For entirely obvious reasons, the first substantive article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) proclaims ‘the right to life, liberty and security of person’. Nothing, we think, can be more basic. Other articles of the UDHR spell out what liberty and security mean. Article 5 declares that ‘no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’. To most of us, this protection belongs side by side with the rights to life and liberty at the very core of international human rights. A similar clause protecting against torture appears in other human rights instruments around the world – in the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights as well as in the regional human rights conventions of Africa, Europe and the Americas.

The UDHR, like other human rights instruments, also proclaims that concern for human dignity lies at the foundation of human rights. That is a philosophical proposition, and it raises profound questions about the nature of human dignity and why human rights are rooted in it. Among the puzzles is how (if at all) we can deduce particular human rights from the concept of human dignity. Why, in particular, do torture and cruel punishment violate human dignity? The evils of physical torture scarcely need philosophical explanation, and they are not specific to human beings and our dignity: torturing a dog is also evil, and it is evil for much the same reason as torturing a human. The evil lies in the infliction of pain and suffering on a sentient being, not in the affront to dignity – or so the objection might go to a human-dignity-based analysis. One could even object that focusing on the victim's dignity rather than her pain and suffering is overly refined or downright evasive. I shall argue that focusing on dignity is not at all evasive. But the connection between the evils of torture and human dignity clearly requires explanation.