Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Reading Religion on By Man


At Reading Religion, a publication of the American Academy of Religion, Daniel Lendman reviews By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment, which I co-authored with Joseph Bessette.  From the review:

By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed provides a trenchant and cogent presentation of the defense of capital punishment from a Catholic perspective… Feser and Bessette… insist that the legitimacy of capital punishment is the ancient and long standing teaching of the Catholic Church.  [They] go even farther, laying out a compelling case that denying that capital punishment can be legitimate in principle is proximate to heresy…

While the context of this argument is decidedly and purposefully Catholic, readers of different religions and belief systems can still find forceful natural law arguments supporting capital punishment in this book.  The authors also offer arguments claiming the prudence of using capital punishment in the United States, relying on case studies and statistical analysis.  Anyone who is interested in investigating the question of the legitimacy of the use of capital punishment, especially in the United States, would do well to entertain the many and powerful arguments put forth by Feser and Bessette.

End quote.  Lendman also remarks:

Readers should be warned, however, that there are many disturbing accounts about the crimes committed by those who have been put to death in the US.  While this reviewer acknowledges that it seems to be a necessary part of the conversation, nevertheless, the sensitive would do well to steer clear of those sections.

End quote.  That is a fair enough comment.  However, I think it is worth mentioning that Joe and I were actually very restrained in what we decided to put in the book.  Some of the details of the crimes we describe are far more gruesome and disturbing than what made it into the book. 

There is an air of sanctimoniousness and sentimentality on the part of some opponents of capital punishment that can be maintained only by ignoring the actual details of the crimes for which offenders are typically executed.  There is a tendency to treat murderers as if they are mostly like the Morgan Freeman character from Shawshank Redemption – scared and mixed-up lovable losers who never got a break in life and simply made some bad choices.  This is Hollywood, not reality.  The extreme, unimaginable depravity and sadism of the worst murderers – and the fact that anything less than a penalty of death would be a mockery of justice and an insult to the victims and their families – is evident only when one takes note of exactly what they did.  Hence the details Joe and I decided to put in the book.

28 comments:

  1. Ed,
    I have just received the proofs of Partners with God: Theological and Critical Readings of the Bible in Honor of Marvin A. Sweeney in which my article, “Natural Law Recorded in Divine Revelation: A Critical and Theological Reflection on Genesis 9:1-7,” discusses how the Noachic Covenant concept in Jewish tradition supports the Christian natural law understanding of both the permissibility of capital punishment and the prohibition of abortion. I also give a plug to the book by you and Joe Besette on capital punishment.

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  2. There is an air of sanctimoniousness and sentimentality on the part of some opponents of capital punishment that can be maintained only by ignoring the actual details of the crimes for which offenders are typically executed. There is a tendency to treat murderers as if they are mostly like the Morgan Freeman character from Shawshank Redemption – scared and mixed-up lovable losers who never got a break in life and simply made some bad choices. This is Hollywood, not reality. The extreme, unimaginable depravity and sadism of the worst murderers – and the fact that anything less than a penalty of death would be a mockery of justice and an insult to the victims and their families – is evident only when one takes note of exactly what they did. Hence the details Joe and I decided to put in the book.

    This itself evinces sentimentality, if not sanctimoniousness, as it's mainly an appeal to indignation. Of course any absolute ethical system will produce cases that make some people uncomfortable, but that's just akin to raising the standard hard case examples Fiat justitia, et pereat mundus. Those who reject the death penalty may well reject the retributive account of justice and thus the idea that penal sanctions are based on paying someone back.

    The claim 'if you knew what had happened you would be so horrified you would agree' is close to the atheist tactic of bellowing about some atrocity, usually the Holocaust prior to that the Lisbon Earthquake or children with deformities or what have you, and demanding the theist be horrified into atheism or be branded inhuman.

    (Recap for posters not familiar with my posts on the death penalty under my old username; I wouldn't rule it out a priori but am strongly against its application being based prudential factors such as deterrence)

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    1. "Those who reject the death penalty may well reject the retributive account of justice"
      If by "retributive" you mean to say the only conceivable motivation for capital punishment is a vengeful, vindictive and petty desire for blood, you're not sincerely pursuing the truth of the matter.

      Putting it technically, I think capital punishment is a means of maintaining certain moral imperatives as instantiated in reality. For a society to keep alive a murderer of the kind typically considered deserving of the death penalty would be to live as though he/she *deserves* life. But does one who takes the lives of others deserve to live irrespective of what evil he has done?

      Moreover, the death penalty is a necessary and powerful means of inculcating and sustaining societal conscientiousness. It rightly teaches growing children, for example, that people such as sadistic murderers do not in fact deserve to live with three meals a day, on the public dollar. To do otherwise is to teach children that sadistic murderers deserve not only life, but the full financial support of everyone else--including the victims of such murderers. That should be self-evidently absurd.

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  3. "This itself evinces sentimentality, if not sanctimoniousness, as it's mainly an appeal to indignation."
    No, it is an appeal to the facts of the case, and to justice. That ignoring both might lead some to appear indignant is to be expected.

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    1. You've just reiterated the point rather than adding anything. Ed presumably argues for why a retributive account of justice is preferable (he has certainly argued why Catholics should prefer them)as do other defenders of the Death Penalty such as Oderberg. It may well be the case that Hollywood presents those on Death Row in an inaccurately positive light, I don't know. But the claim that people only think X way because they haven't been horrified into truth, that people could only hold that position if they some how blinded themselves to the nature of the crimes is an appeal to sentiment.

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    2. Not at all. The point of presenting the details of this or that capital crime is to make the person considering the justness of CP confront the hideous of the crimes and thereby the justness of the punishment. To ignore the depravity that may be involved is to ignore a necessary element for consideration. It is not at all like presenting a murderer in a positive light in order to dissuade people away from CP as a matter of principle, even though both might affect our sentiment in the telling.

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  4. Wait you write books too? Just kidding.

    I agree that 'the devil is in the details' when it comes to the crimes those people committed. Honestly, I fail to see how people could fail to recognize that those men deserve death.

    You might as fail to recognize that those who give their lives, or at least risk them, don't deserve honor for what they did. (We don't honor them merely to increase the likelihood others will act similarly, but primarily because they deserved such recognition.)

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    1. That is the interesting flip side, eh? Just as everyone agrees that honour is due to a person because of their laudable action(s) so to is punishment due to a person for their depraved action(s).

      You can't have one without the other.

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    2. Indeed! I think much of modern philosophy and its worst descendent, leftism, is a desire to have something good without sacrifice.

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  5. OA,
    The purpose of the statement which you object to as sentimental is not to convince somebody of the principle of retribution. Instead, it argues that, given the principle of retribution, the justice of capital punishment in certain cases follows from the heinousness of the crimes in those cases. Ed does indeed defend the principle of retribution on other grounds, but that is not the purpose of that particular statement.
    The principle of retribution is an application of the same principle that makes it proper for a teacher to award a score of 8 to a student that answered 8 questions out of 10 correctly and a score of 10 to a student that answered 10 questions out of 10 correctly--namely to give to each person what that person deserves.

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  6. Tim Finlay

    The purpose of the statement which you object to as sentimental is not to convince somebody of the principle of retribution. Instead, it argues that, given the principle of retribution, the justice of capital punishment in certain cases follows from the heinousness of the crimes in those cases. Ed does indeed defend the principle of retribution on other grounds, but that is not the purpose of that particular statement.

    Okay, if so I stand corrected. My point though is that most persons who hold the death penalty to be wrong hold it to be intrinsically wrong - it wouldn't be a matter of amping up the horror until they finally snap and demand the guilty party be executed. The emphasis on extreme, unimaginable depravity is hyperbolic though (I seriously doubt any of these crimes are unimaginable).

    The principle of retribution is an application of the same principle that makes it proper for a teacher to award a score of 8 to a student that answered 8 questions out of 10 correctly and a score of 10 to a student that answered 10 questions out of 10 correctly--namely to give to each person what that person deserves.

    You are arguing for the identification of retributive justice with deserts here I take?

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    1. If I remember the book correctly, the point of giving the details of the crimes was to show that the penalty of death was proportionate punishment for the crime.

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    2. OA Police,

      First, yes, as others have said, the point of the examples in question is not to generate an emotional response, but rather to indicate how in some cases life imprisonment is simply not anywhere close to a proportional punishment. Also, the details of the examples are necessary in order to assess the degree of depravity and culpability of the offender.

      (This is not to denigrate reactions of horror and outrage, though. Those reactions are extremely common precisely because they reflect a normal human intellect's assessment of the gravity of the crimes, and the emotional reactions serve the natural function of prompting us to respond in an appropriate way. But again, that was not in any event the main point of citing the examples.)

      Second, you are right that many people who oppose capital punishment think it is intrinsically wrong and thus would reject an argument from retributive justice. But you are forgetting two things. First, the book is directed largely against Catholic arguments against capital punishment, and the standard Catholic arguments accept the idea that CP is legitimate in principle and simply oppose it in practice. So the point I was making is perfectly in order when directed against such people. Second, even those who oppose CP in principle usually accept the general principle that a punishment should be proportional to the offense. So what I was saying has application against those sorts of critics too, insofar as it poses a challenge to them to reconcile their commitment to proportionality with an in-principle opposition to CP>

      Third, I didn't say that the crimes were unimaginable. I said that the depravity of some offenders was unimaginable.

      Hence, for example, one of the offenders we talk about in the book killed his victim by driving a car over her head. What we didn't discuss was exactly what this involved, and how the car was backed up repeatedly over the woman, to the point woman's brain matter was blasted out through her skull, etc. There are other horrific details to this crime as well that we left out, concerning what was done to her vagina and anus.

      Now, can you imagine having the sort of character where you would be capable of doing this kind of thing to a human being, over the course of a fairly long period of time? Or consider the psychology of a person like Jeffrey Dahmer, or Eric Harris (the latter of whom seems to have had about as demonic and depraved a mind as a human being can have)? Read about the details of what such people thought and did, and you'll see what I mean by "unimaginable" depravity. Obviously I don't mean unimaginable in the strictest possible sense. What I mean is that the depravity is of the sort most human beings would find it extremely difficult to think themselves into. Most people find it hard to imagine wanting to do these kinds of things, taking pleasure in them, being capable psychologically of following through with them, etc. But they are details that must be considered when evaluating how culpable and malicious the worst offenders are. (As some of them admit. E.g. Dahmer knew that he deserved death and believed he should have gotten the death penalty.)

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  7. By the way, just the be clear the things done to the other parts of the woman's body were done before and apart from the car incident, which was simply the way the guy finally killed her. This was long and drawn out sadism, not a single act that was done in a few moments. Examples of such depravity can be easily multiplied. (E.g. read a good book on everything Dahmer did, or the Manson family did, or Gacy did, etc. etc.)

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  8. One of the main reasons people are against the death penalty is because many innocent individuals have been put to death.

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    1. But that's not an argument against executing people who deserve it but against a juridical process that makes it possible to judge someone deserving who doesn't.

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    2. One of the main reasons people are for the death penalty is because many innocent individuals have been put to death.

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    3. One of the main reasons people are against the death penalty is because many innocent individuals have been put to death.

      Gee, if only Joe and I had thought of that objection!

      Oh wait... yes, we did think of it. That's why we devote almost 20 pages in the book to answering it.

      Really, people, think before you post these glib comments.

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    4. Shows what you know. The death penalty is just the same as murder. Bet you've never heard of that before! Checkmate! Also, don't think about this for more than two seconds, since this argument can only stand under two seconds of scrutiny. Thanks.

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  9. This isn't about the death penalty but Ed's position on felony disenfranchisement.

    The purpose of the criminal justice system is this: once you've paid your debt to society, you and society are now even. So you are now in the same state as you were before you committed the crime. But supporting continued punishment after the sentence is saying "nope, you're still in debt." And that's an injustice.

    If the answer is going to be something lame like "well, felony disenfranchisement is just an extra little twist we add so you don't commit more crimes," that is compromising the core purpose of justice for a consequentialist reason.

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    1. What if felony disenfranchisement is part of your debt to society, not something you pay in addition to your debt?

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    2. That should not be possible with *malum in se* matters. The only time these kinds of extrajudicial suspensions are acceptable are when concerning *malum prohibitum* matters (e.g. drag race and get your license taken away forever).

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    3. In what way is felony disenfranchisement extrajudical?

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    4. By "extrajudicial" I mean "beyond or in addition to the main sentence itself." If the adjective is bothering you just omit it. My point remains the same.

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    5. But it's just part of the punishment, and if the punishment in total is proportionate to the offense, I don't see what the problem is.

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  10. Ed,

    Sorry this is of off-topic but now that Pope Francis has claimed Amoris Laetitia is Thomist (!), would love to hear your reaction.

    "To those who maintain that the morality underlying the document is not “a Catholic morality” or a morality that can be certain or sure, “I want to repeat clearly that the morality of ‘Amoris Laetitia’ is Thomist,” that is, built on the moral philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, he said."

    Thanks

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  11. I note the Pope seems in his public messages to advocate the seemingly erroneous view that the death penalty is intrinsically immoral?

    Well I am not worried. The Pope is infallible thus he really can't change doctrine here.

    At best he might be able to issue a discipline that is restrictive toward the death penalty but I believe Matt 16:18 and Vatican One so I wouldn't worry about it.

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