- εκδίκηση (backward - looking view)
- παραδειγματισμός & σωφρονισμός (forward- looking view)
https://theconversation.com/death-penalty-is-capital-punishment-morally-justified-42970
The execution, by hanging, of Yakub
Memon for his part in the 2003 Mumbai bombings invites us to
revisit the vexed issue of capital punishment. Few topics incite such moral
passion and controversy.
The world’s
religious communities are divided on the death penalty. Despite
a seemingly unambiguous commitment to non-violence (or “Ahimsa”) in both
Hinduism and Buddhism, scholars within those traditions continue to debate the
permissibility of lethal punishment. The Old Testament enjoins us to take an
“eye for an eye” – the principle of lex talionis – while the New Testament
exhorts us to “turn the other cheek”. And while Islam is generally regarded as
compatible with the death penalty, the Qur'an’s emphasis on forgiveness
suggests that Muslims should sometimes respond to evil with mercy, not
retaliation.
While many European countries
urge an ethic of rehabilitation in their criminal justice systems, many
jurisdictions in the United States stand firmly in favour of capital punishment
for serious crimes. Even a federal jury in Massachusetts, a liberal bastion,
recently doled out the death penalty to the sole
surviving perpetrator of the Boston marathon bombing. And while the United
Kingdom abandoned the death penalty in 1964 – the year of the last executions –
nearly half of the British public favours a reintroduction of it (though
that figure has been dropping steadily).
We will not make progress in
the public debate about the death penalty unless we realise that it is only one
element in a much bigger controversy: about the point of punishment itself. As
The Conversation invites us to rethink the death penalty over the next few
weeks, we must not conduct this discussion in a vacuum. Before you ask yourself
whether we should have the death penalty, consider: why hand out any
punishments at all? Considering the three main families in the philosophy of
punishment can help us organise our conversation.
Retribution
“Bad guys deserve to suffer.”
This is a blunt slogan, but it captures the essence of a deeply familiar
notion: people who have committed culpable wrongs deserve their lives to go
worse as a result. Why do they deserve it? Perhaps because it’s not fair for
the lives of wrongdoers to go well when the lives of the innocent have gone
poorly – punishment levels the playing field. Whatever the reason,
“retributivists” – those who believe in retribution – argue that the punishment
of criminals is intrinsically valuable; it is valuable in
and of itself, rather than valuable because of its good consequences (for
example, preventing future crime).
Even if punishing murderers
and thieves had no effect on reducing the overall crime rate, retributivists
tend to think it’s still the right thing to do. Retributivists also think that
the severity of punishment should match the severity of the crime. So, just as
it is wrong to over-punish someone (executing someone for stealing a pair of
shoes), it can be wrong to under-punish someone (giving him a community service
order for murder).
If you are a retributivist,
you might support the death penalty because you think that certain or all
murderers (and perhaps other criminals) deserve to suffer death for their
crimes. Depending on how you think about death, however, you might oppose the
death penalty on the grounds that it is disproportionately harsh – perhaps you
think that no matter what someone has done, she does not deserve to die for it.
On the other hand you might
oppose the death penalty on the grounds that it is disproportionately light.
Many people who opposed the recent death sentence for the Boston bomber did so on the grounds that life in a
maximum-security prison would be a worse punishment – and so more fitting –
than death.
Deterrence
“Criminals should be punished
so that they and others will be less likely to commit crime in the future,
making everybody safer.” Many people criticise retributivism on the grounds
that it is nothing but a pointless quest for barbaric revenge.
Australia withdrew its
ambassador to Indonesia after the execution, in April, of two of its nationals
for drug trafficking.EPA/Dan Himbrechts
Inflicting suffering on human
beings, if it is to be morally justified, must instead have a forward-looking
purpose: protecting the innocent from harm. If this sounds sensible to you, you
probably believe the point of punishment is not retribution, but rather
deterrence.
The idea here is familiar
enough: people face temptations to break just laws; the demands of morality and
the demands of rational self-interest sometimes seem to diverge. Threats of
punishment realign those demands by making it irrational for self-interested
individuals to break the law.
If you are a defender of
deterrence, you must answer two questions about capital punishment before
determining where you stand. The first is empirical: a question about
real-world facts. Does the threat of the death penalty actually deter people
from committing heinous crimes to a greater extent than the threat of life
imprisonment?
The second question is moral.
Even if the death penalty deterred crime more successfully than life
imprisonment, that doesn’t necessarily mean it would be justified. After all,
imagine if we threatened execution for all crimes, including minor traffic
violations, theft, and tax fraud.
Doing so would surely slash
the crime rate, yet most people would judge it to be wrong. Deterrence
theorists tend to defend some upper limit on the harshness of punishment – and
it may be that death simply goes beyond what the government is ever permitted
to threaten.
Reform
“Punishment communicates to
criminals that what they have done is wrong, and gives them an opportunity to
apologise and reform.” There are many different variants of this
view: educative, communicative, rehabilitative – and there are important
differences between them. But the basic idea is that punishment should make the
wrongdoer understand what he or she has done wrong and inspire her to repent
and reform.
Whatever version of this view
one supports, its implication for the death penalty is reasonably clear. What
is the point of a criminal reforming herself as she prepares for the execution
chamber?
To be sure, many people try to
mix and match different elements of these three broad views, though such mixed
theories tend to be unhelpfully ad hoc and can offer conflicting
guidance. Far better, to my mind, to plant one’s flag clearly and answer the
question: which view should have priority in our thinking about punishment?
Then, and only then, can we
proceed to think about the justice (or lack thereof) of governments who kill
their citizens.
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