissibility, even the duty, to order torture in order to avert a severe harm to many. It is the confrontation between what Weber called Verantwortungsethik (the ethics of responsibility) and Gesinningsethik (the ethics of conscience). Nor should we try to avoid the confrontation because it displays some deep truths about our humanity—what Kant called our status as rational beings, albeit embodied beings.
Our humanity is a conception. Like a Leibnizian monad, it has several separately articulable elements, but they only work and make sense as they make a coordinated whole. The elements are: the formal distinction between a constraint and an end, and how these two elements relate to each other; the related concepts of agency and responsibility—what Weber noted in the distinction between Verantwortungsethik and Gesinnungsethik; and the articulation with each other of what Ronald Dworkin has recently usefully designated as ethics—the kind of life we make for ourselves, our responsibility for making the best life we can for ourselves—and morals—how we relate to others, our responsibility to others.[27] Dworkin binds them together in the concept of dignity.[28] This is a concept that embraces a certain aesthetic as well as an ethic and morality. Kant's quite equivalent concept is respect, respect for humanity in one's own person and the persons of all others.[29]
Although one can break into this circle of concepts almost anywhere, I start with Weber's contrast between Verantwortungsethik and Gesinnungsethik, the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of conscience. This is the familiar contrast between consequentialist and deontological ethics, although Weber's account is both richer and less abstract. The responsible political leader weighs consequences and decides accordingly what will produce the best outcome for the people for whom he is responsible—what will assure safety and prosperity, what will avoid suffering and ruin. The person of conscience, described by Weber as a utopian prophet, is moved by ideals and pursues them no matter the cost to the people for whom he is responsible. This does not correspond exactly to the consequentialist/deontological distinction. Weber's utopian may in fact be as ruthless as Pol Pot in the pursuit of his idea. What distinguishes him from the responsible leader is his refusal to accommodate to reality, his ruthless willingness to see his project and his people end in ruin rather than compromise. But in that single-minded pursuit, the utopian may be ready to lie, cheat, steal, murder the innocent, or torture. It all depends, of course, on what his utopian vision might be, what his conscience demands of him. The contrast does not quite bring out what I and others in the dirty-hands line of discussion have in mind. The political leader who Walzer, Kis, Machiavelli (perhaps), and I have in mind is one who considers consequences but stops short at the use of certain means.
Weber's two categories contrast an unworldly, unreasonable, perhaps fanatic prophet–leader with the practical, pragmatic, and hard-headed politician. The former may be inspiring but is likely to bring down ruin on his head and the heads of all around him. The latter may end up doing some fairly unsavory things, but he and his people will prosper in the long run or live to fight another day. As Weber writes, "[H]e who seeks the salvation of the soul, of his own or of others, should not seek it along the avenue of politics."[30] Machiavelli's example is of Lorenzo de Medici, who preserved the independence of the people of Florence, but at the cost of his and their excommunication.[31]
This contrast puts one in mind of the criticism of Kant's moral philosophy, current from almost the moment that it was published: The demands and status of the categorical imperative are unreasonable, inhuman, and, worst of all, empty or circular. The criticism sees Kant as proclaiming that nothing is of intrinsic value except a good will; that is, the determination to have one's conduct governed by a will to comply with the categorical imperative, with maxims that one can will as universal laws—laws governing one's own and every rational being's will. But, so goes the criticism, if only compliance with universal laws is of intrinsic value, then what are the universal laws supposed to be about—except themselves? And in that case, people have no material motives, no goals to pursue, such that the categorical imperative can judge them. And it must be said that some of Kant's account lays him open to this criticism. But it is an ungenerous reading of the great man's works, and like all ungenerous readings it misses an opportunity to deepen understanding.[32]
The better way to read Kant is to acknowledge, as he does in many places, that human beings have material needs and aspirations, whose fulfillment is a proper end of human striving. Indeed, without that premise, the many passages that condemn the unnecessary or improper frustration of that striving—like a person's indolent or quietistic abandonment of his own such striving—is a violation of a duty to oneself and others. The correct way to understand Kant is to see the categorical imperative—in its three formulations—as imposing what in modern parlance are called constraints on the person's human striving. That conception would not only allow, but would celebrate, those strivings and their satisfaction, so long as that striving does not transgress the moral law and the striving is carried forward in ways that are consistent with the striving—whatever their goal might be—of other human beings.
I would add the observation that neither Kant nor his followers, whether they be Ronald Dworkin or Robert Nozick or John Rawls, claim that all striving is morally equivalent: Some striving is acceptable, some humanly degraded, and some sublime.[33] But whatever the judgment on humanity's material ends, the categorical imperative requires that those ends be pursued subject to the constraints of the moral law. This is the old distinction between the right and the good, and the misunderstood claim that the right is prior to the good. The good refers to the ends of our striving, the right to the constraints on that striving, and the latter has priority over the former only in the sense that the urgency of the good cannot override the constraints. But in a real sense, the good has priority over the right because without some ends for our striving, there would be nothing to constrain. Indeed the two are coordinated and together make up a single moral monad. Weber, in his somewhat rambling but deep discourse on politics as a vocation, may be taken to see this point, for in his peroration he proclaims:
I am under the impression that in nine out of ten cases I deal with windbags who do not fully realize what they take upon themselves but who intoxicate themselves with romantic sensations. From a human point of view this is not very interesting to me, nor does it move me profoundly. However, it is immensely moving when a mature man—no matter whether old or young in years—is aware of a responsibility for the consequences of his conduct and really feels such responsibility with heart and soul. He then acts by following an ethic of responsibility and somewhere he reaches the point where he says: "Here I stand; I can do no other." That is something genuinely human and moving. And every one of us who is not spiritually dead must realize the possibility of finding himself at some time in that position. In so far as this is true, an ethic of ultimate ends and an ethic of responsibility are not absolute contrasts but rather supplements) which only in unison constitute a genuine man—a man who can have the "calling for politics."[34]
But is this not just what Kant and the Kantians are saying? You must feel responsible for the consequences of your choices, but there are things you must refuse to do: "[The mature person] then acts by following an ethic of responsibility and somewhere he reaches the point where he says: 'Here I stand; I can do no other.'" Is that not just the Kantian pursuit of the good, but subject to constraints? I shall come to a discussion of what those constraints might be and why they have the moral hold on us they do: "'Here I stand; I can do no other.'" But here I continue to display the structure of this argument, its articulable and articulated parts.
A frequent objection to the constraints view goes this way: Some acts are so vile—for instance, torture and the killing of innocents—that they are categorically precluded. But if they are so vile, surely a virtuous political leader may, must, turn to these if he responsibly and reasonably concludes they are necessary to head off a regime in which such evils and worse will become the general rule applied to whole nations and continents. Our leaders in World War II must have believed that the reign of systematic, mechanized, pervasive, and unrestrained barbarism threatened by the Axis powers justified any such things in order that there not be vastly more of them and for decades to come. However compelling such reasoning may seem, it does not contradict—though it may undermine—the analysis I put forward. Such reasoning mistakes the terms of the analysis. A constraint is not an evil of the same sort as is calculated and weighed in casting the balance of good and evil in a course of action. The balance is cast within the frame of the constraints, and that frame is not part of the picture. Whether in the end you are convinced by this analysis, it is not vulnerable to this logical, this formal, objection. The categorical wrongs and the constraints are, to be sure, evils, but they are not weighed up with other evils to arrive at a balance of advantages. It misses the point of calling torture categorically wrong to argue that because torture is very, very evil therefore we should have as little as possible of it in the world. If that were the correct analysis, then it would be permissible—indeed required—on occasion to resort to torture in order to reduce the overall sum of torture in the world: for instance, to torture a single torturer into revealing where his henchmen in a torture ring are hiding.
This formal feature of the argument articulates with two other elements: human freedom and personal responsibility. If the categorical quality of the right applied as well to the good, then we should not cease—not for a moment, though perhaps only to rest so we could start up again with renewed energy—to act to minimize the instances of that evil in the whole world. And more, if the evil of torture or the killing of innocents is quantifiable and must be reduced by this calculation, then so must the corresponding good be weighed against it: the good of human delight, warm relationships, the glories of the arts and sciences, and the whole cast in one vast balance. Never mind how this calculation even theoretically, approximately, or locally, could be cast; think what this would do to our human freedom.[35] For if there were a moral obligation to minimize evil and to maximize the good everywhere and for everyone, then no one would be allowed moral space or time for his own projects. However weighty a person's project might be, it could not be that it was weighty enough to override the compound claims of all humanity. At best it would have just the weight of one project among many billions. Indeed, the entailment is more radical even than that—for if the greater well-being alone is the only overriding project of all, the very concept of an individual project disappears—for just as the greatest good of the greatest number must be my overriding project, so must it be the overriding project of everyone beside me and the notion of an individual project, or an individual good, disappears in an endless loop of utilitarian universal benevolence. Nor is it any good to say that every individual is liable only to devote X percent of his energy to the well-being of others, the remainder being reserved to himself and his own projects—like disposable income after payment of all one's taxes. Whatever that percentage might be, is it the same for all? Or is there perhaps progressive obligation, with the more fortunate bearing a larger obligation, as with a progressive income tax?
The objection might then be made that if our own projects have this transcendent weight, why should anyone stop at anything in pursuing them? From counting some things as so evil—wrong—that we must not do them no matter what, we seem to have come to a point where we might say that a person may do anything in pursuit of his individual project. And this is just the mirror image of the contention that a person may do nothing in pursuit of his individual project. If it is indeed the case that some things are so evil that we may not do them no matter what, how do we arrest the logical slide to an all-encompassing obligation to stop all such evils in the world: all torture, all killing of innocents, all suffering of children? It is only by marking a sharp distinction between what we do and what we allow to happen through the doing of others—or no one—that the value of particular personal projects can be rescued from being gobbled up by a kind of consequential absolutism. Attributing special significance to personal agency provides a coordinated solution to two problems we have been looking at: the categorical prohibition of torture or killing of innocents, and the consuming obligation of universal good. While there is no obligation to devote every personal resource and every waking moment to minimizing the amount of torture in the world, there is an absolute prohibition on becoming the agent of torture (a torturer) oneself. The former leaves room most of the time for personal values and projects. The latter (the absolute prohibition) may sometimes entail great, even final, costs to oneself and others. One's projects are in the realm of the good. The absolute prohibitions constitute the frame in which the good is pursued, the frame of the right.[36]
Finally, it should be clear that the good need not on this view be seen as a matter of mere subjective preference leaving no ground for judging the relative value, as Jeremy Bentham put it, of push-pin or poetry.[37] Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, offers a preliminary sketch of a theory of the good.[38] His version of push-pin is counting blades of grass in well-trimmed lawns,[39] and Dworkin's is collecting matchbook covers[40]—except, unlike Bentham, they view these as obvious refutations of Bentham's thesis. I shall not try to offer a comprehensive theory of the good, nor how it articulates with the right. Kant, Rawls, and Dworkin all make proposals and the subject is of surpassing interest, difficulty, and importance. Instead, I want to come back to the dilemma with which we started: Can it really be required that we not torture one person in order to save a city; and does the answer differ depending on whether we act on our own or as political leaders responsible for the welfare of society?
There is an appeal to the idea of the sacred and the violation of the image of God to account for and justify the absolute prohibition on torture. Account for it, it may, but how—in secular terms—does it justify the absolute prohibition? Is there a secular version of the sacred? For Kant, as I have said, it is the concept of respect—respect for humanity in one's own person or the person of another—and for Dworkin, it is dignity. The articulated unity of the right and the good are the argument behind these formulations. We are striving, valuing, judging, thinking beings and not just—as a simplified Benthamite utilitarianism would have it—loci of pleasure and pain. It may be thought old hat, but it is worth remembering Rawls's rejection of Benthamite utilitarianism as a principle of social justice in favor of his two principles of justice. I draw passages from § 6 of A Theory of Justice ("Some Related Contrasts [To Utilitarianism]"):[W]e distinguish as a matter of principle between the claims of liberty and right on the one hand and the desirability of increasing aggregate social welfare on the other . . . Each member of society is thought to have an inviolability founded on justice or, as some would say, on natural right, which even the welfare of everyone else cannot override. . . .
. . . [I]f we assume that the correct regulative principle for anything depends on the nature of that thing, and that the plurality of distinct persons with separate systems of ends is an essential feature of human societies, we should not expect the principles of social choice to be utilitarian . . . To do this is not to take seriously the plurality and distinctness of individuals . . . . All ethical doctrines worth our attention take their consequences into account in judging rightness. One which did not would simply be irrational, crazy . . . The principles of right . . . put limits on which satisfactions have value. . . . A just social system defines the scope within which individuals must develop their aims . . . The priority of justice is accounted for, in part, by holding that the interests requiring the violation of justice have no value.[41]
Although Rawls makes his argument in the cooler context of principles of justice, more specifically distributive justice, it extends naturally and inevitably to all aspects of the limits on how we may treat each other. If we must not accept the lower welfare of some as a price for the greater prosperity of the whole—if, for instance, the enslavement of a portion of the population cannot be justified by the greatly increased well-being, safety, or delight of the whole—then the same argument would forbid torturing a few—or even one—to procure that well-being and security. And don't say, "But we are not talking about torturing the innocent, only the terrorist we have captured, who . . . ," and so on. Remember the terrorist proof against pain but not against the suffering inflicted on his child, and watch your objection unravel.
This conception does not ignore or devalue the ends we pursue, or the pains and pleasures we experience—it is not, in Rawls's word, "crazy"—but it does put them in a frame; it does constrain them, and sometimes the constraints bear down hard. It does not ignore our ends as human beings, but by putting them in the frame of right, it gives them a value they could never have in a global, undifferentiated aggregation of satisfaction. Rawls relates that framework conception to the distinctness of persons. I would gloss that with the Kantian notion of persons as judging, choosing, valuing entities—what Kant calls free, rational beings. The frame and its content are correlated, and the standard locution of the priority of the right over the good misleads. The right, the constraints, without the good—that is, the projects, affections, pains, and pleasures, the pursuit of which is constrained—is empty; the ends, the pursuits, without the framing constraints is formless and incoherent. Each alone is valueless. And what are those constraints? They are described variously by Rawls, Kant, Dworkin, and many others, but the conception, the argument on which these accounts converge, makes the very capacity to choose ends, to choose one's good within the constraints of the right, as constituting a person's distinctive humanity. It is that capacity that makes one's projects valuable, makes the persons pursuing those projects valuable, and for that reason makes us all valuable in the same way and to the same degree. Finally, it is the congeries of frame and content that explains why our individual projects have value as our projects and not as infinitesimal contributions to some global soup of generalized value. All this is summed up in the Kantian conception of respect: respect for humanity whether in our own person or in the person of another.
To disrespect another is to disrespect oneself, to devalue one's own projects, or to treat oneself merely as a goldfish one feeds rather than a human person with human ends. Rawls and Dworkin write of relatively civilized forms of disrespect, the kinds we meet with in an active democratic society. Torture, killing of innocents, and frank enslavement should be easier, but they stymie us for another reason. Injustices of the sort Rawls and Dworkin talk about are generally structural and institutional and admit of considerable nuance—after all, Rawls takes us down three steps of generalization before we get to an individual act (original position, constitution, legislation).[42] My claim is that there are particular acts that are categorically wrong no matter what the constitutional or institutional setting: No legislature may authorize them; no higher level official may order them; no officer may inflict them. And no threat can justify them. That is not a kind of case my authorities put to themselves.
How do we explain—other than by what I have described as confession and avoidance—a result where the suffering visited on one (or 100,000) will avoid the suffering of many? Let us concede that we and many will survive, but we must go on to ask—what shall we survive as? This is a shorthand way of suggesting that, for instance, the physician who saves several young, vigorous patients by killing an older, infirm patient to allow the transplant of his organs is no longer a physician and decent man, but a murderer; and his patients survive, but survive as cannibals. The nation that survives by treachery and inhumanity in warfare survives and prospers, but survives no longer as a democracy constituted by principles of humanity and decency. Athens, on Thucydides's account of the famous Melian Dialogue in the Peloponnesian War,[43] prospered, but as a predator state, an historic paradigm of shame and lost honor. If survival were the ultimate criterion of choice, men and women would never risk, or indeed give, their lives in service of an ideal. Mortality as the frame for our choices means that all living (well or ill) is an expenditure of life and not its prolongation. All living is dying.
But evocative as that may be, it is not quite an argument. Casting the evocation in cooler terms, I come back to the frame analogy. If an action, a choice of pursuit of the good, has value only within a frame, and if an act of torture can be shown to be outside the frame—not just an evil to be endured but a wrong not to be committed—then the argument of the balance of advantage does not go through. So why is torture wrong? Compare torture to violence up to the point of killing in battle. In battle, the combatants seek nonlethal goals but are prepared to use force to the point of killing to attain them, and the opponent both defends against the attack and correspondingly seeks to attain his goal in battle. Both may entail killing, and in both to shrink from killing may be to abandon one's goal in the face of resistance by an adversary. Section 15 of the Lieber Code—just before the one quoted at the outset—states:
Military necessity admits of all direct destruction of life or limb of armed enemies, and of other persons whose destruction is incidentally unavoidable in the armed contests of the war; it allows of the capturing of every armed enemy, and every enemy of importance to the hostile government, or of peculiar danger to the captor; it allows of all destruction of property, and obstruction of the ways and channels of traffic, travel, or communication, and of all withholding of sustenance or means of life from the enemy; of the appropriation of whatever an enemy's country affords necessary for the subsistence and safety of the Army, and of such deception as does not involve the breaking of good faith either positively pledged, regarding agreements entered into during the war, or supposed by the modern law of war to exist. Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God.[44]
The Kantian point is that we cannot morally be required to give up our peaceful and moral goals because of the wrongful violence of an enemy, for to do so would make our moral right to pursue goals, to have a good we embrace, hostage to the unjust violence of an adversary. Pacifism may be a choice, a good we embrace, but it is not a moral requirement. The military concept that expresses this system of permissions and constraints goes by the archaic but still invoked concept of chivalry.[45] Torture, by contrast, aims not simply to stop an enemy—even by killing him—but seeks to defeat him by causing his physical nature to overwhelm his mind with pain and to overwhelm his will so that he becomes inhabited by pain. The morally recognizable person is suspended, and he is turned into a mere physical entity, an animal constituted by pain who retains human faculties—of speech and choice—only as they are mastered by pain. The frame of right and wrong is the frame of our humanity, our moral anthropology. Torture seeks to destroy that humanity in a quite precise way: A moral being is one capable of choice, of moral deliberation. It is the point of torture not to destroy the person—as in killing—but to destroy him as an entity capable of choice. Making an offer the victim cannot refuse is to mobilize the capacity of choice; torture intends to overwhelm it.[46] Thus, torture quite literally contravenes the injunction to respect humanity, whether in one's own person or the person of another. The ugliness of the torture pictured in Interrogation I is quite different from the ugliness of, say, Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic, which shows the distinguished surgeon operating before an amphitheater of students and observers—with one squeamish participant off to the side shielding his gaze. But what Eakins portrays is not moral ugliness; it is not the moral destruction of a human being.
Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic, 1875, oil on canvas, 243.8 cm x 198.1 cm,
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia,
Now back to heaven and the principal conundrum I present. Does not my reference to these depictions really make the point against me? Is not the public officer who will not use torture when it may save many not just displaying a moral squeamishness akin to that of the person at the left of the Eakins painting? And just as a surgeon who cannot stand the sight of blood is not fit to practice surgery, is not a statesman who will not—when necessary—order torture or the dropping of the atom bomb unfit to lead? Maybe such squeamishness will be rewarded in heaven and the innocents who suffer as a result will find solace there too, but one is entitled to insist that such hard results be explained here below. After all, it is a matter of survival. But surviving as a torturer, as a monster, is not to survive at all. But exactly what does that mean? Truman did drop the bomb; the allies did engage in terror bombing during World War II; and the Bush Administration did waterboard. And here we all still are. Is that not the analogy to Samuel Johnson's famous response upon hearing Bishop Berkeley's argument about the immateriality of material objects: "Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it—'I refute it thus.'"[47]
To argue that there are practical, factual sequelae to these moral transgressions—lost prestige or greater liability that torture will be used against our captured personnel—is to revert to a form of argument I have tried to eschew. But notice the "and here we all are" refutation is, strictly speaking, beside the point, or at any rate circular. It assumes the validity of the consequentialist thesis in offering a consequentialist response, or by demanding a consequentialist justification for the moral prohibition. Notice how strong the consequentialist thrust is: It causes us to seek desperately for consequences after all, somewhere, somehow for transgressions we know to be wrong, whether there are bad consequences or not. That is why I entitle this Essay Heaven, after that desperate urge. But heaven does not solve the dilemma; it spoils it.
I want to confront us at the end with the stark fact that the only certain consequence, the only necessary and morally sufficient consequence of a wrong act, is the condemnation of that act as wrong, and that is just the correlative of what Kant calls acting for the sake of the moral law alone. We may very well accomplish nothing more, nothing else than that we do right and avoid wrong in refraining from torturing a terrorist, in freeing a man unjustly accused whom it would be convenient to punish. Even to say that, in making those choices, we affirm our moral humanity almost misses the point—as if we made these decisions in order to affirm that humanity. It is better to say that in acting thus we are moral men and women. Max Weber's essay is so moving not just because of the depth of his realization of the difficulties and moral heroism that politics as a vocation requires, but because he saw that, at the end of the line, calculation runs out:[I]t is immensely moving when a mature man—no matter whether old or young in years—is aware of a responsibility for the consequences of his conduct and really feels such responsibility with heart and soul. He then acts by following an ethic of responsibility and somewhere he reaches the point where he says: "Here I stand; I can do no other." That is something genuinely human and moving.[48]
Torture is that point. Lincoln's Code, as John Witt has recently called General Orders No. 100, the code drafted by Lieber,[49] is a hard-headed and even violent code. It is a code for warriors, but like Weber's mature man—and Lincoln and Lieber were mature men—it reaches a point where it says, in effect: "Here we stand; we can do no other." Here again is Article 16:
Military necessity does not admit of cruelty—that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge, nor of maiming or wounding except in fight, nor of torture to extort confessions. It does not admit of the use of poison in any way, nor of the wanton devastation of a district. It admits of deception, but disclaims acts of perfidy; and, in general, military necessity does not include any act of hostility which makes the return to peace unnecessarily difficult.[50]
Finally, by way of coda, let us reflect on whether those who ordered and made way for torture should be prosecuted and punished. One view is straightforward. They committed crimes, crimes more serious than most we do prosecute and condemn. To draw back is to deny the very thing that the whole argument proclaimed. This is a Burkean argument about national character and how devastating it can be to meddle with shared ethical instincts cultivated over generations. Torture is the habit of tyranny, not of free republics, and it cannot simply be switched off and on. But another view has it that the precedent of an administration prosecuting the high officers of its predecessor regime—the sordid history of the independent counsel law—is itself contrary to the practice of democracies; we do not have a revolutionary regime punishing the criminals of a tyranny it overthrew and replaced, but an orderly democratic succession that repudiated the previous one; and the crimes—though crimes they may have been—were committed not in a war of aggression but in order to protect us against an enemy who did not hesitate to use torture and mass killing of innocents.[51]
The first view, requiring punishment, appears to be a consequentialist, causal argument, but the causation is what many years ago I called "moral causation": It follows into action the entailments of a moral argument.[52] Indeed, Kant is more on that side than the second. In Rechstlehre, he famously proclaims:[W]oe to him who creeps through the serpent-windings of utilitarianism to discover some advantage that may discharge him from the justice of punishment, or even from the due measure of it, according to the Pharisaic maxim: "It is better that one man should die than that the whole people should perish." For if justice and righteousness perish, human life would no longer have any value in the world.[53]
Certainly the last clause affirms that no consideration of advantage (what I have called the good) can justify a violation of right. This is Kant's answer to the ticking bomb hyperthetical—as it is mine. But this argument is embedded in a larger argument that urges that justice condemn even not punishing the guilty, rather than condemn only punishing, as the Pharisees might, the innocent. Kant is emphatic in finding justice in society's response to injustice, for example, in the form of the execution of the murderer:
His death, however, must be kept free from all maltreatment that would make the humanity suffering in his person loathsome or abominable. Even if a civil society resolved to dissolve itself with the consent of all its members—as might be supposed in the case of a people inhabiting an island resolving to separate and scatter themselves throughout the whole world—the last murderer lying in the prison ought to be executed before the resolution was carried out. This ought to be done in order that every one may realize the desert of his deeds, and that blood-guiltiness may not remain upon the people; for otherwise they might all be regarded as participators in the murder as a public violation of justice."[54]
The best I can make of this is: If you have a system of just punishment and condemnation as part of a system of justice in an organized society and that society assumes the right to use force against the unjust in order to maintain justice, then withholding of punishment so contradicts and undermines that system of justice—to which persons have willingly and rightly submitted—that it cannot absolve for any reason a wrongdoer from just punishment. Perhaps the victim, who may now be dead, may do that, but the society that undertook to protect him may not.
Any unease may be connected to a more general unease about Kant's theory of punishment. I am of course convinced that personal culpability is a necessary condition of punishment. I am less sure that it is a sufficient condition. Rather, culpability is the condition that justifies using force against the offender in certain ways: for deterrence or incapacitation. As to the death penalty, in the same section just quoted and in which Kant proclaims the retributive necessity of executing the last remaining convicted murderer in a disbanding society, Kant insists that "[h]is death . . . must be kept free from all maltreatment that would make the humanity suffering in his person loathsome or abominable."[55] Now, I believe there is no way that the state can put to death a prisoner wholly in its power that would not "make the humanity suffering in his person loathsome or abominable." And execution by lethal injection, a gruesome parody of medical treatment, is by no means the least offensive means of execution. But that is a topic for another day. Kant's Mikado-like[56] insistence that the punishment not only fit the crime, but mirror it, is a reversion to consequentialism, such that crime after all be answered by condign punishment—that here on earth there be consequences to right and wrong that mimic what Dante imagined would happen in heaven and hell. Here—I would say confidently only that society is morally obliged—we are morally obliged—to shame and condemn those who have tortured, those who have ordered torture, and those who have justified it. By treating as honored fellow citizens those who have dishonored themselves as human beings, we dishonor ourselves.
[1]. Charles Fried & Gregory Fried, Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror (2010).
[4]. Jeremy Waldron, Torture and Positive Law: Jurisprudence for the White House, 105 Colum. L. Rev. 1681 (2005). Waldron has recently carried his argument further to reach the same conclusion as I do in this Essay, and with very generous acknowledgment to Gregory Fried's and my Because It Is Wrong, note 1, supra. Waldron's essay can be found at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1906850 and is forthcoming in Volume XVIII of the Harvard Review of Philosophy.
[6]. Alan M. Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge 158–60 (2002).
[8]. Richard A. Posner, Torture, Terrorism, and Interrogation, in Torture: A Collection 291, 297–98 (Sanford Levinson ed., 2004).
[9]. Max Weber, Politik als Beruf (1918), in Gesammelte Politische Schriften 396–450 (1919), reprinted in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology 77–128 (H.H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills eds. & trans., Oxford Univ. Press 1946), available at http://media.pfeiffer.edu/lridener/ dss/Weber/polvoc.html.
[13]. Roy Sorensen, in a review of The Philosophy of Deception, offers this thought:
Did Kant ever lie? I know of only one report: "In his last years his conscience troubled him, because at one time, in order to decline a disagreeable invitation, he pretended to be already invited for the time designated." . . . [I was left] wondering whether ageing improves some aspects of intellectual performance. Just as prisoners "age out" of crimes, thinkers may "age out" of fallacies. Someone in his prime has the motive and metal agility to engage in back-pedaling and sophistry. At the age of seventy-three, Kant had neither the motive nor the energy to wriggle out of unpleasant commitments.
Roy Sorensen, Fooling Ourselves, Times Literary Supplement, Mar. 4, 2011, at 22.
[15]. E.g., United Nations Convention Against Torture; European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; Inter-American Convention to Prevent and Punish Torture.
[17]. Pope John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor ¶ 80 (June 8, 1993), available at http://www.vatican.va/ edocs/ENG0222/__P8.HTM.
[18]. Francis Lieber, Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field, U.S. War Dep't General Orders No. 100, § 1, art. 15 (1863), available at http:// www.civilwarhome.com/liebercode.htm.
[19]. Francis Lieber, Lecture at Columbia Law School: Law and the Usages of War (Dec. 17, 1961); Francis Lieber Papers, 1780–1873, Box 2, Notebooks III & IV, Special Collections, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, The Johns Hopkins University. I am grateful to John Witt for calling this material to my attention and providing me with it.
[20]. See G.E.M. Anscombe, Moral Philosophy, 33 Philosophy 1, 10 (1958) (using judicial murder as an example of something that may not be done, no matter the harm avoided).
[21]. On the debate over whether waterboarding constitutes torture, see Fried & Fried, supra note 1, at 65–66.
[22]. See Anscombe, supra note 20, at 13 ("Finally, the point of considering hypothetical situations, perhaps very improbable ones, seems to be to elicit from yourself or someone else a hypothetical decision to do something of a bad kind. I don't doubt this has the effect of predisposing people—who will never get into the situations for which they have made hypothetical choices—to consent to similar bad actions, or to praise and flatter those who do them . . . .").
[25]. See Richard A. Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response (2004); Cass R. Sunstein, Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (2006).
[26]. See Richard Bernstein, Kidnapping Has Germans Debating Police Torture, N.Y. Times, Apr. 10, 2003, at A3, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/10/world/kidnapping-has-germans-debating-police-torture.html.
[29]. See, e.g., Immanuel Kant, 4 Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten [Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals] 429 (1785).
[31]. Niccolo Machiavelli, History of Florence bk. III (1901), available at http://ebooks. adelaide.edu.au/m/machiavelli/niccolo/m149h.
[32]. I might say that this ungenerous, debunking spirit animates in an analogous way and with less excuse the work of many of John Rawls's critics, who claim that his original position is either empty or a trick in which material conclusions are put into a philosophical hat only to be triumphantly pulled out as if they had not been there all along.
[36]. See generally Dworkin, supra note 27, at 271–99; Fried, supra note 33; Fried, supra note 12; Anscombe, supra note 20, at 11–13.
[37]. Jeremy Bentham, The Rationale of Reward 206 (1830) ("Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry.").
[43]. Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War bk. 5, at 84–116 (Richard Crawley trans., 1874), available at http://classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/pelopwar.5.fifth.html.
[49]. John Fabian Witt, Lincoln's Code, Speech at the Harvard Law School Legal History Workshop (Feb. 21, 2011), available at http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/faculty-workshops/witt. legal.history.workshop.spring.2011.pdf.
[51]. This is the disagreement between Gregory Fried and myself in the last chapter of Because It Is Wrong. Fried & Fried, supra note 1, at 163–69.
[53]. Immanuel Kant, Rechtslehre [Science of Right], pt. 2 (W. Hastie trans., 1790), available at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kant/immanuel/k16sr/.
[56]. The Mikado in Gilbert and Sullivan's eponymous operetta proclaims, "My object all sublime / I shall achieve in time — / To let the punishment fit the crime — / The punishment fit the crime." William S. Gilbert & Arthur Sullivan, The Mikado or the Town of Titipu, in The Works of Sir William Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan 18 (2005).