{"id":2711,"date":"2005-03-14T16:38:42","date_gmt":"2005-03-14T21:38:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/03\/14\/2711.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:48:08","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:48:08","slug":"more-death-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2005\/03\/14\/more-death-business\/","title":{"rendered":"More death business"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There were some provocative comments to my recent post on the death business<\/a>, and I wanted to take my time and respond to them in some detail.\n

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.’\n

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<\/I> of capital punishment on a reality<\/I> 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.\n

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<\/a> 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.\n

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<\/I> by zero, which meant that that<\/I> whole side was zero, which means that this<\/I> 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.\n

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...\n

Thank you,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2711"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17335,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2711\/revisions\/17335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}