Comments Elsewhere

Brandon Berg: Doesn’t the same logic apply to imprisonment? The state imprisons far more innocent individuals than it executes, and while it’s worse to be executed than to be imprisoned for twenty years and then released, imprisonment is still irreversible. A person may be released from prison, but one who has whiled away his youth in a cell can never really be made whole again.

I’m not a big fan of arguments from the possibility of innocence (plenty of innocent people are killed; but I think the death penalty is morally indefensible even when the condemned is clearly guilty as hell). But I don’t understand the argument that you’re making here. It’s true that you can’t get back the time lost while you were unjustly incarcerated, or undo the pain that was inflicted on you by the incarceration itself. But it’s not true that nothing can be done toward making you whole again: besides being released, you can also be compensated for the wrongful harm that was done to you. Whether or not that can ever fully make up for the wrong done you, it’s more than can be said for judicial murder of the innocent: there’s no possible compensation for the wrongfully executed. (Their estates can be paid off, but so what?) So how do you go from pointing out that no policy offers 100% restoration to the wronged to a defense of a policy that absolutely guarantees 0% restoration of the wronged?

Or, to put an AnCap spin on it, suppose you’re choosing between two privately-governed communities: One in which you have a .01% chance of being murdered and a .001% chance of being executed unjustly, or one in which you have a .02% chance of being murdered and no chance of being executed unjustly. Which do you pick?

I don’t know; I figure it depends in part on what you value in a society. But I think that this question actually changes the subject rather than responding to Sean’s point, anyway. He is not making a claim about what sort of society you should prefer to live in if you had to choose one. He’s making a claim about what you, personally, are or are not entitled to do: you are not entitled to commit premeditated murder, whether or not it helps produce the sort of society in which you would like to live. Now, maybe you think that he’s wrong about that; if you’re a strict consequentialist, for example, then one of the things you probably have to reject is the idea that, body count being equal, there’s any moral difference between doing murder and failing to prevent murder. But if so, that’s the point at which the argument needs to strike; offering two hypothetical societies for choice is just going to sidestep the point that Sean was explicitly trying to make.