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Last week, during the discussion of the Marcellus Williams execution we had a brief aside discussing my belief that the absolutist anti-death penalty stance is evil. That got me to thinking about the topic more and with the spate of executions last week, my social media feeds had a lot of discussion of them. Much of the commentary are sentiments that I find repellant, like this:
To be clear on who Littlejohn was:
…
To be clear on the arguments for clemency, it seems to be almost entirely based on uncertainty about which man pulled the trigger. This sort of hairsplitting, about who pulled the trigger is the kind of thing that I was referring to in the previous discussion as being about as close to just plain evil as any relatively normal, common policy position could be. Two men walked into a store with no intent other than robbing the owner at gunpoint. One of them shot him in the face. I could not possibly care less who pulled the trigger, they were both responsible and should both hang. I see no plausible moral case to the contrary. Perhaps one adheres to a generalized claim that the state should just never execute anyone, which I still strongly object to, but the idea that the case hinges on who pulled the trigger is either ridiculous or in completely bad faith. The latter possibility brings me to the second example of a post that caught my eye:
Readers will probably immediately spot what I think is in bad faith. Am I to believe that Ms. Gill’s objection to what she saw is that this method of execution is simply too brutal? That if only we could figure out some way to end Alan Miller’s life without suffering, she would agree that it’s appropriate to execute a man that “shot and killed two of his co-workers, 32-year-old Lee Holdbrooks and 28-year-old Christopher Yancy, at a heating and air-conditioning distributor, then drove five miles to a business where he had previously worked and shot and killed his former supervisor, 39-year-old Terry Jarvis”? No, of course not. Nonetheless, I want to treat this, for a moment, as a serious objection on the object-level to make a point in favor of execution that I don’t see made with much frequency.
How do you feel hearing that Miller may have spent five or ten minutes suffering before he died? Some may extend a degree of empathy to the monster on the table that I am not personally capable of, but I feel the same as many of the people replying on Twitter do - Miller deserves much worse than a few minutes gasping for breath. In fact, I’ve sometimes seen people argue that the death penalty is too good for the worst people, that life in prison is a worse penalty. This is presumably because they’re imagining a life in prison that’s filled with brutality, misery, and possibly rape and torture for decades. What this highlights to me is that the death penalty is not the worst punishment that a society can mete out - far from it, a swift execution is a cap on the amount of suffering that the justice system may inflict on someone. Truly, I think people like Dahmer deserve much worse than a simple firing squad, but putting some cap on it is a good way to prevent people from exacting revenge in a dehumanizing fashion.
I don’t really have any coherent argument to piece together here. I’m mostly expressing my frustration with empathy that is so misplaced that it seems like faulty wiring to me. Seriously, a man walks into a store with his buddy, shoots an innocent man in the face, is finally executed decades later, and people say, “rest in power” because it might have been his buddy that shot the innocent man in the face. How can I describe that other than evil? The only miscarriage of justice in the Littlejohn case is that the system allowed him to live for decades when no one even had any follow-up questions about whether he was one of the robbers. Other policies are more consequential, but there are none that I feel more conviction about my opponents being just plain wrong than the question of what to do with men like Littlejohn.
I'm not an absolutist. Or, let me phrase it this way: to the extent that I'm opposed to the death penalty, it's not due to an overriding commitment to pacifism. If a man were to witness another man murdering his wife, for example, I would not fault him for disposing of the murderer in whatever manner he pleased. When we speak of the "death penalty" though, we aren't speaking of an impassioned response to a personal injustice; we are instead of speaking of an impersonal state apparatus, one which operates over vast distances and vast quantities of time, and which publicizes (the knowledge of) its executions as a spectacle. Now things are different.
Nietzsche said most of what needs to be said in On the Genealogy of Morality, specifically in the second essay, which deals with the historical genesis of criminal punishment:
The right to inflict misery - or rather, the right to know that misery is being inflicted on your behalf, the right to know that somewhere out there, people are "getting what they deserve" - is its own reward, a reward that the state so generously apportions out to citizens as an incentive for good behavior. It is straightforwardly pleasurable; there are hardly any complexities or nuances to mention here. The idea that justice is painful to those that mete it out, the idea that it is only done begrudgingly and through gritted teeth, is of course nonsense - all advocates of "justice" like to imagine themselves as the executioner. Legal executions serve as a socially acceptable, state-sanctioned outlet for cruelty that cannot permissibly find expression elsewhere. The erotic pleasure of the business itself is the operative animating impulse behind the expansion of the state execution apparatus - likely ahead of any utilitarian concerns about reducing crime, and certainly ahead of any concern for a formal, symmetrical notion of justice.
Perhaps this state of affairs is the only alternative to a society of unrestrained vigilante justice (although, if that's true, it can only be true of a given culture at a given time - many countries have abolished the death penalty without descending into madness). Perhaps this impulse - the impulse to delight in the misery of others, the impulse to pawn off one's own injustices by proxy onto the condemned - must necessarily engage in subterfuge, must necessarily take on the false appearance of "justice" while it performs its vitally important social function. But, that needn't prevent us from performing an honest analysis of its origins.
Your post adduces evidence for the view I have outlined:
If it were about justice, why would it not matter who pulled the trigger? A life for a life - that's at least a plausible principle of justice. But "a life for an intent to take a life", or "a life for being an accomplice to someone else taking a life" - now things are no longer so clear. The fact that such nuances are of little interest to you indicates that the execution itself is the prize for you. Of course you can find other "tough on crime" advocates who don't even want to stop at murder, but are happy to advocate capital punishment for rape, assault, even perhaps petty theft in the case of repeat offenders. Is it really about justice at that point, or is it about casting an ever widening net so we have enough sacrifices to fuel the revenge machine?
Are you careful to align the painfulness of any proposed execution with the amount of pain that was originally inflicted by the murderer on his victims? Or do we just have open license to abuse convicted murderers however we want, for as long as we want? If it's the latter, is that really justice? Or is your motivation something else?
ISTM that the reason that primates take pleasure in punishing wrongdoing is that it is group-selectively-adaptive to evolve to take such pleasure. Cue all those game-theory results (I assume you've read them, otherwise will cite) in which participants willingly pay to punish defectors even at personal cost.
Same as eating a ripe piece of fruit or seeing a beautiful flower, the pleasure in punishing the wicked might be the result of evolution creating a brain that maximizes fitness.
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