Thoughts on the Death Penalty
Anybody who knows me well knows that I am staunchly opposed to capital punishment. There are so many reasons that somebody should be opposed to the death penalty, whether it is because in practice it is racist, or because it is fails to deter crime, or because it is a fiscally irresponsible policy measure. While these arguments do a considerable amount of work on some people, I am not one of them. There are three arguments in particular which serve as the foundation for my repudiation of the death penalty.
Killing somebody is never justified. I personally am a pacifist. There are times that I can recount breaching my pacifism, and I don’t think I will ever fully forgive myself for doing so. The fact of the matter is that I couldn’t conjure a situation in which I could justify the use of force against another person, let alone the use of lethal force. Moreover, the act of killing somebody because they killed someone carries with it an irony and hypocrisy that is just patently unacceptable.
The individual who is being executed could be innocent. A film that very compellingly depicted the horror of this possibility to me when I was young was The Life of David Gale. As if it isn’t enough that the criminal justice system can rob an individual of so many years of their life with a wrongful conviction, it is perverse that we can rob an individual of their life altogether, especially if they are innocent. I am very much of the mind that one innocent being executed is worse than one thousand guilty murderers staying alive, no matter how egregious their murderous acts were.
Performing executions as they are performed in today’s world requires a considerable amount of taxpayer funding. This means that individuals like myself who are pacifists are forced to pay into a system that makes them murderers. There are many things that my tax dollars would be going to that I am dissatisfied with, but the premeditated slaughter of potentially innocent human beings is most certainly at the top of my list of dissatisfaction.
I have never heard an argument in favor of the death penalty that I would count as compelling in ways that matter to me personally. Utilitarian arguments do very little work on me. Arguments dealing with the sanctity of the rule of law do even less work on me, if that’s possible. And arguments that are based in the importance of retributive justice simply serve to illustrate the existence of the most primitive and unsophisticated convictions that ever plagued mankind.
I recently came across one argument, however, that I don’t have a visceral reaction to. To be clear, I am not a proponent of the death penalty under any circumstance, but I do now believe that there is at least one argument in its defense that is wed to my deontic moralism.
In my Ancient Ethics class on Friday, we were discussing Plato’s theory of rehabilitative punishment as outlined in his Gorgias. To be brief, Plato (via Socrates) suggests that enacting just punishment on an individual who has to “pay his dues,” so to speak, produces justice in the individual who is being punished. The purpose of punishment is, therefore, not to avenge or shame or destroy. Rather, the purpose of punishment is to order a soul that has been disordered by acting on unjust impulse.
I was speaking to one of my classmates about how I believed a rehabilitative theory of punishment related to capital offenses and the death penalty, and he recommended that I look into the works of Simone Weil. Seldom am I given a recommendation that I have not even heard of. I immediately went home and purchased electronic and hardcopy editions of some of her works. In The Need for Roots, I stumbled upon her meditations on the “human need for punishment”:
“By committing crime, a man places himself, of his own accord, outside the chain of eternal obligations which bind every human being to every other one. Punishment alone can weld him back again; fully so, if accompanied by consent on his part; otherwise only partially so. Just as the only way of showing respect for somebody suffering from hunger is to give him something to eat, so the only way of showing respect for somebody who has placed himself outside the law is to reinstate him inside the law by subjecting him to the punishment ordained by the law.
…
So that this need may be satisfied, it is above all necessary that everything connected with the penal law should wear a solemn and consecrated aspect; that the majesty of the law should make its presence felt by the court, the police, the accused, the guilty man—even when the case dealt with is of minor importance, provided it entails a possible loss of liberty. Punishment must be an honour.
…
Just as the musician awakens the sense of beauty in us by sounds, so the penal system should know how to awaken the sense of justice in the criminal by the infliction of pain, or even, if need be, of death” (pp. 19-20).
To be sure, this is not how punishment is viewed in American society. Punishment is about giving somebody his due so that we may delight in his demise. Punishment in America is vengeful and crass. But Weil, in lockstep with Plato, conceives of punishment that completely disregards its instrumentality. Rather, punishment is a need that enshrines the inherent worth and dignity of persons when met out justly.
What does this mean for the death penalty?
Well, there may be some cases of metaphysical disorder that cannot be corrected with punishment. And in those cases, it seems that the only way to relieve an individual of the suffering that comes with having a wicked soul beyond repair is by euthanizing them. Just as we come across the suffering doe in the woods and make the choice to take her life so that her irreparable suffering may cease, so may we come across the agonized serial murderer who can only be put out of his misery by being executed. The execution is carried out in the best interest of the person being subjected to it. They are not being indiscriminately used as a means to an end.
All of this is to say that I am still staunchly opposed to the death penalty, but I have come across one argument in its favor that is adequately humane, deeply principled, and thoughtful. Proponents of the death penalty in our current political climate may be wise to tear a page (respectfully) out of Weil’s book.