There were some provocative comments to my recent post on the death business, and I wanted to take my time and respond to them in some detail.
First, I suppose, I should look at the new arguments proposed (by people who don’t buy them) in favor of the death penalty. First, david suggests that the popular rhetoric that “life is a privilege you waive when you kill” is a separate positive argument. I’m not so sure it is a positive argument, as the even accepting the line doesn’t require me to actively take the life of the person who has waived the right. That is, it seems like a response to an Jere7my’s argument, which I’ll get to later. Unless, I suppose, you start the argument the opposite way, with the basic assumption that capital punishment is OK, requiring some substantial argument against it. It would be interesting for me to re-write the earlier note from that assumption; perhaps I’ll try. Not now, though. For now, I’ll note that david’s argument seems a combination of my fourth positive argument, that death is more just than prison, combined with the reactive argument that boils down to ‘it isn’t really killing a human.’
That ‘death is more just than prison’ argument is extended by Michael and picked up by Wayman, to the point that prison is really very bad indeed. I’ll acknowledge here, and it will come as small surprise to Gentle Readers, that I tend to fall into the trap of examining ideas of things, with scant attention to the things themselves. So, yes, it’s a bit irresponsible of me to allude to the comparison between the death penalty and life imprisonment without at least mentioning the conditions of that imprisonment. On the other hand, I think it’s also important to differentiate between policies and corruptions of those policies. Whatever the actuality of prison life is, to base a policy of capital punishment on a reality of prison life is to accept that the reality of prison life is, in fact, our real policy, which (I hope) it is not. To match the policy of capital punishment to the policy of prison life while ignoring the reality of those is also wrong, though. Let’s be clear about this: John Salvi was condemned to death, and that was obvious at the time. So, I try to seek a balance, as best I can, and with the help of my Gentle Readers.
Chaos brings up an entirely different angle on the matter, by pointing out that the government is of necessity in the killing business. This is brought out in a different fashion by Dan P in a post At the temple of Order over at PoI. My reaction is that I do want society to, as Dan P put it, “concentrate[e] the social responsibility for violence -- inflicting, suffering, witnessing, punishing, or even preventing it -- among the few who volunteer to bear it”, but under as many and as clear restrictions as society can manage. It makes a difference, to YHB, if the police can use deadly force (under their restrictions) but the courts cannot. Accepting, as I do, that the state has the right under some circumstances to kill a citizen does not imply that that right should be exercised. I am troubled by the frequency with which the police kill people, but I feel less implicated by it. And, I suppose, I see that problem as one that admits of a practical solution (better training, equipment, staffing, etc.) that doesn’t change the fundamental nature of the thing, where execution does not.
Finally, then, I get to Jere7my’s comment. I don’t have a specific response to it, but it does spark a response that I’ve been more or less chewing on for more than a year now. I may be wrong about this, but (from off-line conversations some time ago) I believe Jere7my’s reaction to the humanity of the guilty stems from a moral framework that encompasses pacifism. I don’t actually know whether Jere7my considers himself a pacifist, but I hope he, and all Gentle Readers, will see the connection. Anyway, the framework essentially says that one of the attributes of humanity is a sort of inherent immunity to moral murder, that is, that killing a human is never the morally best choice under any circumstance. I don’t share that framework, but I understand its rigor (or think I do), and I don’t mean to dismiss it, when I write about moral choices. I do find that I dismiss it, though. Upon a couple of day’s reflection, I’ll claim an analogy: back when I studied math, we would, on occasion, battle at length through a complicated and rigorous proof only to find that we had, as an early step, divided by a variable, which meant that all the subsequent steps worked for all x except zero, and in order to prove the thing for all x, we had to add a separate proof for when x is zero. Those Gentle Readers who have done this sort of thing will remember that usually there was a step where something was multiplied by zero, which meant that that whole side was zero, which means that this whole side was zero, and we’re done (alternately, if one variable is zero, then your figure is two-dimensional, and we proved this theorem for two dimensions last semester). Similarly, if killing someone is never allowed, then the death penalty is not allowed by definition. If war is never the answer, then the invasion of Iraq is not the answer by definition. That’s so obviously a valid position that I neglect to lay it out. It’s for those of us who think that killing is bad, but there are worse things, to lay out what things could be worse, and under what circumstances that awful choice can be made. As a position, it’s harder to defend, and of course as it’s my position I spend more time examining it. When (as I like to do) I try to survey everybody’s positions, though, I should really take more care.
Well, and is that enough on that topic for now? Because, you know, we start Leviticus this week, and I suspect we’ll be up to our ears in the death penalty before long...
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.
That ‘death is more just than prison’ argument is extended by Michael…
I do not argue that death is more just than prison. I argue simply that an abhorrence of the death penalty which does not extend to abhorrence of our entire prison system as it now exists is based on either ignorance or crocodile tears.
No, no, I meant that the argument that death is more just a punishment than prison, as I discuss in the first note, is affected by your point and by Wayman’s, both pointing out that in the comparison, I ignored the actual conditions of prison. It was clear that you oppose the death penalty, whether or no.
Thanks,
-V.
for the record i believe that killing people is never justifiable, it’s simply done.
no one kills intelligently. it’s all stupid, whether in war or personal anger. when the person chooses to win the argument by ending the life of the other, the murdered has proven their own inflexibility. i have yet to hear of a situation of killing in which the killer could not have put down their pride and walked away instead.
when i express this generally it gets a response of “well after this particular chain of killings, you wouldn’t kill to stop it?”
and the answer i give is always something like: if you are in a position to end a conflict, i would guess you were in it from the beginning. one does not atone for helping create a deadly situation by delivering the “final” blow. there is no such thing as a final blow. instead one resists the urge to dominate, and refuses to be led down guns-or-butter paths.
dang dang dang
“the MURDERER has proven their inflexibility” – too many tense changes on the way to the kicker
FWIW, joining in late here, my position has long been related to the waive-your-rights one: That your right to life derives from your respect for other people’s right to life, and if you violate someone else’s right, you no longer have a valid claim on your own (unless you can make such a claim, like self-defense or whatever). That doesn’t imply that the State should kill all murderers, but does imply that it’s not morally wrong to do so — and also not morally wrong for private citizens to do so, for that matter. I’m not sure I actually agree with this position, because I don’t like some of the practical consequences, but it fits my ethics anyway, and the sense that rights are about respecting other people’s rights.
Irilyth — do you lose your own right to life by _violating_ another’s right to life, or simply by not respecting it? For example, killing someone deliberately makes it clear that you don’t respect their right to life, but what about driving recklessly down someone’s block? This seems to show a lack of respect for their right to life, but if they happen to be inside at the time, you won’t actually kill them. Is that a violation? Suppose they do happen to be on the sidewalk, and you _do_ kill them (through reckless endangerment)? Is that a violation?
There doesn’t seem to be a way to calibrate the extent of the perpetrator’s loss of rights such that it corresponds to the extent of his or her lack of respect.
The State should exercise some moral responsibility and moral accountability, particularly because the State is supposed to be us. Saying that we should stoop to the level of those who we condemn is based on a false notion of exceptionalism, whether it is used as an argument in favor of the death penalty, torture, propaganda, disregard for civilian casualties, or disregard for civil liberties. If the moral right to life is forfeited by a person who murders, then the State forfeits its own moral rights for doing the same.
I think of it almost as a contractual thing: You agree not to kill other people, and in exchange, they agree not to kill you. Ditto steal their stuff, beat them up, etc. If you break that contract, they’re no longer obliged to keep their end either. That doesn’t mean they have to kill you, or even that they should kill you, but it means that you don’t have a leg to stand on if you try to object that they shouldn’t (or that you have to appeal to some other reason, anyway, like “The Lord doesn’t want you to kill anyone, even murderers” or whatever).
Again, I am not actually in favor of eye-for-an-eye justice in practice, but it has a certain philosophical simplicity to it. Play by the rules, and the rules protect you; break the rules, and you’re out of the game.
That’s the trouble with thinking of the social contract as bearing any similarity to legal contracts. We are all members of the “society” side of the social contract. We are all diminished morally when we take a life as a group. And a code of ethics which only recognizes as much obligation to others as they demonstrate towards us has no true grounding. “Do unto others” is a more powerful and completely different behavioral principle when it concludes “as you would have them do unto you” rather than “as they have done unto you”.
irilyth —
But who is the contract between? Are you saying that if I steal your stuff, you specifically are entitled to steal my stuff? How much stuff? Or, are you saying that if I steal your stuff, _anyone_ is entitled to steal my stuff? Again, how much stuff? If I steal a pack of gum, am I relinquishing all claim to the right of property? For how long?
yeah i’d rather not go in either a legal (or ugh an economic) direction. it’s just not a good idea to put the power to kill in the hands of a select few. it invites admiration and ultimately emulation. we have to write our rules for ourselves as we really are: monkeys with souls…
Jacob: Those are all practical questions — and I said that I didn’t think this was a very practical principle.
Yes, it’s true, you did. I’m just making trouble. 🙂
But I do generally believe that a valid theoretical framework will lead to useful practical application, and conversely that if a theory can’t really be applied in practice, it’s probably not a very good theory.
Or it’s a fine theory that depends on impossible assumptions (or presuppositions, in logic-speak), and I think that’s where my primary disagreement with irilyth arises on this issue. I am concerned that actual public policy in this arena is still being made on the basis of similar think tank argumentation that depends on impossible assumptions.