1 Mavis Biss Loyola University Maryland Empathy and Interrogation Abstract: Against the background of not-so-distant debate regarding “enhanced” interrogation techniques used by the United States during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which many understand to be torture, this essay explores the moral complexities of “ordinary” interrogation practices, those that are clearly not forms of torture. Based on analysis of the written reflections of two United States interrogators on the work they did during the Iraq war, I categorize the roles played by multiple modes of empathy within interrogation and argue that empathetic responsiveness within the context of military interrogation poses a significant threat to the moral integrity of interrogators. Key words: Empathy, Interrogation, Moral Integrity Bio: Brief Author Bio: Mavis Biss completed her PhD at the University of Wisconsin- Madison in 2011 and is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Maryland. She specializes in moral philosophy, with particular focus on Kantian ethics and conceptions of moral imagination. She has authored articles in History of Philosophy Quarterly, Hypatia, Southern Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy Compass and Kantian Review. Her current work focuses on the ideal of moral self-perfection in Kant’s ethics and the complexities of rational agency in the face of contested moral meaning. Written under the pseudonym Matthew Alexander, How to Break a Terrorist (2008) gives a first-hand account of the interrogations leading up to the successful assassination of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the former leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, in a rural safe-house on June 7 th , 2006. The subtitle, “The U.S. interrogators who used brains, not brutality, to take down the deadliest man in Iraq,” expresses the author’s confidence in what he calls the “new techniques,” methods of interrogation that forgo demoralization of detainees in favor of using rapport and cultural knowledge to obtain information. Joshua Casteel’s Letters from Abu Ghraib (2008), composed from e-mail messages sent during his deployment as an interrogator in Iraq, also testifies to the effectiveness of empathetic understanding and building trust as interrogation techniques. While the new techniques