Bakewell, Sarah. "Montaigne, Philosopher of Life, Part 5: Humanity, Cruelty and Fellow-Feeling." GUARDIAN June 7, 2010.

Philosophical detachment went against Montaigne's grain because of his natural tendency to empathise with others, and to sympathise with them – in the full, original sense of this word, meaning "to feel with". Watching a human or animal in pain, Montaigne felt some of that pain himself. This made it impossible for him to collaborate in the cruel judicial procedures of the day. As a magistrate and mayor of Bordeaux, he was expected to order tortures and public killings, but refused to do so. "I am so squeamish about hurting that for the service of reason itself I cannot do it. And when occasions have summoned me to sentencing criminals, I have tended to fall short of justice". In any case, he knew torture to be useless as an investigative procedure: people will say anything at all to stop the pain. As for burning witches, "it is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have a man roasted alive because of them". Montaigne lived in an era when standards of evidence were being relaxed for witchcraft trials, because – as his contemporary Jean Bodin influentially argued – witches were uniquely strong at resisting interrogation, yet their planned crimes were uniquely dangerous and must be prevented at all costs. Medieval torture techniques had been revived after years of disuse, on the all-too-reasonable-sounding argument that the public good required it. Always sceptical of reasonable-sounding arguments, Montaigne remained unconvinced. In any case, he was too connected to other beings to be able to countenance their suffering, regardless of justifications. "I cruelly hate cruelty", he wrote, emphasising the paradox. It was an aversion of feeling as much as of reason. Not suprisingly, he disliked hunting, although his position as noble host occasionally obliged him to start a deer hunt in his woods for guests: he mentions doing this once for Henri of Navarre, the future Henri IV. Similarly, he was expected to supply meat to his cooks for his sociable table, and did so – yet he could not watch a chicken having its neck wrung in the yard. In his book, Montaigne presents all this as an accident of his own temperament. At the same time, he derives a powerful ethical code from it: an ethics founded in the body and in human nature. It is personal in origin, and he does not lay it out as a system. Yet it does, I believe, have the force of a moral law for him. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/jun/07/montaigne-philosophy-essays.