Ernest van den Haag    The Ultimate Punishment: A Defense

 

In this article van den Haag responds to 7 arguments against capital punishment.

 

Distribution: The death penalty is bad because it is unfairly distributed among people who are convicted of murder.

 

Response:

  1. Don’t conflate the morality of the death penalty with its unjust distribution among those who are guilty.
    1. If capital punishment is immoral then, distributing it well or poorly does nothing to change that
    2. “improper distribution cannot affect the quality of what is distributed”

 

  1. Misdistribution is no more of a problem in capital punishment than it is in any other punishment.

 

  1. Misdistribution between the guilty and the innocent is unjust, but in this case, the difference is among how we treat guilty people in different groups.
    1. Misdistribution among those who deserve it is irrelevant to justice
    2. “Guilt is personal” and is not a matter of the group that the guilty person is in.
    3. For example: Imagine that Dagmar and Gertrude both commit a crime for which they deserve the death penalty.  Dagmar is executed and Gertrude isn’t. 
    4. Whether or not Gertrude was executed has no impact on the fact that Dagmar deserved to be punished.  Say that we never find out whether or not Gertrude was executed, this does not leave us not knowing whether or not Dagmar deserves to die.

 

  1. Equality is less important, morally, than justice.
    1. We ought to distribute justice as equally as we can, even though we cannot distribute it perfectly.
    2. Imagine someone escaping from prison.  It is a miscarriage of justice that the guilty person escape, but it has nothing to do with the justice of keeping those who are left behind in jail.  Otherwise with one escape, we ought to throw open the doors of the prison.

 

  1. Haag argues that misdistribution actually favors black murderers over white murderers, because the misdistribution is explained by the race of the victim, and murders tend to kill people that are the same race as them. 

 

Miscarriages of justice: Innocent people have been executed in the past and it is likely to happen again.

 

Response:

  1. All human activities sometimes cost the lives of innocent bystanders, but we still do these activities. 
  2. IE more innocent people killed by car crashes than by mistaken executions of innocent people, yet we never argue that there ought not to be cars.

 

Deterrence: There is no conclusive evidence that capital punishment is a deterrent.

 

Reponse:

  1. Haag thinks that even if there were no deterrent value he would argue in favor of capital punishment from a retribution view.
  2. It doesn’t have to deter every one in order to deter someone. And capital punishment is worthwhile even if it just deters a few potential murderers. 
  3. It is a better deterrent than prison because of its finality.
  4. It is not worth saving the lives of murders because their execution might not deter others.

 

Relative suffering: The person sentenced to death suffers more than the victim of murder suffered and this excessive suffering is not justified.

 

Response:

  1. we don’t know how much the victims suffered
  2. the victim didn’t deserve to suffer
  3. the goal of punishment is not to offset the victim’s suffering.We don’t just put kidnappers in jail for the length of time that they held their victims

 

Encouraging brutality: By executing someone we are socially endorsing killing.

 

Response:

  1. Punishment is meant to be bad.
  2. We don’t think that imprisonment endorses kidnapping or that fines endorse robbery.
  3. The important difference is that someone deserves to be imprisoned, they don’t deserve to be kidnapped.

 

Excessive retribution: No crime, ever, can justify the death penalty.

 

Response:

  1. “Uncivilized”, “inhuman”, “conflicts with the sanctity of life”, … this is just rhetoric.
  2. This is just a statement of faith, there is no argument to contend with so we need not consider this objection.

 

Morally degrading: the death penalty is degrading for criminal.

 

Response:

  1. Hegel and Kant, not degrading, affirming the criminal’s rationality. 
  2. Now prison, that’s degrading.
  3. The criminal is degrading himself by committing the crime in the first place.

 

The upshot: Haag writes that,

“Execution of those who have committed heinous murders may deter only one murder per year.  If it does, it seems quite warranted. It is also the only fitting retribution for murder I can think of”