| | On capital punishment, I agree with Joe Rowlands; I disagree with Branden (and by extension Rand). I find that the traditional Objectivist position on the death penalty, which argues for a platonic, metaphysical certainty of guilt, completely contradicts the Objectivist epistemology and the requirements of both reason and justice.
If the standard of "no death penalty except in cases of absolute certainty of guilt" were epistemologically valid, then, in logic, it ought to apply to any use of deadly force. In fact, we should never use force in ways that might risk the possibility of killing innocents.
But are death penalty opponents truly prepared to make that leap?
Consider a thought experiment. You are a private, armed security guard returning home from work. You are walking down a street when someone rushes out of a building just ahead of you. Right behind him emerges a man wielding a gun. The armed man begins shooting at the fleeing man. You are shocked, thinking you are witnessing an attempted murder in progress. Instinctively, you draw your own weapon. "Stop!" you yell. The armed man continues to fire at the running man. "Stop or I'll shoot!" you scream. The gunman yells something unintelligible to you while continuing to fire. To protect the fleeing man, you fire at the gunman and hit him. He falls and then dies.
Only later do you learn that the fleeing man has just stabbed his girlfriend to death in that apartment building, and that the gunman you killed was an off-duty cop in the neighborhood who responded to a neighbor's emergency 911 call and was trying to stop the killer from getting away with murder.
Now, should you have refused to intervene until you had "perfect knowledge" of the circumstances and the gunman's guilt? Or, did you act reasonably, given the information available to you?
Far-fetched? Not really. Police often enter crime scenes and have to make split-second decisions about the use of deadly force based on woefully incomplete information. So do soldiers fighting in populated areas where innocent civilians are inherently at risk. After all, how can a police officer absolutely know that the man he told to "freeze" is reaching for a wallet or a weapon? And how can a soldier in Baghdad absolutely know that the vehicle speeding toward his checkpoint is a civilian rushing his pregnant wife to a hospital or a car bomber about to annihilate him and his buddies? How can a bomber pilot going after the armed enemy absolutely know that his bomb won't cause "collateral damage" among innocent civilians?
If deadly force shouldn't be used except in cases of "absolute" (metaphysical) certainty of guilt, and where no innocent people can conceivably be put at risk, we would find ourselves constrained to a de facto pacifism. If the view that "ten murderers should live rather than one innocent person be killed" is valid, then we should disarm our police and soldiers, because they are, unavoidably, going to accidentally kill some number of innocents while defending us against the bad guys.
Just how "absolute" was Rand's own view on this issue? You will recall that at the end of Atlas Shrugged, in rescuing Galt and Rearden, Dagny, Francisco, and Ragnar did not hesitate to act as judge, jury, and executioner on the spot. Dagny, in fact, executed a guard simply for hesitating to comply with her orders. Did she "absolutely" know this stranger and his personal context before blowing him away? Maybe he was there under some coercive inducement. Maybe he didn't know that Galt was innocent. Maybe he didn't even know that Galt was the prisoner. So just how "absolute" is Rand's requirement of knowledge of guilt, anyway?
In response, some will argue that the death penalty is different because the use of deadly force is not in response to an "emergency" requiring immediate action, but only in ex post facto retaliation against someone already captured and confined. True; but that is still irrelevant to the epistemological argument against the death penalty. That argument holds that because innocent life is so valuable, it shouldn't be taken in any circumstances except where there is absolute metaphysical certainty of guilt. So, if the anti-death-penalty case is now qualified to mean "No use of deadly force except during emergencies," then the "absolute certainty" requirement is not very absolute, is it?
And once the platonic, metaphysical standard of certainty is dismissed, what argument remains against the death penalty as an act of justice in the case of pre-meditated murder?
In no other area of life do we employ "absolute (metaphysical) certainty" as our standard of judgment. In judging people, we instead employ the "contextual (epistemological) certainty" -- the standard of REASON. Thus, in a courtroom, we determine innocence or guilt by the standard of "REASONABLE doubt." Why, in this single area of the law, do we feel the need to chuck the standard of reason and submit instead to a platonic standard of UNREASONABLE doubt?
Furthermore, as others like Erica have observed, there are many cases in which there is ABSOLUTELY NO QUESTION that a murderer committed his ghastly deeds, that his crimes were calculated and pre-meditated, and that he was legally sane while committing them. Most serial killers and mob hit men are perfect examples. If they are caught red-handed (literally), what could possibly be the remaining argument for keeping them alive at the taxpayers' expense?
Finally, I reject the argument from deterrence as the relevant rationale for the death penalty -- just as I reject other utilitarian arguments for other criminal penalties. The point of punishing a bad person is not its deterrent effects on others; it is the administration of proportionate justice to that bad person. The point of putting a Hitler to death is not that it might deter a future Saddam, or that putting a Bundy to death might deter a future Dahmer. It is that Hitler, Saddam, Bundy, and Dahmer all deserved to die for their heinous crimes.
Turn the argument around: Do we reward good individuals solely because we want to encourage their neighbors to be good? Or do we reward good people because they deserve it? Then why should we punish criminals because of any future potential deterrent impact on others? Shouldn't we punish them because of what THEY did -- and in direct proportion to the harm done?
I have much more to say about all of this in my essay "Crime and Moral Retribution," which argues for a justice-based standard of criminal sanctions -- including capital punishment.
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