[Part 1 was posted earlier today, here]
Notwithstanding my doubts about the foregoing justifications for capital punishment, I firmly support such punishment in cases of particularly heinous murders. My support is grounded on an alternative rationale, a rationale found prominently in the Bible. (Though I am robustly atheistic, I have long taken the view that one can profit from a good knowledge of the Bible.) We are repeatedly told in the Torah that murderers - and certain other miscreants - should be put to death so that the community can be purged of their contaminating presence. Stripped of its religious trappings, and narrowed to encompass only murders that are especially vile, this purgative rationale for the death penalty is the basis for my stance in favour of capital punishment. A community sullies itself by keeping alive certain people who have acted in such a repugnantly depraved and murderous fashion as to degrade the human species through their membership in it. By sustaining rather than ending the existence of those people, a community retains its association with them - even if they are securely locked away. The only way in which the community and the human species can be purged of the debasing evil of those people is to be purged of those people themselves. That purging never requires torture or displays of heads on pikes; instead, it requires nothing more and nothing less than executions.
Instead of focusing on the safety of the public or on the perspective of the victim, the purgative rationale for capital punishment - like the denunciatory rationale, though in an importantly different way - concentrates on the moral health of a community and of humanity more broadly. A key insight of the Bible is that we are members one of another, not only in the sense of being obligated to care for one another but also in the sense of being elevated by one another's accomplishments and lowered by one another's misconduct. When the misconduct reaches a level of grotesque iniquity, its soiling effects will intolerably linger if the person responsible for the conduct is permitted to live. The relevant community, acting on behalf of humanity, must sever all links with the person by putting an end to his life. To keep Charles Manson or Ian Brady or Frederick West in existence is to prolong the taint which the continued presence of each of them imposes on the human race. (The verbs for West should be in the past tense, of course.)
I should close with some caveats. First, I have said nothing here about procedural safeguards. Stringent safeguards should be operative in connection with the imposition of any punishment, but are clearly of special importance when the death penalty is involved. The procedural safeguards in several states in the American South - to say nothing of tyrannies such as the regimes in China and Saudi Arabia and Iran - are inadequate. If the criminal-justice officials in those states are unwilling or unable to introduce proper safeguards, then the US Supreme Court should deem their practice of capital punishment to be unconstitutional.
Second, I have said hardly anything to elucidate the distinction between crimes which warrant the imposition of the death penalty and crimes which do not. The purgative justification for capital punishment leaves plenty of room for debate over the drawing of that distinction. As should be apparent, I believe that such punishment is not warranted for any crime other than murder and is warranted for only quite a small proportion of the overall number of murders for which people are convicted in any given year. I shan't say anything more specific here. For example, I shan't here address the question whether a cold-blooded contract killing is more or less of a stain on a community than a murder fuelled by sadistic gratification derived from the infliction of a painful death on another.
Third, sheer turpitude is not sufficient to warrant the death penalty or indeed any other legal penalty. Suppose, for example, that someone yearns to torture and murder children but is too cowardly to hazard the risk of punishment for doing so. His outlook is no less depraved than that of someone who actually engages in such outrages. Nonetheless, an intolerable degree of moral contamination stems not from the hideousness of a person's outlook alone, but from the hideousness of that outlook combined with the person's responsibility for actions which have given effect to that outlook. A purgative justification for capital punishment does not suggest that we should strive to open windows into men's souls; it suggests instead that we should hold people accountable for what they have done (including what they have done to sully the species of which they are members).
Fourth, I have not sought to provide any rigorous arguments in support of my purgative focus. I believe that such arguments - relating to the worth of persons - could be put forward, with the aid of certain ideas developed in the literature on perfectionism and desert. Nonetheless, I have not endeavoured to present any such lines of reasoning here. My concern, rather, has been to delineate briefly a rationale for capital punishment that is distinct from the justifications that are most frequently invoked. Anyone acquainted with the Bible will find the purgative justification quite familiar, but its inconspicuousness in most present-day debates over the death penalty has led me to think that a terse summary of it is worthwhile. Any full-scale arguments in support of the purgative position must await another day. (Matthew Kramer)
[Concluded]