The Death Penalty

1. The Death Penalty Introduction to Moral Issues

2. The Ultimate Punishment • Ernest Van Den Haag: The Death Penalty is our harshest punishment: It ends the existence of those punished, instead of temporarily imprisoning them. • Maldistribution between the guilty and the innocent is , by definition, unjust. • But that injustice does not lie in the nature of the punishment. • Guilt is personal. The only relevant question is: Does the person to be executed deserve the punishment?

3. The Ultimate Punishment • Equality seems morally less important than justice • Justice requires that as many of the guilty as possible be punished, regardless of whether others have avoided punishment. • Some Inequality is indeed unavoidable, as a practical matter in any system. But ultra posse nemoobligatur (but no one is bound beyond ability)

4. The Ultimate Punishment • I would favor retention of the death penalty as retribution even if it were shown that the threat of execution could not deter prospective murderers not already deterred by the threat of imprisonment. • The severity and finality of the death penalty is appropriate to the seriousness and the finality of murder

5. The Ultimate Punishment • The actual monetary costs are trumped by the importance of doing justice • Punishment, regardless of motivation, is not intended to revenge, off set, or compensate for the victim’s suffering, or to be measured by it. Punishment is to vindicate the law and the social order undermined by the crime. • Do we legitimize unlawful killing? • No…although all punishments are meant to be unpleasant, it is seldom argued that they legitimize the unlawful imposition of unlawful imposition of identical unpleasantness. • Imprisonment is not thought to legitimize kidnapping, neither are fines thought to legitimize robbery?

6. The Ultimate Punishment • We threaten punishments in order to deter crime. We impose them only to make the threats credible but also as retribution (justice) for the crimes that were not deterred. • The death penalty cannot be unjust to the guilty criminal. • Two moral objections: • 1.The penalty may be regarded as always excessive as retribution and always morally degrading. • Van Den Haag: One must believe that no crime –no matter how heinous- could possibly justify capital punishment. Such a belief can neither be corroborated nor refuted, it is an article of faith • 2.The murder has a right to life. • Van Den Haag: I share Jeremey Bentham’s view that “natural rights” are nonsense upon stilts.

7. The Ultimate Punishment • By murdering, the murderer has so dehumanized himself that he cannot remain among the living. • The social recognition of his self-degradation is the punitive essence of execution.

8. Justice Civilization , and the Death Penalty • Against the Death Penalty: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVMho2cP1NE • Reiman: The Death Penalty is a just punishment for murder because the lextalionis, an eye for an eye, and so on, is just, although, as I shall suggest, it can only rightly be implied when its implied pre-conditions are satisfied. • The Golden Rule (Do onto others, as you would want to be treated) lextalionis share the a common moral inspiration, the equality of persons.

9. J.C.D.P continued • The Hegelian approach to lextalionisbegins with the victim’s equality with the criminal, and infers from it the victim’s right to do to the criminal what the criminal has done to them • The Kantian approach starts with the criminals rationality, and infers from it the criminal’s authorization of the victim’s right to do to the criminal what the criminal has done to the victim. • Taken together, they support the proposition that the equality and rationality of persons implies that an offender deserves and his victim has the right to impose the suffering on the offender equal to that which he imposed on the victim.

10. J.C.D.P. continued • There are some crimes we ought to not match, such as rape or torture. • Just as torture is terrible, execution should be avoided because of how horrible it is. • The abolition of the death penalty , though it is a just punishment for murder, is part of the civilizing mission of modern states.

11. J.C.D.P. continued • Van Den Haag has argued that it has not been proven that the death penalty deters more murderers than life imprisonment, but it also has not been proven that it is completely ineffective in deterring further murders. • However, the less feared penalty may still be enough to deter anyone who can be deterred, i.e. The horrors of life imprisonment are bad enough. • Most people who commit murders are not deterred by the death penalty…most criminals are aware of the consequences of their actions before they commit a crime. • The refusal to execute also teaches a lesson about the wrongfulness of murder. • Because we don’t have conclusive evidence of the death penalty’s deterrent effect versus that of life imprisonment, it should be eliminated According to Van Den Haag….either we should abolish the electric chair, or reinstitute the rack (reductio ad absurdum= Disproof of a proposition by showing that it leads to absurd or untenable conclusions.) • I believe that we should abolish the death penalty though it is a just punishment for murder.