If you are a Christian trying to respect the dehumanized subject, then locking them up for 60 years and forgetting about them is not an ethical way to go about it. This makes disavowal easy, which is the heart of liberal ideology.
At least with the death penalty, society has to make a conscious choice about what to do with this person. We should choose rehabilitation and redemption much more often than we usually do of course, but it’s better to decide between rehabilitation vs death, than blithe imprisonment where we get to pretend we are respecting human rights but don’t ever have to deal with the murderer’s inhuman excess.
(that’s from me, not Zizek.)
A reminder because of the Dylan Roof case.
(demonesss’s comment is also good and she’s a good user to follow on reddit if you want to understand more Zizek)
Empirically, I don’t think abolishing the death penalty does lead to harsher sentences and de-emphasising reformative justice.
If anything, the opposite seems to be true.
Frankly, if you force “society” (i.e. people) to “decide between rehabilitation vs death” in specific cases rather than the general case, they will say “the guy murdered nine people in order to start a race war, fry him”.
Deliberately forcing people to focus on the specific, abhorrent crimes of an individual - rather than the abstract question of whether mercy is good, the fact that the death penalty ensures innocent people will be killed, what kind of society we want to be etc. - makes it easier for them to argue “some people are an exception to the general rule that killing is bad, fry the fucker.”
Well we can use today’s example. We are talking about Dylan Roof. The various recent shooters who just got jailtime, the media is not discussing. And yet, if you throw them away for decades, then we are committing social death to them. I do not feel hugely morally superior for “suffer the rest of your life behind bars” than I do for “the body dies immediately.” I honestly don’t know which one I would choose personally, but both sound utterly terrible. And I’m glad we are at least talking about one convict this week. Death forces us to confront the choices of our justice system. (Much like the argument for, say, using soldiers over drones.)
Mostly though, a lot of the liberal arguments against the death penalty, especially the more principled ones, don’t really hold weight. Some people justify it with “the government shouldn’t hold power over life and death,” but that sounds like avoiding the fact that the government does hold power over life and death. The idea “well if it’s a mistake then you can still fix it” should be weighed against “and how many mistakes do we ever catch? How many lives does that save?” And is a life really not ruined after years behind bars, even if you fix the mistake?
I distrust our desire not to take the full account of our actions. Events that make us say “Do we really want to do this, as a people?” seem like good discussions to have.
You might not know whether to pick death or life imprisonment, but I suspect many others would pick life imprisonment with a slim possibility of release over death. I certainly would.
Death is extremely final. There are no libraries in death. There are no thoughts, no dreams - nothing. There is a very large difference between life in prison and death. Calling it “social death” obscures the issue.
I agree that forcing the issue - by say, eliminating prison sentences beyond 20 years and replacing them with death - would tend to reduce empathy for prisoners rather than increase it. There are a lot of people that people just won’t feel safe around, so now they’re going to be coming up with excuses to dehumanize criminals so they can justify executing them. It’s not going to suddenly make them reason more clearly about the side effects.
I’m not so sure this idea that forcing people to confront things will actually change their behavior the way you want, rather than causing them to double down. Is there any evidence for it working previously?
