George on Schiavo

Princeton's Robert P. George offers his thoughts on the Schiavo case here.  His comments also bear on our conversation (below) on retribution and the criminal law:

From a moral vantage point, it can be, though it will not always be, permissible to decline treatment — even potentially life-saving treatment — when one's reason for declining the treatment is something other than the belief that one's life, or the life of the person for whom one is making a decision, lacks sufficient value to be worth living. What we must avoid, always and everywhere, is yielding to the temptation to regard some human lives, or the lives of human beings in certain conditions, as lebensunwerten Lebens, lives unworthy of life. Since the life of every human being has inherent worth and dignity, there is no valid category of lebensunwerten Lebens. Any society that supposes that there is such a category has deeply morally compromised itself. . . .

Now let's consider the death penalty. Its supporters typically do not claim that the death-row inmate has a life unworthy of life. That isn't their justification for capital punishment. Their claim, rather, is that the individual convicted of a capital murder should be executed because that is what justice requires as payment for his heinous crime. Their justification for the death penalty is retributive. (Of course, they may also believe that the application of the death penalty will prevent the murderer in question from repeating his crimes and perhaps also deter others.) They may fully recognize the inherent dignity and value of every human life, including the life of the murderer himself, yet believe that by wantonly taking the life of another human being the murderer has forfeited his own right to life. Some supporters of the application of the death penalty in the case of Karla Faye Tucker acknowledged that she had repented of her crime and reformed herself. They certainly did not regard her as unfit to live. Indeed, they believed that, if spared, she would probably devote her life to good causes. Yet they believed that retributive justice demanded her execution.

(HT: Open Book)

Rob