Lucky to have attended a lecture by Gaita

Last week, on the Celebration feast of St. Thomas at the University of Leuven in Belgium, I attended quite an anticipated lecture of Raymond Gaita called "Torture, the lesser evil" - very, very dense and he elaborately commented towards recents authors that make an attempt at formulating an apology and agree to the rare necessity for torture.

One of Gaita's most genious elaborations, was in my view, his awkward analogy of torture and rape - in this case the common reasons (legally) implied againt rape and the fact that justice and psychologists approach this as a violence concerning a sexual act where there is abscence of consent on the side of one individual, which is basically a very wrong way to look at it. Because it's not about whether it is just a fact that your 'autonomy' has been attacked, but rather one's integrity. Gaita opposed the idea to deduct or reduce human dignity to 'the degree of personal autonomy'. Rape, he said in short, is about violating one's (sexual) integrity, maybe the very essence that defines who you are. The idea of having someone distort the uniqueness, rendering someone to a mere object of perversion, is personnally uphauling and affects various mental , such as personal identity and so on. And this is something that is inherent in torture as well: the degrading aspects may be explained as collateral, or instrumental to attain the goal of extracting information, the side-effect cannot be minimalised: it denies a person (his) human dignity, which is considered a universal characteristic and a human right.

Gaita held a certain pessimism towards the current promulgators of torture, since (however they retain an obviously ill-conceived belief that doing such a wrong may result in a greater benefit), in these tensefull times where the public largely tends to flatten out morality (not quite sure I interpretet this correctly), he fears that such a utilitarian wrongdoing may eventually prevail. He nicely quoted from Primo Levi, and he noted out that, even in the worst case of sustaining a living, one who honors basic values of human dignity will even move to help out the most dispisable or pestilent person.

Because his lecture took quite longer than the time foreseen, I was late for theater rehearsal, yet wished I could've stayed longer to ask him to what extent he assessed Albert Schweizer's concept of fundamental 'reverence for life' and in what way this differed from his thinking.

I found him to be a very intriguing speaker, at times with a cristal-clear rhetoric, on some moments rather ethereal, but maybe that's because I'm not an expert in the topic matter - and because I had to follow the lecture from a room next to the promotion hall with a projection because it was overcrowded...

Hope to read up on his work.