{"id":1808,"date":"2018-01-10T15:53:24","date_gmt":"2018-01-10T20:53:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=1808"},"modified":"2018-01-10T15:53:24","modified_gmt":"2018-01-10T20:53:24","slug":"death-penalty-defense-justice-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2018\/01\/death-penalty-defense-justice-ii.html","title":{"rendered":"The Death Penalty: In Defense of Justice II"},"content":{"rendered":"

In response to my recent article, \u201cCapital Punishment: A Defense of Justice<\/a>,\u201d I elicited the following objection:<\/p>\n

It is contradictory for those (like me) who claim to believe in \u201climited government\u201d to grant government the power to execute its own citizens, for (presumably) a government with such power is Big Government, and the latter, being abusive and incompetent, is all too likely to execute innocents. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Nonsense.<\/p>\n

First, only an historical-illiterate would suppose that a \u201climited\u201d government of the kind delineated in the U.S. Constitution is incompatible with the death penalty. The Founding Fathers believed in capital punishment<\/a> and made allowance for it within the Constitution.<\/p>\n

Second, fundamentally, governments exist for the sake of conserving the law<\/em>.\u00a0 More specifically, a civil association, i.e. the kind of association that the United States Constitution describes, is in its very essence a legal association: It is a system of laws.<\/p>\n

Thus, it is the principal function of governments, particularly our government, to punish <\/em>those who would siphon from our body politic its blood and guts, its laws.<\/p>\n

Due to optical considerations, this point is seldom made publically, least of all by politicians and their propagandists in the media.\u00a0 It\u2019s not pretty.\u00a0 Whether it is said that governments exist to \u201cserve the People,\u201d \u201cpromote the common good,\u201d or \u201cprotect human rights,\u201d most people prefer to trade in euphemisms, in deceptive drivel, rather than reckon with reality.<\/p>\n

Unless a government has the will and the resources to punish those within its jurisdiction who undermine its laws\u2014who attack the civil association that it governs\u2014then it isn\u2019t a government at all.\u00a0 It may be a Manager, a Therapist, an Educator, or an agent of Social Justice, but it is not <\/em>a government, a custodian and enforcer of laws.<\/p>\n

As for capital<\/em> punishment, it is arguably more essential to the system of punishment that belongs to a civil association than any other form of punishment.\u00a0 It is the cornerstone, so to speak, the apex of the system, of the association.\u00a0 By way of the ultimate penalty, the Law makes it clear in no uncertain terms that it is supreme, that it unequivocally affirms both the agency of those that it binds as well as the justice for all under its jurisdiction for the sake of which it exists.<\/p>\n

Third, if capital punishment should be abolished because government agents could make a mistake and execute an innocent person, then so too should war be abolished\u2014however powerful the evidence may be that a preemptive attack could be the only way to prevent the deaths of untold numbers of innocent lives.\u00a0 After all, government officers can and have made catastrophic, lethal mistakes in this area too.<\/p>\n

In other words, if the executioner must be relegated to the dustbin of history, then so too must the soldier.<\/p>\n

Moreover, if the moral community known as the civil association must refrain from using capital violence against those that have been convicted only after having passed through the Law\u2019s battery of procedures, then there is that much more reason<\/em> for it to refrain from ever going to war against anyone for any reason ever again.<\/p>\n

To see that this is so, ask yourselves these questions: Would it be easier to have to raise just one child or tens and hundreds of millions of children?\u00a0 The question is a no-brainer.\u00a0 It is easier to raise one child than to raise even two.<\/p>\n

Which is easier, to teach and grade ten students or 200 students?\u00a0 Again, the answer is so obvious as to render the question rhetorical.<\/p>\n

Similarly, it is vastly more difficult to make a mistake in punishing one innocent person than it is to mistakenly kill many innocents in a mass lethal attack.<\/p>\n

Actually, these analogies understate the magnitude of the disparity in risk between capital punishment and war, for in the case of the former, the Law has ample opportunity to become intimately familiar with the circumstances of one its own.\u00a0 In dramatic contrast, in the case of war, the government has to reckon with what are alleged to be the circumstances of a foreign people.<\/p>\n

Joseph de Maistre, a 19th<\/sup> century French Catholic in the conservative, reactionary tradition of thought, made these points.\u00a0 In speaking of \u201cthe executioner\u201d and \u201cthe soldier,\u201d de Maistre wrote:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe one kills the guilty, convicted and condemned, and his executions are happily so rare that one of these ministers of death suffices in a province. As for the soldiers, there are never enough of them. They must kill without limit, and always honest men [men who are as committed to fighting for their <\/em>homelands as are their enemies].\u201d<\/p>\n

De Maistre asks us to imagine that a \u201ctraveling genius,\u201d a stranger to the Earth, was told that of these two killers, \u201cone is very honored and always has been among all the nations of the world; the other is equally regarded as infamous.\u201d If he were asked, \u201cWhich of these men would be the one who was honored?\u201d de Maistre is certain that the stranger \u201cwould not hesitate a moment [to] bestow all praise on the executioner.\u201d<\/p>\n

The impartial foreign genius would answer: \u201cHe [the executioner] is a subtle being\u2026he is the cornerstone of society\u2026take away the executioner and all order disappears with him.\u201d Moreover, the executioner is a man possessed of \u201cgreatness of soul\u201d and \u201cnoble disinterestedness,\u201d for he \u201cdevotes himself to such respectable functions [.]\u201d<\/p>\n

The soldier, though, is a different matter altogether. The soldier is \u201ca minister of cruelty and injustice.\u201d The genius asks: \u201cHow many individual injustices, horrors and useless atrocities does he commit?\u201d<\/p>\n

De Maistre concludes by noting that for as thankless is the job of the executioner, it nevertheless remains the case that \u201call grandeur, all power, all subordination, rest on\u201d him; \u201che is the horror and the tie of the human association.\u00a0 Take away this incomprehensible agent and at that moment, order will give way to chaos, thrones will fall and society will disappear.\u201d<\/p>\n

There remains much truth to de Maistre\u2019s insights.\u00a0 Capital punishment, more than any other law, affirms the supremacy of the rule of law and reminds a people that they are \u201ca nation of laws.\u201d<\/p>\n

The executioner deserves as much as anyone to be thanked for his service.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In response to my recent article, \u201cCapital Punishment: A Defense of Justice,\u201d I elicited the following objection: It is contradictory for those (like me) who claim to believe in \u201climited government\u201d to grant government the power to execute its own citizens, for (presumably) a government with such power is Big Government, and the latter, being…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Death Penalty: In Defense of Justice II<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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