Comments Elsewhere

“Fourth, even if we waive the preceding, we confront another problem: if executions deter crime, why confine executions to murder? Why not execute all criminals and reduce crime en masse? That seems unjust, which suggests, in turn, that deterrence theory cannot be a free-standing rationale for the DP.”

This is an excellent point, and one that death penalty advocates mostly just drop completely (I guess because they’ve already convinced themselves that murderers do deserve death—something like “an eye for an eye” seems to be about the beginning and the end of the process—and proceed without thinking that any further argument on that point is needed).

I think there’s a similar point to be made against deterrance arguments—not only that you can deter more crimes than murder using execution, but there are more ways to deter murderers than execution. For example, you could torture and/or mutilate them without killing them. If killing people after many years of imprisonment and a lengthy appeals process could deter murderers on the margin it’s hard to imagine why some medieval torment or another wouldn’t do so more or less as well. But it’s pretty widely accepted that those kind of punishments are wrong, and even that they are wrong because they do something wrong to the criminal. But what grounds do we have for thinking that any execution, even the most “humane”, is treating a criminal any better? One could make arguments to that effect (some people would rather die than suffer certain kinds of torture), but the arguments have to be made, and have to be both general and unambiguous enough to justify the death penalty as a matter of policy. It seems to me that this—like the question of what further reasons make killing-for-deterrance acceptable in cases of murder but not for just any old crime—is something that deterrance advocates just blank out.

Great post.