The Death Penalty as Sacrifice to the God of Progress

Let us have this one

I’ve never started an article with a trigger warning before, but I feel obligated to inform the reader that I’m about to tell a disturbing story. Ever since I saw the TV report that brought this crime to my attention about a decade ago, I’ve thought about what happened probably on at least a monthly basis. Whenever the death penalty comes up, my mind goes back to it, and sometimes when hearing about other random events too. It’s the story that has lodged itself in my mind as symbolizing why the state needs to kill people and the moral depravity of the other side of the debate.

On the morning of July 23, 2007, Stephen Joseph Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky broke into the home of the Petit family in Cheshire, Connecticut. They beat the father, Dr William Petit, with a baseball bat and restrained him in the basement, along with his wife Jennifer and their two daughters, aged 17 and 11.

Hayes took Mrs Petit to a bank to withdraw money, brought her back to the home, raped her and strangled her to death. Komisarjevsky raped Michaela, the 11-year-old, and sexually assaulted 17-year-old Hayley. They then tied the two girls to their beds and set the house on fire, killing them by smoke inhalation. The father managed to escape and went to a neighbor's house for help.

Hayes and Komisarjevsky were caught, and in 2010 sentenced to death. Five years later, however, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional, and they were given life in prison instead. A few months ago, Newsweek reported that one of the murderers had transitioned to womanhood while in prison. The former Stephen Joseph Hayes became Linda Mai Lee, for some reason apparently adopting an Asian identity too. “Linda” now blames the rapes and murders on her anger at being born in the wrong body, while claiming to be doing better today.

The vast majority of inmates in Oregon State Penitentiary are men, but Lee said she is able to wear makeup, eye shadow, foundation, eyeliner and even lipstick on occasion. She also cherishes her jewelry, including rings and necklaces, as well as bras, panties and what she called a "slightly feminized" uniform. That had eliminated her thoughts of suicide. She's now seeking breast augmentation and hair replacement therapy since male pattern baldness drastically enhances her gender dysphoria.

On most issues, we argue primarily on consequentialist grounds. Here we might ask, does the death penalty work as a deterrent? How much does implementing it cost compared to life in prison? And so on. Yet most of us care about morality too, and I find it extremely annoying how death penalty opponents are the ones always claiming the moral high ground. “The state should not kill people” I guess is a value, but there is simply no part of me that sees how it is relevant in a case like this.

In my moral universe, there is no possible redemption or forgiveness for Hayes and Komisarjevsky. Their continuing existence I consider an affront to my dignity and that of the rest of society. They cannot possibly be repentant, because if they were they would find a way to commit suicide, which is the only honorable thing a person could do after having committed a crime like this.

Conservatism can be understood as indulgence in some of the more primitive aspects of human nature. You get a bunch of knuckle-headed young boys together, they attack each other for being different, gay, or showing stereotypically female traits. All over the world, the populist right is composed of people who never got over this stage of psycho-social development. Humans are naturally tribal and dislike outsiders and people who think and act in ways contrary to accepted norms. A lot of conservative intellectual thought is about taking these instincts and trying to justify them.

I admit to having the natural instincts of a rightoid. When I was a kid I was into gangsta rap because I liked the idea of being a violent thug and would have been watching Andrew Tate videos if I had been born half a generation later. Earlier in life, I was a racist, a sexist, and a homophobe. Almost three years ago now, I told the world that I hated pronouns more than genocide.

But I was also smart and unusually honest. This meant I was destined to turn away from these ideas. It feels good to be a “nationalist” and want people to wallow in poverty for being born in the wrong place. But there’s no ethical system that can justify this. It’s fun to laugh at trannies. But while the LGBT movement has gone too far in recent years, to treat this as one of the most important issues facing the world reflects a deranged set of priorities. Some of the other rightoid instincts – conspiratorial thinking, anti-market bias – I never had. But seeing the parallels and relationships between those instincts and the ones I did – racism, sexism, and homophobia – polarized me against the whole bundle. I came to see totalitarian dysgenics and Nietzschean chuddery as the true manifestations of right-wing intuitions applied to politics, and I want no part of it.

That said, my original instincts never completely went away. I want society through its laws to reflect a moral condemnation of certain kinds of behavior, and to bring the hammer down on individuals who have violated norms I believe in upholding through dramatic and decisive gestures. The idea of going full utilitarian or Effective Altruist is deeply unappealing. I might be willing to accept at a scientific level that free will is a myth and we’re all just bags of chemicals, but applying those lessons to everyday life would make it ugly. We evolved to need concepts like virtue and engage in moral judgments. A politics that simply seeks to maximize the greatest good for the greatest number without any considerations of beauty or justice destroys what makes us human in the first place, and probably fails on utilitarian grounds too because of how much of our nature it demands we sacrifice.

So I, and most of the rest of the world, want morality to be embedded in law and culture. This is in part to create distance between ourselves and others. Yet I think rightoidism is about starting with these instincts and never moving beyond them. When a rightist engages in gay bashing, he’s telling the world that he’s masculine and conforms to traditional gender norms. When he blames immigrants for high housing prices instead of land-use regulations, he gets the policy wrong while forming a bond that he values with strangers. But immigrants are innocent, and trans women are beautiful. Who is left to target?

My answer is criminals. Every time society executes a murderer, it is in effect saying, yes, we are good modern people, and have accepted that the only moral system that makes sense is one based on utilitarianism and individual liberty. But we’re still human beings! We realize that fairness and justice still matter and once in a while we need to indulge our base instincts. We might even be able to get there through utilitarianism itself. Killing murderers makes us feel good and brings closure to families, and it can perhaps serve as a safety valve to prevent us from going full rightoid on other issues.

We sometimes hear news stories of families that don’t want the person who killed their relative to be executed, and I suspect these are reported on only because they’re “man bites dog” cases. Otherwise, it’s probably just a coping mechanism, since executing a criminal takes decades and often turns the condemned into a celebrity, meaning that locking them up and throwing away the key becomes the easiest way to move on. That’s not a failure of the death penalty itself, but how it is implemented.

If someone beat your mother up and put her in the hospital for a year, you would probably be very upset to learn that the perpetrator was only given a $100 fine. This wouldn’t change much if a careful social scientist was able to prove to you that one shouldn’t expect any negative utilitarian consequences from such a light sentence, since this particular perpetrator is unlikely to offend again and deterrence is overrated anyway.

This is because we have some idea of just deserts that we consider important. Some people are pure utilitarians, but I am not. I want to see good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people.

This is the straightforward case for the death penalty. Most of the arguments against the practice aren’t really about the death penalty per se. What if there is a mistaken conviction? Well, locking up an innocent person for life is also pretty bad, and it seems to me that if you’re a convicted murderer today the only way anyone cares if you might be innocent is if you get sentenced to death.

“How can we possibly kill people in order to teach that killing is wrong?” So does this mean that when we put people in jail for kidnapping, we are similarly being hypocritical? How can you lock someone in a cell to teach them not to lock others in a cell? I occasionally hear it said that not killing murderers is what makes us better than them. But I don’t feel that American society has to feel insecure when judged by the standards of John Wayne Gacy or Jeffrey Dahmer.

Sometimes, the death penalty opponent will indicate he shares your sense of justice, and will argue that life in prison is worse than being put to death. But criminals seem to disagree, and almost always fight for prison over death when given a choice. I don’t think American prisons are actually that bad. Individuals who are incarcerated in a first world country might have a living standard comparable to that of poor people in the Congo, and they certainly live better than Medieval peasants. Yet nobody says that poor Africans are better off dead because their lives are so bad.

When I hear about people who rape and kill women or massacre entire families, it bothers me to know that they are out there breathing, with three meals a day and a bed to sleep in. I can only imagine how the family members of victims feel. I sometimes reflect on how sex criminals likely masturbate to their crimes, and when we put them in jail they still have full use of their hands. This thought alone makes the death penalty an easy issue for me.

There’s an argument that we don’t want to be the kind of society that kills people. True, when you look around at the world and observe which countries make common use of the death penalty, you can see that they are usually not nice places. But while I don’t want to live in a society that is too brutal, I don’t want to live in one that is too soft either. Letting murderers live is an affront to their victims and their families, all because we don’t have the courage to deliver justice. Red state America proves that the death penalty is at least consistent with economic growth and a high standard of living. South Carolina just executed someone by firing squad, which is pretty cool, and it’s regularly in the top fifth of states for economic growth.

All of this leads to the question of why we should stop at the death penalty and not torture people too. I’m not against that in principle. But we have a constitution, and it prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. We know that the death penalty doesn’t fall under that category, as it was there at the founding. While we may not be able to give our worst criminals as much as they deserve, death at the very least cleans the slate, and ensures that a murderer ends up in the same state as his victim. He doesn’t get to jack off to his crimes anymore.

There is always a danger in indulging our emotions too much at the expense of consequentialist reasoning. This is the road to rightoidism. What’s next, believing in tariffs, nations, or telling women what to do because it feels good? Opposing surrogacy and lab grown meat? I’m not worried that I’m no better than a murderer for wanting him dead, but if I let emotions not grounded in arguments based in utilitarianism or individual rights determine my political positions, I do worry that I’ll be no better than a conservative.

At the same time, conservative instincts never completely disappear, and are always in danger of reemerging, even in the most civilized societies. Ideally, we would let the masses focus their hatred on criminals, with an implicit understanding that they leave foreigners and sexual nonconformists alone.

Heather Mac Donald says that it’s a myth that our society locks up harmless people all the time, and prison is a “lifetime achievement award” for those who have spent years terrorizing society. This is easy to believe, given how many news stories we hear about criminals with dozens or hundreds of arrests who are still allowed to walk the streets. Ideally, I’d execute everyone convicted of first-degree murder, but I’d also expand the death penalty to lifelong criminals who we can be certain contribute nothing to humanity. That’s probably not politically feasible, so my position is that we should go as far as the law and public opinion will allow. My only hesitation here is that we might sentence drug dealers to death when their customers OD, which would be a travesty.

Maybe nobody is responsible for their own actions in a truly cosmic sense. We can remind ourselves of this as we put people to death. Perhaps before every execution, we can have a public official give a speech explaining to the poor wretch where he fits in the arc of humanity’s progress. That while we were once much simpler and indulged in our emotions on all matters of social and political life, slowly but surely instinct gave way to reason. Yet although naive consequentialism had freed us of many of the burdens of the past, we felt a new form of unease that made life seem like it had lost a spark. As time went on, we overcame our evolutionary instincts and accepted every petition placed before our reason and conscience. We ended racial segregation, gave women equal rights, legalized gay marriage. We were proud of the progress we had made, but with every retreat from rightoidism, the voice in our head that told us we were growing too alienated from our instincts grew louder and more persistent

To the criminal, we would say “you are where we draw the line!” For everyone else, we felt morally obligated to listen to their arguments and give ground when we no longer had a response. At some point, we realized that we would have to close our ears to further petitions in order to remain human. The criminal seems the perfect place for the train of rationality to stop. Something something scapegoat Peter Thiel René Girard. We need a sacrifice, and a murderer ends up being useful to society after all. He can take solace in that fact, as he dies knowing that he has a role to play in the great story of humanity, and that our lack of charity towards him makes all the progress we’ve achieved not seem that gay, and therefore possible.