This timely and passionate book is the first to address itself to Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz’s controversial arguments for the limited use of interrogational torture and its legalisation.

• Argues that the respectability Dershowitz's arguments confer on the view that torture is a legitimate weapon in the war on terror needs urgently to be countered
• Takes on the advocates of torture on their own utilitarian grounds
• Timely and passionately written, in an accessible, jargon-free style
• Forms part of the provocative and timely Blackwell Public Philosophy series

Bob Brecher is Reader in Moral Philosophy at the University of Brighton, UK and Director of its Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics. He is the author of two previous books, Anselm's Argument: the Logic of Divine Existence and Getting What You Want?: a Critique of Liberal Morality (1998). He has published widely in ethics and social and political philosophy and was the founding editor of the journal Res Publica.