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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31395 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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my belief that the absolutist anti-death penalty stance is evil

I'm not an absolutist. Or, let me phrase it this way: to the extent that I'm opposed to the death penalty, it's not due to an overriding commitment to pacifism. If a man were to witness another man murdering his wife, for example, I would not fault him for disposing of the murderer in whatever manner he pleased. When we speak of the "death penalty" though, we aren't speaking of an impassioned response to a personal injustice; we are instead of speaking of an impersonal state apparatus, one which operates over vast distances and vast quantities of time, and which publicizes (the knowledge of) its executions as a spectacle. Now things are different.

Nietzsche said most of what needs to be said in On the Genealogy of Morality, specifically in the second essay, which deals with the historical genesis of criminal punishment:

But in particular, the creditor could inflict all kinds of dishonour and torture on the body of the debtor, for example, cutting as much flesh off as seemed appropriate for the debt: – from this standpoint there were everywhere, early on, estimates which went into horrifyingly minute and fastidious detail, legally drawn up estimates for individual limbs and parts of the body. [...] Let’s be quite clear about the logic of this whole matter of compensation: it is strange enough. The equivalence is provided by the fact that instead of an advantage directly making up for the wrong (so, instead of compensation in money, land or possessions of any kind), a sort of pleasure is given to the creditor as repayment and compensation, – the pleasure of having the right to exercise power over the powerless without a thought, the pleasure ‘de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire’, the enjoyment of violating: an enjoyment that is prized all the higher, the lower and baser the position of the creditor in the social scale, and which can easily seem a delicious titbit to him, even a foretaste of higher rank. Through punishment of the debtor, the creditor takes part in the rights of the masters: at last he, too, shares the elevated feeling of being in a position to despise and maltreat someone as an ‘inferior’ – or at least, when the actual power of punishment, of exacting punishment, is already transferred to the ‘authorities’, of seeing the debtor despised and maltreated. So, then, compensation is made up of a warrant for and entitlement to cruelty. –

The right to inflict misery - or rather, the right to know that misery is being inflicted on your behalf, the right to know that somewhere out there, people are "getting what they deserve" - is its own reward, a reward that the state so generously apportions out to citizens as an incentive for good behavior. It is straightforwardly pleasurable; there are hardly any complexities or nuances to mention here. The idea that justice is painful to those that mete it out, the idea that it is only done begrudgingly and through gritted teeth, is of course nonsense - all advocates of "justice" like to imagine themselves as the executioner. Legal executions serve as a socially acceptable, state-sanctioned outlet for cruelty that cannot permissibly find expression elsewhere. The erotic pleasure of the business itself is the operative animating impulse behind the expansion of the state execution apparatus - likely ahead of any utilitarian concerns about reducing crime, and certainly ahead of any concern for a formal, symmetrical notion of justice.

Perhaps this state of affairs is the only alternative to a society of unrestrained vigilante justice (although, if that's true, it can only be true of a given culture at a given time - many countries have abolished the death penalty without descending into madness). Perhaps this impulse - the impulse to delight in the misery of others, the impulse to pawn off one's own injustices by proxy onto the condemned - must necessarily engage in subterfuge, must necessarily take on the false appearance of "justice" while it performs its vitally important social function. But, that needn't prevent us from performing an honest analysis of its origins.

Your post adduces evidence for the view I have outlined:

I could not possibly care less who pulled the trigger, they were both responsible and should both hang. I see no plausible moral case to the contrary.

If it were about justice, why would it not matter who pulled the trigger? A life for a life - that's at least a plausible principle of justice. But "a life for an intent to take a life", or "a life for being an accomplice to someone else taking a life" - now things are no longer so clear. The fact that such nuances are of little interest to you indicates that the execution itself is the prize for you. Of course you can find other "tough on crime" advocates who don't even want to stop at murder, but are happy to advocate capital punishment for rape, assault, even perhaps petty theft in the case of repeat offenders. Is it really about justice at that point, or is it about casting an ever widening net so we have enough sacrifices to fuel the revenge machine?

Miller deserves much worse than a few minutes gasping for breath.

Are you careful to align the painfulness of any proposed execution with the amount of pain that was originally inflicted by the murderer on his victims? Or do we just have open license to abuse convicted murderers however we want, for as long as we want? If it's the latter, is that really justice? Or is your motivation something else?

If it were about justice, why would it not matter who pulled the trigger?

I hold both men equally responsible for the killing. You might have had a point if one of them was only an accomplice after the fact, but from my reading they both went into that business fully intent on murdering the staff member in question.

Hitler doesn't have to personally turn on the gas in Auschwitz to be responsible for the Holocaust.

ISTM that the reason that primates take pleasure in punishing wrongdoing is that it is group-selectively-adaptive to evolve to take such pleasure. Cue all those game-theory results (I assume you've read them, otherwise will cite) in which participants willingly pay to punish defectors even at personal cost.

Same as eating a ripe piece of fruit or seeing a beautiful flower, the pleasure in punishing the wicked might be the result of evolution creating a brain that maximizes fitness.

Are you careful to align the painfulness of any proposed execution with the amount of pain that was originally inflicted by the murderer on his victims? Or do we just have open license to abuse convicted murderers however we want, for as long as we want? If it's the latter, is that really justice? Or is your motivation something else?

It's important to note here that Nitrogen gas is now being used, because anti-death penalty ideologues have lobbied chemical and drug companies to stop supplying the materials for the prior method (lethal injection). So for anti-death penalty advocates to point to nitrogen asphyxiation as cruel is to decry the results of one's own side.

Cruel and unusual punishments were banned at the founding to move past the medieval drawing and quartering, but definition creep has reached the point where it is used to ban the death penalty by the back door. We must settle on some standard of pain that is necessary and work from there.

Well, the catch there is that places like Oklahoma did manage to screw up lethal injections in new and exciting ways.

We don’t have a very good track record standardizing pain or suffering, either.

The lethal injections were screwed up because drug companies stopped providing the drugs, right? IIRC the original lethal injection was a three drug cocktail with the killing agent being specialized potassium salt(and also a sedative and anesthetic), but as it became harder to obtain the necessary chemicals states switched to using a lethal dose of horse tranquilizer, which is less instant and humane.

Well, they had that stumble, and ended up switching to midozalam. But they also managed to inject the wrong drugs.

Shortly before Glossip's scheduled execution, the state learned that a drug supplier had sent the Oklahoma Department of Corrections a supply of potassium acetate rather than potassium chloride. Potassium chloride is the third drug prescribed in Oklahoma's lethal injection protocol.[12] An autopsy on Charles Warner's and Clayton Lockett's bodies revealed that the state had used potassium acetate during each of their executions as well, in violation of their protocol.

Fortunately, potassium acetate works just fine.

Though a nice sharp blade would work too, with less fiddling. For all its indubitably French origins, the guillotine really fits well with America -- the execution technique of the nobility, packaged and commoditized for the masses.

I'm biased here in that I find lethal injection disgusting for humanist reasons, I think it is below the dignity of a murderer to be put down like a dog, that it is more dignified to be hung or shot, to be blamed. The hanged man is a moral actor whose actions we deemed worthy of death, the lethally injectee strapped to a gurney is reduced to an object to be disposed of with minimal fuss.

Technically, there is one state where the default method of execution is shooting- Utah(technically the condemned is given a choice between the firing squad and lethal injection, but in practice every execution in Utah has chosen a firing squad).

Revealed preferences?

Mormons believe that atonement for murder requires the literal shedding of blood, so that might be part of it in some cases, given that this is Utah.

If it were about justice, why would it not matter who pulled the trigger?

Entering a criminal conspiracy to point a gun at man's head suffices for me to say that someone is morally culpable if that trigger gets pulled. Other people will draw the line in different spots. I'd be fine not executing Littlejohn, not knowing the details of the case, but I'm also fine with sentencing him to death. He was tried by a jury of his peers and sentenced accordingly. Had they decided that he was substantially less culpable due to mitigating circumstances that aren't obvious, I wouldn't really question it. The point in the Littlejohn case isn't that he absolutely must be executed, but that it's absurd to claim there was some horrible injustice done by executing him. His actions clearly and directly led to an innocent man being shot in the face and dying, execution is perfectly acceptable as a punishment.

Are you careful to align the painfulness of any proposed execution with the amount of pain that was originally inflicted by the murderer on his victims? Or do we just have open license to abuse convicted murderers however we want, for as long as we want? If it's the latter, is that really justice? Or is your motivation something else?

I think I covered this explicitly in my post - my gut feeling that someone deserves worse should be overridden and limited. It's trivial to imagine worse punishments than being put in front of a firing squad, one of the legitimate goals that I think is served with the death penalty is providing finality without becoming perverse. I am not in favor of deliberately painful executions. I have explicitly stated that I think it's immoral to deliberately condemn someone to a lifetime of physical and mental torture - executing them is the moral solution to avoid such a temptation.

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