Probably not that eager to have the death penalty available for a regime that classifies violence against Tesla showrooms as domestic terrorism. It would be fine in Switzerland or Norway, I suppose. The irony is that rightoid indulgences can only be safely provisioned to polities and societies that comprehensively reject rightoid values - dubious that the US with its cultural glorification of homosexual prison rape qualified even before 2024.
OTOH, if one does want to run a based rightoid state, it strikes me that there are far better uses for the criminal biomass. Enslavement (for as long as humanoid robots don't make it negative value asded). Voluntary-compulsory medical experimentation would be one obvious thing. And penal legions for seizing resources and expanding the borders.
Good analysis! In addition to the risk of wrongful convictions (Cameron Todd Willingham, for instance), there is, as you said, the possibility that an illiberal state could apply the death penalty to the wrong kinds of crimes. For instance, I suspect that a not-inconsiderable number of (often primitive rightoid) Americans would endorse executing people even for victimless crimes like cartoon/animated child porn and child sex dolls/robots, for instance, as evidenced by the logic of "all MAPs in woodchippers, virtuous or not". And if one wants to look at history, AFAIK, anal sex in Britain, both homosexual and heterosexual, was punished with the death penalty until 1861. Even nowadays rightoid regimes like the Taliban's Afghanistan still execute adulterers and/or adultresses, IIRC.
Also, if one really wants to punish criminals and make them suffer a lot, then why simply execute them? Why not aggressively torture them beforehand? One could, for instance, flog them like crazy every single day for a year or two or even many decades before finally executing them. And Yes, things like slavery and medical experimentation could also be very valuable.
Using MAPs instead of pedophile demonstrates you think sexual attraction to children is totally fine. It’s only the act that is socially or morally problematic and even then, it’s the silly pearl clutchers who don’t understand that children are sexual beings.
We cannot trust someone who seeks to obscure what pedophiles are.
But just to clarify: I’m not stupid. I do support profiling MAPs to keep children safe, such as by preventing MAPs from being babysitters and preventing them from adopting children. I just oppose the rightoid tendency to categorically execute them, virtuous or not. (Even executing actual child molesters would probably be too much unless they’re also guilty of child murder, since otherwise executing them could make them more likely to also murder their victims, which we don’t want.)
MAP is more broad than pedophile; it also includes hebephiles and ephebophiles. And Yes, it is indeed the act that is problematic. Simply being attracted to children and not harming them is OK. It might be “icky” but ultimately it’s a variation of human sexuality like finding rape or choking or spanking or hitting arousing.
Hard disagree. The sensual attraction is deeply problematic and will almost always be acted on. It’s a sexual orientation in my opinion, innate and mostly unchangeable. I suspect you agree but that’s why you find them sympathetic. It’s just like the gays! No sexual orientation is per se bad.
We’d be better off as a society if we executed child rapists and child molesters who perpetrate violence against children under a certain age. You ignore the enormous harm inflicted upon children in the name of protecting those few pedophiles who don’t act out on their inclinations. These people should be chemically castrated. If we can allow children to castrate themselves, we as a society can chemically castrate men and women too. Equal opportunity and all.
There’s no simple attraction to children. Some things are just wrong. This is one of them. If a man came home and confided in his wife that he is attracted to their 13 year olds best friend, that is sickening and she’s better run for the hills. Not stay with him because he may never offend.
Rape and the molestation of children is severely underreported so obfuscates the massive damage done to children and society as a whole.
It will always be acted upon? Sounds like you're not nearly punitive enough! I guarantee that if you put a gun to people's heads, they will stop acting out.
What’s to ensure that executing even actual child molesters won’t result in more child murders? Because if they’re getting executed anyway, and they’re non-virtuous to begin with, they really won’t have any incentive to spare the child either.
As for acting upon it, cartoon/animated child porn and child sex dolls/robots could probably act as a reliable substitite for some such people, especially the virtuous ones, but Yeah, the rest should be castrated, either physically or chemically. I just oppose castration in those cases where cartoons and dolls/robots are an acceptable long-term substitute for them.
I doubt the first scenario because people tend to notice missing children and murder is difficult to get away with. Also, they’d need to keep killing children to satiate their sexual appetites and that increases the chances of being caught.
Hard disagree with animated children’s pornography or any other substitute. It’s legitimizes pedophilia and encourages satisfying perverse sexual urges. It is not a victimless crime but a crime that has wide reaching and diffuse effects. Your stance remind me of the harm reduction drug proponents. I oppose enabling drug users too for many of the same reasons. Some things are bad in and of themselves and should be stringently punished by society, including through execution or other serious punishment by the state. Having children has only reinforced this belief.
I just believe some urges should never be acceptable.
One more thing. I hate the political effort to parse pedophiles into different types. Is so wrong. It’s trying to make some abuse seem less problematic.
Well, I think that from an evolutionary perspective, it would be more unusual to be attracted to a prepubescent minor than to a pubescent minor. But Yeah, still a violation of the law either way.
Interestingly enough, Richard Hanania has previously defended women who have sex with underage male minors and argues that it should be decriminalized:
He argues that it should be OK because the underage boys aren’t traumatized by this experience. Well, by that logic, I guess that it should also be legal for underage boys to sext older men in exchange for money just so long as they won’t be tramatized by this either, right?
FWIW, I disagree with Hanania’s logic here, but ultimately, if one accepts a strict reading of the harm principle, then that’s where his logic down the rabbit hole goes.
I read his article and found it interesting and somewhat persuasive. I do agree with him that it may be less traumatizing for a boy to be raped or molested by a woman because I believe men and woman are fundamentally different and so necessitate different treatment at times. However, if taking this stance weakens protections against male on female pedophilia (which it also does in my opinion), then I’d oppose it.
Children are too precious and innocent to give women leeway to have sexual with boys.
Pre-pubescent children are not sexual beings, but that doesn’t mean that one can’t be attracted to them without harming them. Pubescent children are sexual beings in the sense that they can have sex with each other but generally not with adults.
You realize the ship has sailed on this one already, yes? Private prison companies can sue the state for breach of contract if enough people are not imprisoned.
I thought I was a "member" of the SDS back in the 60s at the University of Colorado. . (Really,. I was just another tool being used by a bunch of rich kids who felt guilt because they drove around distributing a radical newspaper in their Cadillac (really! )). My contribution to the movement was ripping the conservative cartoons off the door of a professor's office. Not that they weren't funny but just the fact the he was poking fun of the things "we" all thought were true. I (like the guys who burn Teslas) was just another idiot. But, the purpose of what I was doing was indeed to terrorize the professor who insulted all of "us" letting him know that the fragile society was crashing.
The writer of this note really needs to experience a dose of terror himself so he has a grasp how how fragile civilized life is. Society has lots of people who will do crazy things if they think there is no punishment for what they do. (Me, I learned a little bit abut reality through a long trip to Southeast Asia wearing a pickle suit. Like I said, society is fragile.) If the loonies aren't smacked down, they will continue to do bad things because they CAN. A year in an El Salvadoran maximum prison would teach them a lot about how fragile civilization is.
Your comment got a bit convoluted. Are you saying that ripping down some cartoons generates enough terror that it should be punished by a year in supermax?
If so, isn't that basically North Korean state policy?
1969-1971 US Army. Almost everyone wore green fatigues. Hence the term pickle suit. I don't know when Army switched to camouflage fatigues but it was after i got out.
All governments inherently have the death penalty. The death penalty, in many transfigured forms, is the thing that makes a government a government. The sole and exclusive right to control the application of death within its physical boundary.
When a government classifies rape and murder as a crime that cannot be punished by death, what we are forgetting is that *it still maintains other crimes as worthy of death*. For example, disobeying a cop. In MAID states, the government has functionally ruled that it can’t kill you for murder but can kill you for being sick as long as you consent first.
Obviously this isn’t a binary argument but trying to remove the death penalty for barbarous acts of wanton murderous violence at the same time the government still retains the ability, as you say, to execute you for resisting arrest after setting fire to a unoccupied Tesla car, indicates a profoundly disordered state
That’s not necessarily a problem I mean a domestic terrorist act does not end of itself warrant put people to the needle I mean, it would definitely warrant locking them up most people I have talked to in life who are in favour of the death penalty are usually for strictly for removing murders and rapists from society, not people who do property damages those people you just lock up another thing one might want to consider is that it’s not always obvious at least it’s not obvious to me that my tax tax dollars should be used to keep mass rapists and murderers fed for the rest of their life, keeping people in prison. It’s not free and it’s not like all the money comes from a magic hat
Capital punishment is meant as a deterrent. Hang one guy for stealing horses, and nobody will want to steal a horse. Hang 'em for rape. Nobody will think about raping a girl. Hang 'em for murder, and nobody will think about killing another person in anger.
Capital punishment was a public spectacle for one reason: to teach people the cost of committing a crime.
If it actually worked that way in practice, it might be justified, but the threat of execution doesn't actually seem to be a particularly effective deterrent. The problem is that most crimes are committed by people who are bad at thinking ahead.
The threat of execution in the US today is almost non-existent. The fastest execution in the country this century was sentenced two years after he was apprehended and executed four years later. McVeigh killed almost two-hundred people, nineteen of whom were children, and injured almost seven hundred. Three-quarters of a century earlier, Giuseppe Zangara was executed for assassinating Chicago mayor Anton Cermak less than a month after being apprehended. The only reason this is the case is because of generations of pro-criminal activism, all of which has been done in the name of a false, and increasingly empirically indefensible, view of humanity, that unfortunately appeals heavily to activists and those who either instinctively support activists or whom would like to become them. We never should have listened to these people, and should treat them like the pro-crime activists they are. They are bad people who have made our country worse for the sake of a corrupted, suicidal empathy that is neither deserving of tolerance nor respect.
How many people are making the calculation that 20 to life in prison is an acceptable risk, but the death penalty isn't? There's a point of diminishing return on deterrence, especially the person is either acting in the heat of the moment or expects to get away with it (the combination of which I suspect make up most of crime)
So goes the theory, which might be true for some cases where people are premeditating theft, rape, or murder. But when someone acts on impulse without thinking about the consequences, capital punishment will not deter the perpetrator.
The risk of wrongful conviction, combined with the uniquely final and irreversible nature of the death penalty, is enough for me to oppose it. Maybe there are a few scumbags who deserve to die, but even one wrongfully executed person is still too many for my conscience. With wrongful imprisonment, at least there remains a lifetime of hope for being set free and starting a new life.
What turned me against the death penalty is that I learned about the frequency of wrongful convictions and wrongful executions. We will convict innocent people in the future. It’s unavoidable in my opinion.
But what about the risk in the other direction? Wrongful clemency? Not only the terrible miscarriage of justice, but the entirely preventable crimes that the people who are relieved of their sentence, or whom were given an unduly light sentence, or no sentence at all, go on to commit afterwards? Imagine if Hitler was executed after the beer hall putsch? Or if Lenin was arrested and executed after his original failed couple attempt on the provisional government in July of 1917? Or Castro after his attack on Moncada in '53? Or Yahya Sinwar after his arrest in '89? All four would've been more than justified, and we're still not done paying the price for not solving the problem earlier when it would've been easier.
This isn't to say I necessarily recommend a trial. In many cases, a jury trial is actually quite unjust, and unwarranted. I certainly don't see why it's a good idea to hold a jury trial for terrorists rather than a fact finding mission, a tribunal, and then an execution. This puts me quite far to the right by modern standards, but just because my idea's unpopular doesn't mean the rightness of jury trials for shit like terrorism was ever a good idea. We've made a mockery of justice trying to fit everything into a single mold like this.
This brings up to me “innocent until proven guilty.” Many people are acquitted who are fully guilty on purpose and by design of our legal system.
Do people actually agree with this policy/ideology? I suspect many people haven’t really thought about it too much -or- maybe uncritically agree with it somewhat due to “social desirability bias.”
There's always a tradeoff. I don't want things to just be as easy as "the state can arrest and sentence anybody they like to whatever they want". But every protection which grants rights to criminal suspects and convicts by definition makes it harder for guilty as well as innocent people to be found guilty.
The Warren and Burger courts clearly went way too far in the direction of enabling criminality. Sadly, they were far from alone, as the same happened in different ways throughout the First World and Latinoamerica. But just because many people made bad decisions rather than few doesn't make said bad decision more defensible.
My point was very specifically about the choice between death and lifelong imprisonment. Hypothetically, I suppose that a timely sentencing of Hitler, Lenin, or whomever to life in prison would have had the same preventive effect as a timely execution. On this particular question, I don’t see a significant “risk in the other direction.”.
Hitler, Lenin, Castro, and Sinwar are hardly isolated incidents. All four of the scenarios I outlined happened in different decades, in different countries, after extraordinarily bold crimes that both historically and presently have warranted execution. All four men were either apprehended or apprehendable by the legitimate authorities of their times for specific capital offenses. Not for some time-travel, kill-baby-Hitler scenario. Sinwar's case is particularly the most contrary to your point, as he had served twenty-two years in prison before he was released as part of the Shalit exchange. Even in the contemporary U.S., that's about how long on average it takes to run out of enough of the mandatory roadblocks to be executed. If ever there were even the most charitable case for your point, this should be it. But it wasn't. It just proved the opposite. The Israelis should've executed Sinwar via tribunal back in the '80s after catching him. Their not doing this led directly to both October 7th and the war in Gaza.
They are however extreme incidents. Most people will never come close to causing as much damage as those four. But you shouldn't need to be at the badness level of a HAMAS hitman or a socialist terrorist to warrant execution. We need to more frequently execute people for lesser offenses as well to prevent whatever the closest they'll manage to October 7th is, even if it's as simple as a murder over twelve-hundred dollars of drugs:
If they had executed Hitler after the Beer Hall Putsch, the geopolitical situation in Europe that was arguably caused by American intervention in the First World War would have continued to make it likely for somebody to take Hitler's role in history. Preventing that situation would have required the execution of Woodrow Wilson before he became president of the United States, I suppose.
I am not being entirely facetious there. My point is that your policy of preventively killing all the right people at the right time would require more knowledge than any human being can have as history unfolds in real time. In an economic context, Friedrich Hayek warned us of the false pretense of knowledge that leads to tyranny.
This didn't require much knowledge. By giving an extremely lenient sentence to a criminal who attempted to violently overthrow the state and seize power for himself; you both incentivize worse behavior from him, his followers, and his enemies; and make it more likely that said worse behavior in the future will be more rewarding to said bad actors. This is elementary common sense, which is why when the Nazis csme to power, they killed and arrested the sort of people most likely to do to them what they themselves had done to seize power.
The issue with American intervention in WWI was that we didn't go far enough and finish the conflict in the East with the Siberian expedition. Nor were we sensible enough to so much as hold military victory parades in the German streets so the enemy knew they were beaten, nor to partition the Kaiserreich into its constituent monarchies to lower the chance of future revsnchism. A far worse and more brutal partition undid Nazi Germany, but for all you can say about it, it worked completely at neutralizing the threat of further German-led belligerence for almost a century thereafter.
Very conflicted on this issue but great piece as always, Richard. The global trends, though, are exceedingly clear: the death penalty is on the way out. The abolition of the death penalty may well be considered a landmark in a state arriving at the end of history. The Trump administration’s actions have repulsed much of the better half of the country. Speaking with respect to practical politics, how do you intend to reconcile EHC to capital punishment? Surely, if you want them to move closer to libertarianism, it would be wise to balance priorities and emphasise a libertarianism that overlaps with left-liberalism on such social issues? Thanks once more!
"The global trends, though, are exceedingly clear: the death penalty is on the way out"
In so far as you have observed what is happening globally, I think you are correct.
However - this reminds me a little too much of the "be on the right side of history" argument that the Left throws at us far too often. I don't know if your intention was to suggest this - but I wish to question it either way.
In the UK, where we have not had the death penalty for many years, support for its reintroduction is very nuanced. For example, Google "Britons don’t tend to support the death penalty… until you name the worst crimes "
Whilst we are opposed to its reintroduction for "all cases of murder", the reverse is true for multiple murders, terrorism, and child murderers. And it's been consistent.
At the risk of being accused of populism, "global trends" that are this consistent are often synonymous with government by oligarchy with the (not too convincing) illusion of democracy. And as we have seen in many countries recently, such government often creates a pressure for change that bursts out suddenly.
The idea that they can never be reversed, that there is a long arch of "inevitable human progress" needs pushback.
I recall the late Mark Kleiman saying the UK lacked the death penalty despite it being popular because educated people had more influence in their political system. But the General Social Survey in the US shows people support it at all education levels https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2010/09/12/support-for-the-death-penalty-by-education/ I think the UK got rid of it while the EU was growing to incorporate them, as the EU prohibits it. But they might bring it back post-Brexit.
Executing Muslim terrorists is counterproductive because that's exactly what they want. Specifically to get their 72 virgins in Paradise. Aggressively torturing them and forcing them to eat pork and other non-halal food items would be much more effective.
Muslim terrorists want to die, assuming they do want to die, in glorious suicide attacks while killing infidels. When being arrested and sentenced, they always fight for the lightest sentence they can manage. You sure didn't see Dzokhar Tsarnaev go, "yeah, I confess to everything! Please sentence me as quickly as possible so I can enter paradise as a martyr! I'll forgoe all appeals!" Nor have we seen this of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. Nor of Umar Abdulmutallab.
Fair point. So, if we want to punish them, why not torture them to the extent that the law allows before executing them? For instance, we could push SCOTUS to adopt a 1789 reading of “cruel and unusual punishments” and thus push to re-allow flogging for serious offenses.
I do think getting rid of flogging was a mistake, but I also think the main value for execution is to permanently rid ourselves of intolerably troublesome individuals. If we're gonna be making major changes anywhere related to terrorists, I'd rather it be in the abolition of jury trials for terrorist offenses and their replacement with a fact-finding mission and tribunal for their execution. Flogging would work more as a substitute for jail terms, but one that still provides robust enough of a punishment as to have some deterrent effect without the time and resource sacrifice of prison terms.
How would you deal with the risk of wrongful convinctions? Would you use fact-finding missions? Because I wouldn’t necessarily trust those in red states.
No offense, but I don't think you know a lot of Muslims if you think forcing them to drink alcohol and eat bacon would be a torturous punishment. It's unclean, sure, but it's not morally odious in the same way it would be morally odious to force a Catholic to sexually assault someone.
The biggest risk with the death penalty is wrongful convictions, IMHO. Look at Cameron Todd Willingham, for instance. And of course the possibility that an illiberal state could apply it to the wrong kinds of crimes. Richard Hanania endorses adult women having sex with underage male minors, for instance. Imagine if we had the death penalty for this! I suspect that he would oppose this!
Of course, if one truly wants to make criminals suffer, then why stop with just executing them? Why not also torture them beforehand?
Thanks for the response. Like I said, I’m very conflicted about this issue so I don’t think abolitionism is necessarily on the right side of history. But the end of capital punishment has been nearly as certain as demographic transition in developed countries, for better or for worse. You’re right that it is a kind of elite virtue signalling (a luxury belief of sorts). While abolition in the West was often grossly anti-democratic (think the late Robert Badinter ending the guillotine in France when support was still at 60 percent), elites support and elite-strivers quickly adopt these beliefs. Given that Hanania would like these elites to abandon overtly statist-collectivist policies, I was merely questioning the wisdom of playing up these issues. Reintroduction will in my view be near impossible as Trumpism will likely polarise half of the West against politics of this kind. You also overestimate, I think, the extent to which right-wing elites would be eager to take this issue up, given that it will almost certainly be a cudgel for intra-elite competition on the right. Thanks again.
The dignity of the human being is the only truth we possess. Everything else is uncertain and will always correspond to a procedural truth in court. The court follows complex rules and orders that sometimes seem unjust, but we must hold fast to this one truth. If we abandon it, we abandon humanity. The question is: To whom does our life belong? Does it belong to us, or can it ever belong to a state that can judge it? The human being possesses the ability to decide over their own life and death; that is what makes them autonomous. Even the convicted murderer and sexual offender must be allowed to retain their dignity; it is inviolable because it transcends the law and is deeply rooted in the self-understanding of human existence. It distinguishes an animal from a human. It is a human invention and thus an expression of civilization. The death penalty is an instinct, and that is all it is.
I totally agree. I see it as a gross overreach of state power to end the life of an individual under controlled circumstances. In war, enemies are killed but that is only because they cannot be safely captured. Whenever feasible they are taken hostage because human life is dignified and has meaning. To me, the death penalty is just senseless killing even if the individual has no possibility of redemption
It's not a moral outrage that we set the maximum punishment at lifetime confinement. It sucks to be in prison for your entire life and it's a fitting consequence for the worst crimes. Maybe we're just numb to it, but you'd probably struggle to imagine anything you'd trade for a lifetime in prison.
You've preempted this a bit, but liberal democracies have rules against amputating, lobotomizing, torturing, or raping criminals - death is strictly worse than all of those things. If you're concerned that the incarcerated can masturbate to their crimes, we can compromise at chemical castration (I'm sincerely fine with this).
It's no surprise that the worldwide trend is always towards abolition, and countries that abolish capital punishment never bring it back. It's in the same category as sentencing offenders to 1000 lashes, just a difference in degree - like you said, it's a rightoid indulgence and a sign of societal barbarism. What's the point of indulging that, even for the worst offenses? You start with an anecdote about a horrific crime that you routinely think about, but for most high-profile crimes, you probably wouldn't know if the perpetrator was in prison, on death row, or already executed.
Can you guess whether El Chapo is in prison, or dead/on death row? What about Fujimori? What about the leaders of the Khmer Rouge? Drug lords and dictators who murder thousands of people could be facing life sentences rather than an execution, and most wouldn't know. Any sense of cosmic injustice is totally artificial.
Also, the first title was better ("The Death Penalty Should Be Our Last Rightoid Indulgence"). You should change it back.
It's somewhat beside the point, but I wasn't referring to a *lifetime* of torture or sodomy as punishment, any more than I was referring to a lifetime of lashing. Even a single lashing, torture, or sodomy qua punishment is categorically prohibited in every civilized country.
Singapore is certainly civilized and almost all male prisoners are caned. The exception is those who are condemned to death- they are not caned. The prisoner is caned on one day if medically fit. If not fit his sentence is doubled. Singapore has a very low 2 year recidivism rate-22%.
Actually, flogging has never been held to be unconstitutional. It was a common punishment at the time the Eighth Amendment was ratified and still in common use at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified.
If you use the evolving standards approach, it would be held to be unconstitutional, but if you use the original meaning, maybe not. If a state brought flogging back, it might be upheld.
Depends on whether you use a 1787 or a contemporary reference point. Chris Green talks about the sense-reference distinction in one of his articles. "Unusual" meant "contrary to long usage", so from a contemporary reference point, flogging would indeed be "unusual", but not from a 1787 reference point.
Yes, this is the issue that I see here. If one *really* wants bad people to suffer, then why stop at the death penalty? Why not aggressively torture them as well, at least to the extent that the law will actually allow for this? We can bring back flogging, for instance, if SCOTUS will actually allow for this.
Killing someone merits death. We don't have any penalties severe enough for someone who commits multiple murders.
> and countries that abolish capital punishment never bring it back
SCOTUS declared it unconstitutional in the US, then reversed.
> It's in the same category as sentencing offenders to 1000 lashes, just a difference in degree - like you said, it's a rightoid indulgence and a sign of societal barbarism.
On the contrary, per Greg Clark it's what caused England to progress out of Malthusianism.
Liberal sympathy for criminal psychopaths truly is grotesque. I am pro-choice and identify as a progressive but writing a human interest story about someone who committed the most unthinkable crime is deranged. I can not understand how someone can think this to be acceptable: https://www.newsweek.com/steven-hayes-connecticut-linda-mai-lee-2021341
It seems that a lifetime of fantasy about retribution fueled by human instinct & creative media creates very strong feelings in this space. I have changed my mind many times over the years. I doubt we will ever find a grand agreement based on logic & scientific research, so what’s left? I’m not sure except to say that if our legal system is never going to be fixed so that justice is accurate, apolitical & evenly adjudicated, then how can we justify killing other human beings? Your arguments in this space are woefully immature & privileged
Im guessing he would be against it. He says in the article that he thinks it would a travesty to execute a drug dealer just because a customer of theirs over-dosed.
The problem I have with the death penalty is that you are imposing an absolute punishment within a fallible system. Every time the system gets it wrong then it’s the system and, therefore, the people committing murder. The two murderers referenced in your excellent post should be kept in the harshest possible conditions allowed by law and not pandered to in any way. The regime should be harsh and unrelenting.
Yeah, it’s a difficult point Andy and one I’ve struggled with a few times. As far as I can remember, the Innocence Project has yet to be proven wrong which is troubling. And yet, with the two murderers whose actions you detail in your post certainly bring out a desire to just end them.
The first part of your argument makes sense - the fallibility of the justice system.
But applying that logic later: a punishment with "the harshest possible conditions" imposed upon somebody who is later found to be innocent seems to me to be a comparable tragedy to an innocent man being hanged.
Yes - the innocent could be freed and compensated, but how much can money really make up for anything?
My point was that being jailed for years in harsh conditions is also final and irreversible.
You can release someone - but you can't give them their years back. You can't erase the possible beatings and prison rapes they've suffered.
I think if a country is in the business of meting out punishment, it has to understand that even without the death penalty its punishments are not generally "reversible if an error is found later".
You can at least give them an extraordinarily massive sum of money, if necessary, in the millions, to compensate them for this post-exoneration. That's certainly not nothing! It's quite a lot, in fact!
Meanwhile, if they get executed, then they don't get anything at all!
I'll say again that death is _unique_ in its _absolute_ finality and irreversibility. It belongs to a separate category from even decades of wrongful imprisonment, after which one can at least say, "Today is the first day of the rest of my life."
Those lost years are irreversible. And if you are incarcerated long enough to die of natural causes (which is the case for most people sentenced to death), you have lost your life there in just as irreversible a way.
You can repeat yourself if you wish - but it doesn't make your assertion any more valid than the first time round.
There are plenty of fates that many people would consider worse than death. Indeed, this is one reason why medically assisted dying is such a hot issue - because such fates can and do happen to people.
I read of one prisoner in a South African jail - the lone white man among hundreds of black prisoners. He was locked up for a relatively minor offence - and had to suffer repeated rapes over months before he was finally released. As a final insult, he was diagnosed as HIV positive.
This is an extreme case in a different jurisdiction - but it illustrates the naivety of thinking that imprisonment is reversible. Given the choice of his fate or a bullet through the head, I'd take the bullet.
Put a man among the hardened criminals and lifers, and you may very well destroy the human being that was there at the start of the incarceration.
Cops are aloud to shoot criminals on the street. It's not "off limits" because death would be final & irreversible, and caps are fallible. Otherwise people could just run around killing people (and any cops who tried to stop them).
I don't apply the same standard of ethical judgment to a police officer using lethal force out of unavoidable necessity that I do to a criminal court sentencing someone already in custody. When the matter has become a court case, there is no longer an unavoidable necessity.
“But there’s no ethical system that can justify this.” As a Critical Rationalist (Popperian) would point out, epistemologically speaking, there is no possibility of “justifying” anything due to introducing an infinite regress (i.e., each justification must be justified and so on). But this doesn’t mean you can’t argue for your point of view as long as you are open to criticism/testing.
But on your view all the criticisms are necessarily unjustified. And regardless, your original point is necessarily unjustified, so seeing if it withstands criticisms is totally irrelevant. So there's no point in arguing for anything.
Yes, it’s true that justifications of theories are impossible (including Critical Rationalism itself—it’s recursive), but that doesn’t mean truth doesn’t exist independently of our inability to justify it. Truth exists independently of justifications (although our theories can be explained). But our theories do need to withstand criticism/testing to see if they survive (an attempted falsification). Even then, we are stuck with an unjustified theory.
(1) Doesn't the survival method suffer the same problem of infinite regress? Suppose I have a theory X which survives testing Y. For the test to mean anything it must be the case that Y is an appropriate attempted falsification of X: call this appropriateness Z. But Z requires testing W, which requires testing the appropriateness of W....
We can't get out of this by suggesting the general theory of testing has itself been subject to testing, because we need a justification that Y specifically is appropriate to X.
(2) Suppose we have a way of avoiding problem (1): the survival of X of testing Y is meaningful in some way. Is X now *more justified*? Or how else do we describe our increased credence in X? If justification is allowed to vary by degree such that we have more justification for some beliefs than others, then it appears Critical Rationalism reduces to the trivial insight that we cannot be *certain* (perfectly justified in believing) of X.
Justification does not vary by degree, as justification is logically impossible. Criticism/testing only demonstrates that our theories can withstand attempted falsifications and *may* be closer to the truth. E.g., if it appears that all swans are white and we come across a black swan, then the theory that all swans are white has been falsified (unless it turns out, e.g., that the black swan was merely covered in soot, etc., which could also be tested). In the event that non-white swans are never seen, then it is an unfalsified theory that all swans are white.
It is not a trivial insight that justification is logically impossible because the justificationist mentality (even when it is conceded that certainty is not possible) often leads to dogmatism and the “manifest truth” doctrine (i.e., belief as a psychological state based on the delusion of inductive reasoning). How many times do we hear people say that such and such has not been justified?—as if such a thing were possible. On the other side is someone who thinks such and such has been justified. We must be satisfied with aiming for the truth while knowing that epistemological justification/induction is impossible. That’s a step beyond conceding certainty is impossible.
That is the first thing that came to my mind. But what about cases about which there is absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind (e.g., indisputable video evidence, multiple reliable witnesses, unforced admission of guilt from the perpetrators)? Essentially, allowing a considerable number of false negatives but zero false positives? Even with that criterion, I question whether I could execute someone, even if that person tortured and killed someone I loved. Taking a life does not bring back someone who was murdered. But I might be okay with the justice system doing the execution. I don't know; I have a lot of conflicted feelings about this disturbing issue.
I consider the "you're no better than them" argument to be a fallacy - because legally sanctioned executions can pass the moral test of Universalisation.
That is to say: If everyone killed either nobody at all, or only those who had been found guilty in a court of law and sentenced to death, there would be no murders.
So by going through due process and doing our very best to ensure both prior guilt, and that the crime is sufficiently egregious, we have massively distinguished ourselves from those who pick on innocent victims.
A country could in theory become completely free form murders yet still have the death penalty on the statute book - and nobody would be killed. But if the reverse happens - the death penalty is removed - murders can (and do) continue. This should conclusively demonstrate that murder and execution are not morally equivalent.
Engaging in sadistic impulses is not good for us humans. It may bring short-term satisfaction, but it coarsens our character, desensitizes us to cruelty and makes us less receptive to the gentler and more sublime aspects of the human experience.
If the death penalty had any utility in deterring violent crime and thus saving lives, then maybe it would've been worth it. But it doesn't really help anyone.
In these situations I often think of the teachings of Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun and a writer.
When you read about a horrible crime or an injustice and your heart is filled with pain and outrage, just let the emotion be there, without wallowing in it. Look at it within your body, and think about all the other people who must be feeling the same way. Stay there with a broken heart. It will soften you. We tend to run away from painful emotions, either by attempting to suppress them, or by indulging in anger and hatred towards the putative cause of pain. Smart people in particular tend to escape from their emotions by intellectualizing them. But staying with a broken heart is what engenders compassion.
Chodron is probably much better at putting it down. A recommended reading.
Out of curiosity, what is your acceptable level of risk that, in a country with the death penalty, the state will kill an innocent person who was wrongfully convicted? For example, some people would be okay with the death penalty being around as long as the state executed fewer than 1 innocent person for every 1,000 guilty people. What would be your acceptable ratio?
Probably not that eager to have the death penalty available for a regime that classifies violence against Tesla showrooms as domestic terrorism. It would be fine in Switzerland or Norway, I suppose. The irony is that rightoid indulgences can only be safely provisioned to polities and societies that comprehensively reject rightoid values - dubious that the US with its cultural glorification of homosexual prison rape qualified even before 2024.
OTOH, if one does want to run a based rightoid state, it strikes me that there are far better uses for the criminal biomass. Enslavement (for as long as humanoid robots don't make it negative value asded). Voluntary-compulsory medical experimentation would be one obvious thing. And penal legions for seizing resources and expanding the borders.
Good analysis! In addition to the risk of wrongful convictions (Cameron Todd Willingham, for instance), there is, as you said, the possibility that an illiberal state could apply the death penalty to the wrong kinds of crimes. For instance, I suspect that a not-inconsiderable number of (often primitive rightoid) Americans would endorse executing people even for victimless crimes like cartoon/animated child porn and child sex dolls/robots, for instance, as evidenced by the logic of "all MAPs in woodchippers, virtuous or not". And if one wants to look at history, AFAIK, anal sex in Britain, both homosexual and heterosexual, was punished with the death penalty until 1861. Even nowadays rightoid regimes like the Taliban's Afghanistan still execute adulterers and/or adultresses, IIRC.
Also, if one really wants to punish criminals and make them suffer a lot, then why simply execute them? Why not aggressively torture them beforehand? One could, for instance, flog them like crazy every single day for a year or two or even many decades before finally executing them. And Yes, things like slavery and medical experimentation could also be very valuable.
Using MAPs instead of pedophile demonstrates you think sexual attraction to children is totally fine. It’s only the act that is socially or morally problematic and even then, it’s the silly pearl clutchers who don’t understand that children are sexual beings.
We cannot trust someone who seeks to obscure what pedophiles are.
But just to clarify: I’m not stupid. I do support profiling MAPs to keep children safe, such as by preventing MAPs from being babysitters and preventing them from adopting children. I just oppose the rightoid tendency to categorically execute them, virtuous or not. (Even executing actual child molesters would probably be too much unless they’re also guilty of child murder, since otherwise executing them could make them more likely to also murder their victims, which we don’t want.)
MAP is more broad than pedophile; it also includes hebephiles and ephebophiles. And Yes, it is indeed the act that is problematic. Simply being attracted to children and not harming them is OK. It might be “icky” but ultimately it’s a variation of human sexuality like finding rape or choking or spanking or hitting arousing.
Hard disagree. The sensual attraction is deeply problematic and will almost always be acted on. It’s a sexual orientation in my opinion, innate and mostly unchangeable. I suspect you agree but that’s why you find them sympathetic. It’s just like the gays! No sexual orientation is per se bad.
We’d be better off as a society if we executed child rapists and child molesters who perpetrate violence against children under a certain age. You ignore the enormous harm inflicted upon children in the name of protecting those few pedophiles who don’t act out on their inclinations. These people should be chemically castrated. If we can allow children to castrate themselves, we as a society can chemically castrate men and women too. Equal opportunity and all.
There’s no simple attraction to children. Some things are just wrong. This is one of them. If a man came home and confided in his wife that he is attracted to their 13 year olds best friend, that is sickening and she’s better run for the hills. Not stay with him because he may never offend.
Rape and the molestation of children is severely underreported so obfuscates the massive damage done to children and society as a whole.
It will always be acted upon? Sounds like you're not nearly punitive enough! I guarantee that if you put a gun to people's heads, they will stop acting out.
What’s to ensure that executing even actual child molesters won’t result in more child murders? Because if they’re getting executed anyway, and they’re non-virtuous to begin with, they really won’t have any incentive to spare the child either.
As for acting upon it, cartoon/animated child porn and child sex dolls/robots could probably act as a reliable substitite for some such people, especially the virtuous ones, but Yeah, the rest should be castrated, either physically or chemically. I just oppose castration in those cases where cartoons and dolls/robots are an acceptable long-term substitute for them.
I doubt the first scenario because people tend to notice missing children and murder is difficult to get away with. Also, they’d need to keep killing children to satiate their sexual appetites and that increases the chances of being caught.
Hard disagree with animated children’s pornography or any other substitute. It’s legitimizes pedophilia and encourages satisfying perverse sexual urges. It is not a victimless crime but a crime that has wide reaching and diffuse effects. Your stance remind me of the harm reduction drug proponents. I oppose enabling drug users too for many of the same reasons. Some things are bad in and of themselves and should be stringently punished by society, including through execution or other serious punishment by the state. Having children has only reinforced this belief.
I just believe some urges should never be acceptable.
One more thing. I hate the political effort to parse pedophiles into different types. Is so wrong. It’s trying to make some abuse seem less problematic.
Well, I think that from an evolutionary perspective, it would be more unusual to be attracted to a prepubescent minor than to a pubescent minor. But Yeah, still a violation of the law either way.
Interestingly enough, Richard Hanania has previously defended women who have sex with underage male minors and argues that it should be decriminalized:
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/hitler-demi-moore-and-other-pedophiles
He argues that it should be OK because the underage boys aren’t traumatized by this experience. Well, by that logic, I guess that it should also be legal for underage boys to sext older men in exchange for money just so long as they won’t be tramatized by this either, right?
FWIW, I disagree with Hanania’s logic here, but ultimately, if one accepts a strict reading of the harm principle, then that’s where his logic down the rabbit hole goes.
I read his article and found it interesting and somewhat persuasive. I do agree with him that it may be less traumatizing for a boy to be raped or molested by a woman because I believe men and woman are fundamentally different and so necessitate different treatment at times. However, if taking this stance weakens protections against male on female pedophilia (which it also does in my opinion), then I’d oppose it.
Children are too precious and innocent to give women leeway to have sexual with boys.
Pre-pubescent children are not sexual beings, but that doesn’t mean that one can’t be attracted to them without harming them. Pubescent children are sexual beings in the sense that they can have sex with each other but generally not with adults.
The last such execution in the UK was actually in 1835.
There is already essentially enslavement.
>Enslavement
This risks creating a constituency of capitalists who may lobby to imprison more people in order to get more free labor
You realize the ship has sailed on this one already, yes? Private prison companies can sue the state for breach of contract if enough people are not imprisoned.
Let's not make it worse then
I thought I was a "member" of the SDS back in the 60s at the University of Colorado. . (Really,. I was just another tool being used by a bunch of rich kids who felt guilt because they drove around distributing a radical newspaper in their Cadillac (really! )). My contribution to the movement was ripping the conservative cartoons off the door of a professor's office. Not that they weren't funny but just the fact the he was poking fun of the things "we" all thought were true. I (like the guys who burn Teslas) was just another idiot. But, the purpose of what I was doing was indeed to terrorize the professor who insulted all of "us" letting him know that the fragile society was crashing.
The writer of this note really needs to experience a dose of terror himself so he has a grasp how how fragile civilized life is. Society has lots of people who will do crazy things if they think there is no punishment for what they do. (Me, I learned a little bit abut reality through a long trip to Southeast Asia wearing a pickle suit. Like I said, society is fragile.) If the loonies aren't smacked down, they will continue to do bad things because they CAN. A year in an El Salvadoran maximum prison would teach them a lot about how fragile civilization is.
Your comment got a bit convoluted. Are you saying that ripping down some cartoons generates enough terror that it should be punished by a year in supermax?
If so, isn't that basically North Korean state policy?
pickle suit?
1969-1971 US Army. Almost everyone wore green fatigues. Hence the term pickle suit. I don't know when Army switched to camouflage fatigues but it was after i got out.
All governments inherently have the death penalty. The death penalty, in many transfigured forms, is the thing that makes a government a government. The sole and exclusive right to control the application of death within its physical boundary.
When a government classifies rape and murder as a crime that cannot be punished by death, what we are forgetting is that *it still maintains other crimes as worthy of death*. For example, disobeying a cop. In MAID states, the government has functionally ruled that it can’t kill you for murder but can kill you for being sick as long as you consent first.
Obviously this isn’t a binary argument but trying to remove the death penalty for barbarous acts of wanton murderous violence at the same time the government still retains the ability, as you say, to execute you for resisting arrest after setting fire to a unoccupied Tesla car, indicates a profoundly disordered state
That’s not necessarily a problem I mean a domestic terrorist act does not end of itself warrant put people to the needle I mean, it would definitely warrant locking them up most people I have talked to in life who are in favour of the death penalty are usually for strictly for removing murders and rapists from society, not people who do property damages those people you just lock up another thing one might want to consider is that it’s not always obvious at least it’s not obvious to me that my tax tax dollars should be used to keep mass rapists and murderers fed for the rest of their life, keeping people in prison. It’s not free and it’s not like all the money comes from a magic hat
The US safely had the death penalty for a very long time.
Capital punishment is meant as a deterrent. Hang one guy for stealing horses, and nobody will want to steal a horse. Hang 'em for rape. Nobody will think about raping a girl. Hang 'em for murder, and nobody will think about killing another person in anger.
Capital punishment was a public spectacle for one reason: to teach people the cost of committing a crime.
If it actually worked that way in practice, it might be justified, but the threat of execution doesn't actually seem to be a particularly effective deterrent. The problem is that most crimes are committed by people who are bad at thinking ahead.
The threat of execution in the US today is almost non-existent. The fastest execution in the country this century was sentenced two years after he was apprehended and executed four years later. McVeigh killed almost two-hundred people, nineteen of whom were children, and injured almost seven hundred. Three-quarters of a century earlier, Giuseppe Zangara was executed for assassinating Chicago mayor Anton Cermak less than a month after being apprehended. The only reason this is the case is because of generations of pro-criminal activism, all of which has been done in the name of a false, and increasingly empirically indefensible, view of humanity, that unfortunately appeals heavily to activists and those who either instinctively support activists or whom would like to become them. We never should have listened to these people, and should treat them like the pro-crime activists they are. They are bad people who have made our country worse for the sake of a corrupted, suicidal empathy that is neither deserving of tolerance nor respect.
I conjecture it would be useful to deter murders by prison gangs like the Mexican Mafia.
It's not effective because it's so rarely used. Execute a lot more people, and more people will be scared of getting executed.
How many people are making the calculation that 20 to life in prison is an acceptable risk, but the death penalty isn't? There's a point of diminishing return on deterrence, especially the person is either acting in the heat of the moment or expects to get away with it (the combination of which I suspect make up most of crime)
So goes the theory, which might be true for some cases where people are premeditating theft, rape, or murder. But when someone acts on impulse without thinking about the consequences, capital punishment will not deter the perpetrator.
It’s a start.
Did hanging people for rape result in no rapes being committed?
the question would not be whether none were committed but whether fewer were committed.
I am responding to a comment saying "Nobody will think about raping a girl."
The risk of wrongful conviction, combined with the uniquely final and irreversible nature of the death penalty, is enough for me to oppose it. Maybe there are a few scumbags who deserve to die, but even one wrongfully executed person is still too many for my conscience. With wrongful imprisonment, at least there remains a lifetime of hope for being set free and starting a new life.
What turned me against the death penalty is that I learned about the frequency of wrongful convictions and wrongful executions. We will convict innocent people in the future. It’s unavoidable in my opinion.
This is my only real reservation.
"With wrongful imprisonment, at least there remains a lifetime of hope for being set free and starting a new life."
And getting huge compensation from the government for one's wrongful imprisonment!
Every penalty has a risk of wrongful conviction, and the only reversible penalties are monetary ones.
But what about the risk in the other direction? Wrongful clemency? Not only the terrible miscarriage of justice, but the entirely preventable crimes that the people who are relieved of their sentence, or whom were given an unduly light sentence, or no sentence at all, go on to commit afterwards? Imagine if Hitler was executed after the beer hall putsch? Or if Lenin was arrested and executed after his original failed couple attempt on the provisional government in July of 1917? Or Castro after his attack on Moncada in '53? Or Yahya Sinwar after his arrest in '89? All four would've been more than justified, and we're still not done paying the price for not solving the problem earlier when it would've been easier.
This isn't to say I necessarily recommend a trial. In many cases, a jury trial is actually quite unjust, and unwarranted. I certainly don't see why it's a good idea to hold a jury trial for terrorists rather than a fact finding mission, a tribunal, and then an execution. This puts me quite far to the right by modern standards, but just because my idea's unpopular doesn't mean the rightness of jury trials for shit like terrorism was ever a good idea. We've made a mockery of justice trying to fit everything into a single mold like this.
This brings up to me “innocent until proven guilty.” Many people are acquitted who are fully guilty on purpose and by design of our legal system.
Do people actually agree with this policy/ideology? I suspect many people haven’t really thought about it too much -or- maybe uncritically agree with it somewhat due to “social desirability bias.”
There's always a tradeoff. I don't want things to just be as easy as "the state can arrest and sentence anybody they like to whatever they want". But every protection which grants rights to criminal suspects and convicts by definition makes it harder for guilty as well as innocent people to be found guilty.
The Warren and Burger courts clearly went way too far in the direction of enabling criminality. Sadly, they were far from alone, as the same happened in different ways throughout the First World and Latinoamerica. But just because many people made bad decisions rather than few doesn't make said bad decision more defensible.
My point was very specifically about the choice between death and lifelong imprisonment. Hypothetically, I suppose that a timely sentencing of Hitler, Lenin, or whomever to life in prison would have had the same preventive effect as a timely execution. On this particular question, I don’t see a significant “risk in the other direction.”.
No, political prisoners escaped all the time in Tsarist Russia.
Escapes from today's maximum-security prisons are extremely rare.
Winston Moseley, the guy who killed Kitty Genovese, escaped custody and raped an additional woman.
Hitler, Lenin, Castro, and Sinwar are hardly isolated incidents. All four of the scenarios I outlined happened in different decades, in different countries, after extraordinarily bold crimes that both historically and presently have warranted execution. All four men were either apprehended or apprehendable by the legitimate authorities of their times for specific capital offenses. Not for some time-travel, kill-baby-Hitler scenario. Sinwar's case is particularly the most contrary to your point, as he had served twenty-two years in prison before he was released as part of the Shalit exchange. Even in the contemporary U.S., that's about how long on average it takes to run out of enough of the mandatory roadblocks to be executed. If ever there were even the most charitable case for your point, this should be it. But it wasn't. It just proved the opposite. The Israelis should've executed Sinwar via tribunal back in the '80s after catching him. Their not doing this led directly to both October 7th and the war in Gaza.
They are however extreme incidents. Most people will never come close to causing as much damage as those four. But you shouldn't need to be at the badness level of a HAMAS hitman or a socialist terrorist to warrant execution. We need to more frequently execute people for lesser offenses as well to prevent whatever the closest they'll manage to October 7th is, even if it's as simple as a murder over twelve-hundred dollars of drugs:
https://nypost.com/2024/12/08/us-news/shaurn-thomas-awarded-4-1m-over-wrongful-murder-conviction-confesses-to-separate-killing/
If they had executed Hitler after the Beer Hall Putsch, the geopolitical situation in Europe that was arguably caused by American intervention in the First World War would have continued to make it likely for somebody to take Hitler's role in history. Preventing that situation would have required the execution of Woodrow Wilson before he became president of the United States, I suppose.
I am not being entirely facetious there. My point is that your policy of preventively killing all the right people at the right time would require more knowledge than any human being can have as history unfolds in real time. In an economic context, Friedrich Hayek warned us of the false pretense of knowledge that leads to tyranny.
This didn't require much knowledge. By giving an extremely lenient sentence to a criminal who attempted to violently overthrow the state and seize power for himself; you both incentivize worse behavior from him, his followers, and his enemies; and make it more likely that said worse behavior in the future will be more rewarding to said bad actors. This is elementary common sense, which is why when the Nazis csme to power, they killed and arrested the sort of people most likely to do to them what they themselves had done to seize power.
The issue with American intervention in WWI was that we didn't go far enough and finish the conflict in the East with the Siberian expedition. Nor were we sensible enough to so much as hold military victory parades in the German streets so the enemy knew they were beaten, nor to partition the Kaiserreich into its constituent monarchies to lower the chance of future revsnchism. A far worse and more brutal partition undid Nazi Germany, but for all you can say about it, it worked completely at neutralizing the threat of further German-led belligerence for almost a century thereafter.
Very conflicted on this issue but great piece as always, Richard. The global trends, though, are exceedingly clear: the death penalty is on the way out. The abolition of the death penalty may well be considered a landmark in a state arriving at the end of history. The Trump administration’s actions have repulsed much of the better half of the country. Speaking with respect to practical politics, how do you intend to reconcile EHC to capital punishment? Surely, if you want them to move closer to libertarianism, it would be wise to balance priorities and emphasise a libertarianism that overlaps with left-liberalism on such social issues? Thanks once more!
"The global trends, though, are exceedingly clear: the death penalty is on the way out"
In so far as you have observed what is happening globally, I think you are correct.
However - this reminds me a little too much of the "be on the right side of history" argument that the Left throws at us far too often. I don't know if your intention was to suggest this - but I wish to question it either way.
In the UK, where we have not had the death penalty for many years, support for its reintroduction is very nuanced. For example, Google "Britons don’t tend to support the death penalty… until you name the worst crimes "
Whilst we are opposed to its reintroduction for "all cases of murder", the reverse is true for multiple murders, terrorism, and child murderers. And it's been consistent.
At the risk of being accused of populism, "global trends" that are this consistent are often synonymous with government by oligarchy with the (not too convincing) illusion of democracy. And as we have seen in many countries recently, such government often creates a pressure for change that bursts out suddenly.
The idea that they can never be reversed, that there is a long arch of "inevitable human progress" needs pushback.
I recall the late Mark Kleiman saying the UK lacked the death penalty despite it being popular because educated people had more influence in their political system. But the General Social Survey in the US shows people support it at all education levels https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2010/09/12/support-for-the-death-penalty-by-education/ I think the UK got rid of it while the EU was growing to incorporate them, as the EU prohibits it. But they might bring it back post-Brexit.
Executing Muslim terrorists is counterproductive because that's exactly what they want. Specifically to get their 72 virgins in Paradise. Aggressively torturing them and forcing them to eat pork and other non-halal food items would be much more effective.
Muslim terrorists want to die, assuming they do want to die, in glorious suicide attacks while killing infidels. When being arrested and sentenced, they always fight for the lightest sentence they can manage. You sure didn't see Dzokhar Tsarnaev go, "yeah, I confess to everything! Please sentence me as quickly as possible so I can enter paradise as a martyr! I'll forgoe all appeals!" Nor have we seen this of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. Nor of Umar Abdulmutallab.
Fair point. So, if we want to punish them, why not torture them to the extent that the law allows before executing them? For instance, we could push SCOTUS to adopt a 1789 reading of “cruel and unusual punishments” and thus push to re-allow flogging for serious offenses.
I do think getting rid of flogging was a mistake, but I also think the main value for execution is to permanently rid ourselves of intolerably troublesome individuals. If we're gonna be making major changes anywhere related to terrorists, I'd rather it be in the abolition of jury trials for terrorist offenses and their replacement with a fact-finding mission and tribunal for their execution. Flogging would work more as a substitute for jail terms, but one that still provides robust enough of a punishment as to have some deterrent effect without the time and resource sacrifice of prison terms.
How would you deal with the risk of wrongful convinctions? Would you use fact-finding missions? Because I wouldn’t necessarily trust those in red states.
No offense, but I don't think you know a lot of Muslims if you think forcing them to drink alcohol and eat bacon would be a torturous punishment. It's unclean, sure, but it's not morally odious in the same way it would be morally odious to force a Catholic to sexually assault someone.
Would forcing Muslims to have gay sex be better?
It would certainly be more cruel and odious, if that is your goal. Whether you think it would be better is up to you.
The biggest risk with the death penalty is wrongful convictions, IMHO. Look at Cameron Todd Willingham, for instance. And of course the possibility that an illiberal state could apply it to the wrong kinds of crimes. Richard Hanania endorses adult women having sex with underage male minors, for instance. Imagine if we had the death penalty for this! I suspect that he would oppose this!
Of course, if one truly wants to make criminals suffer, then why stop with just executing them? Why not also torture them beforehand?
Wrongful convictions can happen with ANY penalty.
Yes, but the death penalty is irreversible. At least after a long wrongful prison sentence one can get huge financial compensation.
Thanks for the response. Like I said, I’m very conflicted about this issue so I don’t think abolitionism is necessarily on the right side of history. But the end of capital punishment has been nearly as certain as demographic transition in developed countries, for better or for worse. You’re right that it is a kind of elite virtue signalling (a luxury belief of sorts). While abolition in the West was often grossly anti-democratic (think the late Robert Badinter ending the guillotine in France when support was still at 60 percent), elites support and elite-strivers quickly adopt these beliefs. Given that Hanania would like these elites to abandon overtly statist-collectivist policies, I was merely questioning the wisdom of playing up these issues. Reintroduction will in my view be near impossible as Trumpism will likely polarise half of the West against politics of this kind. You also overestimate, I think, the extent to which right-wing elites would be eager to take this issue up, given that it will almost certainly be a cudgel for intra-elite competition on the right. Thanks again.
Japan retained the death penalty even though it had below replacement births before most countries.
The dignity of the human being is the only truth we possess. Everything else is uncertain and will always correspond to a procedural truth in court. The court follows complex rules and orders that sometimes seem unjust, but we must hold fast to this one truth. If we abandon it, we abandon humanity. The question is: To whom does our life belong? Does it belong to us, or can it ever belong to a state that can judge it? The human being possesses the ability to decide over their own life and death; that is what makes them autonomous. Even the convicted murderer and sexual offender must be allowed to retain their dignity; it is inviolable because it transcends the law and is deeply rooted in the self-understanding of human existence. It distinguishes an animal from a human. It is a human invention and thus an expression of civilization. The death penalty is an instinct, and that is all it is.
I totally agree. I see it as a gross overreach of state power to end the life of an individual under controlled circumstances. In war, enemies are killed but that is only because they cannot be safely captured. Whenever feasible they are taken hostage because human life is dignified and has meaning. To me, the death penalty is just senseless killing even if the individual has no possibility of redemption
I'm with Steve Pinker: "dignity" is stupid.
It's not a moral outrage that we set the maximum punishment at lifetime confinement. It sucks to be in prison for your entire life and it's a fitting consequence for the worst crimes. Maybe we're just numb to it, but you'd probably struggle to imagine anything you'd trade for a lifetime in prison.
You've preempted this a bit, but liberal democracies have rules against amputating, lobotomizing, torturing, or raping criminals - death is strictly worse than all of those things. If you're concerned that the incarcerated can masturbate to their crimes, we can compromise at chemical castration (I'm sincerely fine with this).
It's no surprise that the worldwide trend is always towards abolition, and countries that abolish capital punishment never bring it back. It's in the same category as sentencing offenders to 1000 lashes, just a difference in degree - like you said, it's a rightoid indulgence and a sign of societal barbarism. What's the point of indulging that, even for the worst offenses? You start with an anecdote about a horrific crime that you routinely think about, but for most high-profile crimes, you probably wouldn't know if the perpetrator was in prison, on death row, or already executed.
Can you guess whether El Chapo is in prison, or dead/on death row? What about Fujimori? What about the leaders of the Khmer Rouge? Drug lords and dictators who murder thousands of people could be facing life sentences rather than an execution, and most wouldn't know. Any sense of cosmic injustice is totally artificial.
Also, the first title was better ("The Death Penalty Should Be Our Last Rightoid Indulgence"). You should change it back.
“Also, the first title was better (‘The Death Penalty Should Be Our Last Rightoid Indulgence’). You should change it back.”
I used a new feature where you can A/B test titles and go with the one that has a higher open rate. This title one.
I’d rather be executed than be sodomized and tortured for the rest of my natural life. The death penalty isn’t worse than lots of things.
It's somewhat beside the point, but I wasn't referring to a *lifetime* of torture or sodomy as punishment, any more than I was referring to a lifetime of lashing. Even a single lashing, torture, or sodomy qua punishment is categorically prohibited in every civilized country.
Singapore is certainly civilized and almost all male prisoners are caned. The exception is those who are condemned to death- they are not caned. The prisoner is caned on one day if medically fit. If not fit his sentence is doubled. Singapore has a very low 2 year recidivism rate-22%.
Actually, flogging has never been held to be unconstitutional. It was a common punishment at the time the Eighth Amendment was ratified and still in common use at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified.
If you use the evolving standards approach, it would be held to be unconstitutional, but if you use the original meaning, maybe not. If a state brought flogging back, it might be upheld.
Depends on whether you use a 1787 or a contemporary reference point. Chris Green talks about the sense-reference distinction in one of his articles. "Unusual" meant "contrary to long usage", so from a contemporary reference point, flogging would indeed be "unusual", but not from a 1787 reference point.
Yes, this is the issue that I see here. If one *really* wants bad people to suffer, then why stop at the death penalty? Why not aggressively torture them as well, at least to the extent that the law will actually allow for this? We can bring back flogging, for instance, if SCOTUS will actually allow for this.
Killing someone merits death. We don't have any penalties severe enough for someone who commits multiple murders.
> and countries that abolish capital punishment never bring it back
SCOTUS declared it unconstitutional in the US, then reversed.
> It's in the same category as sentencing offenders to 1000 lashes, just a difference in degree - like you said, it's a rightoid indulgence and a sign of societal barbarism.
On the contrary, per Greg Clark it's what caused England to progress out of Malthusianism.
“We sometimes hear news stories of families that don’t want the person who killed their relative to be executed…”
Wypipo, amirite? The same moral instincts that lead to wokeism, e.g., “trans women are beautiful”, etc.
Actually, more like the same moral instincts that lead to anti-abortion, pro life sentiments.
The Catholic Church is against capital punishment for the same reason it is against abortion: the sanctity of human life.
Not wanting horrendous criminals to be sentenced to execution appears to be a common sentiment in Japan too, at least for the more publicized crimes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetsuya_Yamagami#Reactions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshiyuki_K%C5%8Dno_(victim)#Later_activism
Liberal sympathy for criminal psychopaths truly is grotesque. I am pro-choice and identify as a progressive but writing a human interest story about someone who committed the most unthinkable crime is deranged. I can not understand how someone can think this to be acceptable: https://www.newsweek.com/steven-hayes-connecticut-linda-mai-lee-2021341
Whether the death penalty brings closure to victimized people or not is understudied, but there is evidence that it’s not working and we know for a fact it is not a deterrent to crime: https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=5144&context=mulr
It seems that a lifetime of fantasy about retribution fueled by human instinct & creative media creates very strong feelings in this space. I have changed my mind many times over the years. I doubt we will ever find a grand agreement based on logic & scientific research, so what’s left? I’m not sure except to say that if our legal system is never going to be fixed so that justice is accurate, apolitical & evenly adjudicated, then how can we justify killing other human beings? Your arguments in this space are woefully immature & privileged
Singapore executes drug dealers and it is both moral and effective. So agree to disagree on that one.
Wonder how Hanania himself would feel about that.
Im guessing he would be against it. He says in the article that he thinks it would a travesty to execute a drug dealer just because a customer of theirs over-dosed.
The problem I have with the death penalty is that you are imposing an absolute punishment within a fallible system. Every time the system gets it wrong then it’s the system and, therefore, the people committing murder. The two murderers referenced in your excellent post should be kept in the harshest possible conditions allowed by law and not pandered to in any way. The regime should be harsh and unrelenting.
Yeah, it’s a difficult point Andy and one I’ve struggled with a few times. As far as I can remember, the Innocence Project has yet to be proven wrong which is troubling. And yet, with the two murderers whose actions you detail in your post certainly bring out a desire to just end them.
The Innocence Project mostly uncovers legal technicalities rather than actual innocence. A lawyer who actually got a guilty person sprung that way talked about it a ways down in this book review https://web.archive.org/web/20230529075039/https://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/review-of-the-collapse-of-american-criminal-justice-by-william-j-stuntz/
The first part of your argument makes sense - the fallibility of the justice system.
But applying that logic later: a punishment with "the harshest possible conditions" imposed upon somebody who is later found to be innocent seems to me to be a comparable tragedy to an innocent man being hanged.
Yes - the innocent could be freed and compensated, but how much can money really make up for anything?
Death is a uniquely final and irreversible punishment. Its unique finality and irreversibility should make it off limits to a fallible justice system.
My point was that being jailed for years in harsh conditions is also final and irreversible.
You can release someone - but you can't give them their years back. You can't erase the possible beatings and prison rapes they've suffered.
I think if a country is in the business of meting out punishment, it has to understand that even without the death penalty its punishments are not generally "reversible if an error is found later".
You can at least give them an extraordinarily massive sum of money, if necessary, in the millions, to compensate them for this post-exoneration. That's certainly not nothing! It's quite a lot, in fact!
Meanwhile, if they get executed, then they don't get anything at all!
I'll say again that death is _unique_ in its _absolute_ finality and irreversibility. It belongs to a separate category from even decades of wrongful imprisonment, after which one can at least say, "Today is the first day of the rest of my life."
Those lost years are irreversible. And if you are incarcerated long enough to die of natural causes (which is the case for most people sentenced to death), you have lost your life there in just as irreversible a way.
You can repeat yourself if you wish - but it doesn't make your assertion any more valid than the first time round.
There are plenty of fates that many people would consider worse than death. Indeed, this is one reason why medically assisted dying is such a hot issue - because such fates can and do happen to people.
I read of one prisoner in a South African jail - the lone white man among hundreds of black prisoners. He was locked up for a relatively minor offence - and had to suffer repeated rapes over months before he was finally released. As a final insult, he was diagnosed as HIV positive.
This is an extreme case in a different jurisdiction - but it illustrates the naivety of thinking that imprisonment is reversible. Given the choice of his fate or a bullet through the head, I'd take the bullet.
Put a man among the hardened criminals and lifers, and you may very well destroy the human being that was there at the start of the incarceration.
Cops are aloud to shoot criminals on the street. It's not "off limits" because death would be final & irreversible, and caps are fallible. Otherwise people could just run around killing people (and any cops who tried to stop them).
I don't apply the same standard of ethical judgment to a police officer using lethal force out of unavoidable necessity that I do to a criminal court sentencing someone already in custody. When the matter has become a court case, there is no longer an unavoidable necessity.
In a court case we can be much more sure, reducing the fallibility you're worried about.
Even so, the system is still too fallible for me to be OK with the death penalty as a permissible option.
“But there’s no ethical system that can justify this.” As a Critical Rationalist (Popperian) would point out, epistemologically speaking, there is no possibility of “justifying” anything due to introducing an infinite regress (i.e., each justification must be justified and so on). But this doesn’t mean you can’t argue for your point of view as long as you are open to criticism/testing.
How can you argue for something that cannot possibly be justified?
You argue for it and then see if it withstands criticisms.
But on your view all the criticisms are necessarily unjustified. And regardless, your original point is necessarily unjustified, so seeing if it withstands criticisms is totally irrelevant. So there's no point in arguing for anything.
Yes, it’s true that justifications of theories are impossible (including Critical Rationalism itself—it’s recursive), but that doesn’t mean truth doesn’t exist independently of our inability to justify it. Truth exists independently of justifications (although our theories can be explained). But our theories do need to withstand criticism/testing to see if they survive (an attempted falsification). Even then, we are stuck with an unjustified theory.
(1) Doesn't the survival method suffer the same problem of infinite regress? Suppose I have a theory X which survives testing Y. For the test to mean anything it must be the case that Y is an appropriate attempted falsification of X: call this appropriateness Z. But Z requires testing W, which requires testing the appropriateness of W....
We can't get out of this by suggesting the general theory of testing has itself been subject to testing, because we need a justification that Y specifically is appropriate to X.
(2) Suppose we have a way of avoiding problem (1): the survival of X of testing Y is meaningful in some way. Is X now *more justified*? Or how else do we describe our increased credence in X? If justification is allowed to vary by degree such that we have more justification for some beliefs than others, then it appears Critical Rationalism reduces to the trivial insight that we cannot be *certain* (perfectly justified in believing) of X.
Justification does not vary by degree, as justification is logically impossible. Criticism/testing only demonstrates that our theories can withstand attempted falsifications and *may* be closer to the truth. E.g., if it appears that all swans are white and we come across a black swan, then the theory that all swans are white has been falsified (unless it turns out, e.g., that the black swan was merely covered in soot, etc., which could also be tested). In the event that non-white swans are never seen, then it is an unfalsified theory that all swans are white.
It is not a trivial insight that justification is logically impossible because the justificationist mentality (even when it is conceded that certainty is not possible) often leads to dogmatism and the “manifest truth” doctrine (i.e., belief as a psychological state based on the delusion of inductive reasoning). How many times do we hear people say that such and such has not been justified?—as if such a thing were possible. On the other side is someone who thinks such and such has been justified. We must be satisfied with aiming for the truth while knowing that epistemological justification/induction is impossible. That’s a step beyond conceding certainty is impossible.
Too many innocent people are sentenced to death. That's all you need to know to oppose the death penalty.
That is the first thing that came to my mind. But what about cases about which there is absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind (e.g., indisputable video evidence, multiple reliable witnesses, unforced admission of guilt from the perpetrators)? Essentially, allowing a considerable number of false negatives but zero false positives? Even with that criterion, I question whether I could execute someone, even if that person tortured and killed someone I loved. Taking a life does not bring back someone who was murdered. But I might be okay with the justice system doing the execution. I don't know; I have a lot of conflicted feelings about this disturbing issue.
Would you also be OK with the justice system aggressively torturing them before executing them?
Too many guilty murderers aren't executed. That's all you need to know.
Know to conclude what?
We need to execute more.
I consider the "you're no better than them" argument to be a fallacy - because legally sanctioned executions can pass the moral test of Universalisation.
That is to say: If everyone killed either nobody at all, or only those who had been found guilty in a court of law and sentenced to death, there would be no murders.
So by going through due process and doing our very best to ensure both prior guilt, and that the crime is sufficiently egregious, we have massively distinguished ourselves from those who pick on innocent victims.
A country could in theory become completely free form murders yet still have the death penalty on the statute book - and nobody would be killed. But if the reverse happens - the death penalty is removed - murders can (and do) continue. This should conclusively demonstrate that murder and execution are not morally equivalent.
Engaging in sadistic impulses is not good for us humans. It may bring short-term satisfaction, but it coarsens our character, desensitizes us to cruelty and makes us less receptive to the gentler and more sublime aspects of the human experience.
If the death penalty had any utility in deterring violent crime and thus saving lives, then maybe it would've been worth it. But it doesn't really help anyone.
In these situations I often think of the teachings of Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun and a writer.
When you read about a horrible crime or an injustice and your heart is filled with pain and outrage, just let the emotion be there, without wallowing in it. Look at it within your body, and think about all the other people who must be feeling the same way. Stay there with a broken heart. It will soften you. We tend to run away from painful emotions, either by attempting to suppress them, or by indulging in anger and hatred towards the putative cause of pain. Smart people in particular tend to escape from their emotions by intellectualizing them. But staying with a broken heart is what engenders compassion.
Chodron is probably much better at putting it down. A recommended reading.
Out of curiosity, what is your acceptable level of risk that, in a country with the death penalty, the state will kill an innocent person who was wrongfully convicted? For example, some people would be okay with the death penalty being around as long as the state executed fewer than 1 innocent person for every 1,000 guilty people. What would be your acceptable ratio?