Thursday, May 10, 2012
Winright on Capital Punishment
At Catholic Moral Theology, Tobias Winright has a really good post up, responding to Charles Lane's recent argument that the death penalty is sometimes -- as in the case of Anders Breivik -- justified. (HT: Distinctly Catholic.)
I have admitted several times over the years here at MOJ to some reservations -- notwithstanding my view that capital punishment should be rejected -- about the way the Church's (relatively) recent criticisms of / reservations about / limitations on / possible justifications for capital punishment are expressed in the Catechism and elsewhere. These reservations, in a nutshell, reflect a worry that punishment-theory talk is collapsing into self-defense / legitimate-killing / double-effect talk.
As Winright writes, "the Catholic Church today has a principled moral stance that no longer accepts the death penalty as a form of retributive punishment." And because (as I see it) the only satisfactory justification for punishment is meaningful retribution (understood correctly, not merely as "revenge") by legitimate public authority, then I would think that this means the death penalty is not justified as punishment at all. (Winright notes that the 1992 Catechism was revised to remove mention of the "death penalty" from the discussion on criminal penalties.) That is, the death penalty is not permissible, at all. What is (possibly) permissible, I gather, is killing someone -- whether or not that person has been convicted of a capital crime? -- when such killing "is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor." But, to say (and teach) that the death penalty -- understood as a penalty -- is not permissible at all is, I think, to say and teach something (non-trivially) different from what, it seems to me, the Church said and taught for a long time. And, I cannot help thinking that the sharpness of this break is, sometimes, being softened by suggestions that "the death penalty" is permissible in extreme ("practically non-existent") circumstances.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2012/05/winright-on-capital-punishment-.html
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Rick -- thanks for this post. I want to explore something and hear your thoughts. When you say that the death penalty is not permissible as a penalty, I think you are saying that the death penalty cannot, under any circumstances, properly be thought of as retributive punishment. That is because (a) you are using penalty and punishment as synonymous; (b) you believe that revenge is not the same thing as retribution properly understood; and (c) you believe that there are no circumstances in which the punishment of death could be imposed for retributivist-sounding reasons other than for revenge-based reasons, and those reasons should not count at all.
Sometimes I wonder whether, or at least to what extent, revenge can be severed off from the other components of retribution that we like (Jeffrey Murphie's work makes me wonder about that), or even whether it is desirable that such severing occur. But I also wonder about (c). Do you think that (c) is right?
Thanks. Marc