Some scattered thoughts on the “death penalty” that I hope helps move it beyond the usual platitudes.   Thanks for Bill Barr and Galley Slaves for getting me thinking.

The impossibility of reconciliation with the executed.  I still feel a loss because I can never reconcile with McVeigh.  I’d like to think that thirty years from now he’d admit he was wrong and try to make amends with victims’ familys on a one by one basis.  Would that make up for what he did?  Of course not, but it would help heal many families.  Even murderers have a (moral, though legally unenforcable) responsibility to reconcile with those they have hurt, which always includes more than the murdered.  The dead cannot reconcile.  Executing murderers deprives families of the murdered of the possibility of reconciliation with the murderer, a cost we should figure in if we are truly about victims’ rights.

The responsibility of spectacle.  Our current, almost secretive, painfully humane methods make executions unpublic.   There is something to be said of the honesty of a public hanging, no matter what you think of the hanging itself.  The public execution in the town square, with its rituals and pageantry, is truly public: everyone knows what the state has done that day.  And anyone who looks around at the faces in the crowd will know what people thought about it.

The right to take life.   Some of my fellow liberals hold the position that no ever one has the right to take life, a position that seems different from the pragmatic nonviolence of the Civil Rights Movement.  And then are liberals like myself who do believe (a la Bonhoeffer’s attempted assasination of Hitler, and WW2 generally) that it is sometimes morally appropriate to take life.  Truly public executions are at least honest insofar as they make clear who is killing who and why.  They’re also honest insofar as they make painfully clear that only the state/society—not the individual—has the authority to take life.  Liberals from different perspectives on who has the right to take life don’t seem to be in conversation with each other about this.

Isn’t “penalty” a sports term?  Not only that, “penalty” makes the whole discussion about whether someone deserves execution or not.   But there’s so much more at stake than that (as I hope the above points show).  If liberals want America to have a discussion that rises above the moral development level of “I didn’t do it–he did” then they should quit saying “death penalty.”  It’s an execution.  And, yes, he deserves it, because a “life for a life”—while not the most mature moral position—is still morally sound as it goes.  Let’s try and broaden the discussion a little.

The right to life.  I just don’t get the common line that murderers don’t “deserve” (there’s the word again) to enjoy a meal, watch tv, etc.  Who does “deserve” to read a book, smoke a cigarette, have sex, etc?  Honestly, what are the moral criteria for “deserving” these things, and on what are these criteria founded?  Here’s one thought on that, one that I think holds no matter how cruel or unusual you’ve been.  There are some pretty good thinkers who’ve made the case that “life imprisonment” (there’s another funny term) is more inhumane than public execution.  (If this is the case, perhaps some will want to be appointed public gloaters to enjoy, on our behalf, the hours of unceasing unenjoyment that the imprisoned suffer.)  Are we really so sure that “life imprisonment” is more “humane” than execution?