Leaving aside the practical objections (such as decline in the quality of the UK legal system) is capital punishment justified for murder?
Note, this is not a question on whether capital punishment is effective, but is it just?
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It certainly can be just, but that the raises the question of how safe a conviction might be.
It also raises the issue of whether you are prepared to place the responsibility in the hands of other people/the state.
I think it was Prof de la Paz who made the point that he would be prepared to both judge and execute on his own authority, but would not concede that authority to the state to act on his behalf. Or I could be wrong on that one.
In your hypothetical, maybe.
Individual people have a right to protect themselves. I think that we can all take that one as read.
Therefore, they have a right to band together to do so. Not as a lynch mob, but I don’t see anything particularly wrong about your neighborhood watch carrying guns rather than cellphones.
In theory, the purpose of the corrections and penal system in the western world is primarily to prevent future crimes. While we can tapdance around the deterrent value of capital (or any) punishment and the rehabilitative value of confinement, the person hanged will not re-offend and the person imprisoned will not re-offend (against the general public) during his incarceration. At least, that’s the justification for after-the-fact imprisonment or execution.
However, people with a personal emotional stake in a given crime and its punishment will probably not be objective. They’re just not likely to step outside of themselves and see the facts as they are. Example: there’s a woman who is convinced that every crime committed in my city is committed by her ex-husband. The last example was some petty BS vandalism. I actually had to run this one down: if he had done it, then it would fall under the umbrella of “domestic violence,” which is legally one hell of a complication. Except he was fifty miles away at the time. Not a good enough defense according to her, which is why it’s not her decision to make: she’s too close to the matter to just go where the facts say to go.
Thus, the police and courts as we know them here. (Well, again, in theory.)
BTW, Cats, you’re right that the statement was Prof. de la Paz, and I personally think it’s more than a little arrogant. My experience has been that people who consider themselves capable of meting out justice unilaterally can’t be trusted with anything close to power over others.
Note: I am not talking about self-defense the way we normally think of it. SD is for situations where you either act or die, RIGHT NOW. I don’t think it’s reasonable or fair to expect someone to sit on his hands in the face of an immediate threat. Matters of guilt and punishment are not SD, and IMHO need to be adjudicated dispassionately, after the fact, by someone without a dog in the fight.
Governments do things which are not “just” all the time. Confiscatory taxation, corrupt appropriations, oppressive laws, orwellian security. All part and parcel of the trade off between running a massive collectivist enterprise while keeping the politicians in their cosy jobs.
The government puts people to death every day. They send soldiers to war, they cause suicides because they’ve created a nanny society in which a great many people do not find life worth living. They fund “makework” and vanity projects but neglect health funding. They tax energy such that older citizens can no longer keep themselves cool in the summer. The list is endless. Hence, singling out the toasting a few fellow citizens convicted of murder as examples for the criminal class as “unjust” shows a great unfamiliarity with the actual mechanisms and implications of modern government.
Heinlein was right when he said that voting is an act of violence.
For mass murder: without a doubt.
The trouble with “life” in the UK is that it does not mean life. If it did for heinous murders then it would be a significant different story.
Capital punishment should be an option for those convicted of murder.
Most Libertarians agree with the idea of voluntary and fair trade. It is one of the basic beliefs which inspire libertarian thinking.
A murderer is not engaged in a fair trade. By definition, a murderer deals out involuntary death.
Therefore, most libertarians incline to the view that it is justified to deal death back to the one who started the killing.
I agree with this sentiment, but I tend towards not imposing capital punishment, simply because of the possibility of tainted evidence, corrupt cops, or incompetent legal staff. The risk of killing an innocent person is the only drawback, but it is a major one. If we lived in Utopia, with perfect police, well, we probably wouldn’t have crime, would we, except for unplanned crowd events, etc. Until we live in Utopia, I’ll support life imprisonment, not death.
Each person’s life is their own, to give or take as they choose. On the assumption of a system where murders can be distinguished as capital crimes or not based on the circumstances of the crime, then it is just. In such systems, only the most gratuitous or horrendous of voluntary crimes qualify, and qualifying crimes represent a complete disregard for the victim’s right to have their life. Committing such a crime then is a dismissal of that right, a denial of its existence. People should not have any right that they’re not willing to respect for others; the commission of voluntary and gratuitous murder then is the act of surrendering your own right to life.
Yes, it is just.
One who committed intentional (planned) murder proved that he doesn’t believe and doesn’t respect the right to life. So he has no right to life. Capital punishment is justified, is the correct thing. He doesn’t have the right to a life in jail, at the expense of the public.
Yes it is just, but that doesn’t mean we should be doing it. There are too many chances of getting it wrong as nick g points out above.
Tough question. I think the important elements to this are proportionality and restitution. If you are an adult of sane mind and deliberately cause the death of another in cold blood with malice aforethought and without any pretext of defending yourself (and we will assume that this has been fully proven to everyone’s satisfaction including the defendant’s), then I think the element of proportionality will dictate that capital punishment at least comes into play; this is a case of plain murder and I think the murderer has lost all of his L.A. privileges.
However, we must include the element of restitution. To lose a major breadwinner, for example, would be a terrible blow to an aggressed family in a future anarcho-capitalist world, without any form of public welfare, and many such families would perhaps prefer compensation paid to the satisfaction of seeing the murderer die.
In such a case, I don’t think the presiding natural law judge should therefore be the one to decide upon capital punishment. I think all the judge should do is remove the protection of law from the defendant and then allow the defendant to once again receive the future protective benefit of law only at the behest of the heirs of the victim. The heirs could then either decide to kill the defendant, as due, fair, and proportional punishment; allow him to exile himself in some misbegotten part of the world; or extract financial restitution from him to recompense their loss (e.g. “blood money”).
Theoretically, I suppose, if they were of a Tolstoyan bent, they could even simply choose to forget the whole thing, though this would be rather unusual!
What if the victim had no heirs? (Including not having an insurance company looking after their affairs, in this anarcho-capitalist future.) Well, this is very tricky ground. In a future time with no state, all cases would be prosecuted by the victim or heirs of a victim, so if there are no heirs to a murdered victim, who would prosecute? I suppose anyone in the society who thought that this murderer should be convicted and punished could step forward as plaintiff, and so long as they paid for the prosecution, they could also be appointed as the legal heir, should the prosecution succeed. Though I think this unusual state of affairs would only be allowed when no victim or heirs were around to decide whether to take up the case.
We could quibble on the financial details of the case set out above, but in the end, and wibbling terribly, I think Hammurabi’s ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life’ code, is still making capital punishment, in the most extreme of cases, a just punishment.
A convicted murderer who managed to obtain clemency, as well as being stripped financially, would also have to start behaving a lot better for the rest of their lives. Their conviction would hang round their necks like an Albatross, and with everyone in this future society being armed with a right to defend themselves if attacked, it would be very difficult for the murderer’s heirs to sustain a conviction should he himself be killed by anyone in the course of his societal dealings. Families would also take a much stronger line in dealing with these black sheep family members, even before they committed any crimes, as they would wish to preserve the family’s financial holdings and not lose large chunks of it to compensate other aggressed families.
Whatever the case, on no grounds is capital punishment by the state tolerable. This gang of criminals have no right to do anything, except disappear, and that’s not even getting into the debate of how incompetent and expensive socialist law makes so many mistakes that capital punishment is too dangerous to allow, because even one innocent person murdered by the state’s parasite gaolers, is one too many.
It is just. Whether it is wise has to be determined on a case by case basis (this is also where Jonathan’s practicality remark comes in). If someone slaps your wife for no good reason, you are justified in slapping him back. Whether this is the wisest option is another question (I think that in such an instant a more “disproportionate” response, such as breaking of a jaw, would be a wiser option, for the purpose of deterrence). We no longer do “an eye for an eye” not because it is unjust, but because it is unwise (or impractical).
If you start from the premise that:
1) Man is endowed by his Creator with (or, if you prefer, “has inherent in his nature as a human being”) certain rights,
2) these rights include life and liberty,
3) these right are inalienable, i.e., they can neither be given away nor taken away, even by the State,
then no, capital punishment can never be just.
It certainly guarantees a zero rate of reoffending, though it fails from the PoV of “restorative justice”.
Ethically, I want a justice-system whose first duty is to ensure that on conviction any offender has to ‘make good’ the damage he/she has caused to the victim.
I’d see the ideal sentence for a convicted murderer as one where she/he spends the rest of his/her life working essentially as a bonded slave to the murdered person’s family/employer to replace the lifetime good those people have lost out on through the act of murder.
In achieving this, capital punishment fails. But so does the existing system.
I’ve always thought that the northern territories of Canada are not used productively. Murderers, pedophiles, terrorists etc. could be parachuted into the vast frozen emptiness and left to fend for themselves. After all if they want to be anti-social they can ‘live’ out their dream in this inhospitable landscape without bothering the rest of us.
Jack, too bad I didn’t see your comment when I posted mine, as it seems that our thinking is similar. I have one question though: why cannot the heirs demand financial retribution regardless of execution or lack thereof? Furthermore, I don’t see the existence of heirs as an issue regarding capital punishment. Take the example I brought above, and say it’s not your wife, but a strange woman or child standing in a checkout line in a supermarket next to you.
BTW, when I say ‘capital punishment’, I don’t meat that it should be carried out by the state, in fact I tend to think that I’d rather it wouldn’t.
The question asked is not concerned with peripheral hypotheticals. It specifically leaves aside the practical objections. The answer is yes.
Agreed. It is very just indeed that some people die. The reason I oppose almost all capital punishment is purely based on the fallible nature of trials, not any lack of justice in topping some murdering vermin.
RobtE said:
If the right to liberty is inalienable, then imprisonment is also unjust.
Clearly this is absurd. If you commit certain crimes, you forfeit your right to liberty. If you commit certain other crimes, you forfeit your right to life.
I’m please to see that hardly anyone has said all capital punishment is immoral. I don’t think it is either. But that’s just amongst our crowd. Ask most people and they’ll say state execution is always immoral. I find the best response is to say, “nuh uh”.
I actually do think it is a good idea, even though some innocent people will be executed. More innocent victims will be saved.
But the whole debate is unnecessary. We’d only need to consider capital punishment if for some reason we couldn’t just lock some people up for life.
Why can’t we? Not enough prison spaces.
The government needs to start spending a lot more on prisons.
All rights are alienable by certain actions of the owner of any right. The moment someone starts shooting at me for no good reason, they forfeit their right to life and I may shoot back. My right to life takes precedence because they have alienated theirs for a period of time.
I would say that it is justified. I would however, add some laws to the books that we in the US don’t have. I would define the withholding of exculpatory evidence by either the prosecution or the police, solicitation of false evidence by either the prosecution or the police or the provision of false evidence which lead to a murder conviction and execution as capital crimes.
Yes, capital punishment is a just punishment which MAY be appiled. In fact, in many cases, I would argue any lesser punishment would be unjust (mass murder, treason, etc.).
“I would say that it is justified. I would however, add some laws to the books that we in the US don’t have. I would define the withholding of exculpatory evidence by either the prosecution or the police, solicitation of false evidence by either the prosecution or the police or the provision of false evidence which lead to a murder conviction and execution as capital crimes.”
Seconded – As I remarked to a Chief Inspector a while back, the Birmingham 6 might not be around under those rules, but then neither would most of the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad. He shut up about bringing back the noose for a bit afterwards.
It is not just if a State administers it in vacuo.
If the people do not have a right to kill either in self-defence or in defence of their property, then they cannot delegate this right (which they don’t have) to any agency – State or otherwise.
If they do have it, and if they then want to lend it to a State to use it in their name, then it is just. but tbey don’t need to delegate it at all in this case.
no. no single peron, or group of people should be given power to kill someone else. that is calculated murder just like me coming up to you, drawing a gun and shooting you between the eyes is calculated murder.
That is just my ideal though, and obviously it forgets the fact that choosing to lock up convicted murderers permanently is a (minor) expense to everyone.
The state wants to give a robber or a rapist a strong incentive to spare his victims’ lives. Otherwise, if the penalty for these crimes is practically as severe as the penalty for murder, why not eliminate a witness who could testify against you?
The state also wants to give conspirators in murder a strong incentive to inform on each other. In the case of James Byrd, murdered by three men in Jasper, Texas, one of the three spared himself the death sentence levied against the other two by informing on them.
Hence, the death penalty has practical uses in law enforcement which extend beyond killing a murderer who has made himself a terrible menace to his fellow citizens.
It is just only if it can be implemented by the victim. As (by definition) it cannot, it is unsupportable. And saying that the relatives are victims too maybe true, but having them commit the execution will just create more victims – the relatives of the murderer.
What Sunfish said. Which, FWIW, I thought he put very well.
All that, and not one word about what is “Just,” presumably as a part of justice.
Expressions indicate a tendency to equate legal systems with “justice.”
I submit that “justice” consists of the performance of obligations, and what is “just” is that which is necessary (and sometimes “appropriate”) to the performance of one or more obligations.
Is it “just” to kill another in war?
The consensus (so far) and my own experience in participation is yes; because it is necessary to the performance of an obligation; particularly an obligation which one must acknowledge and accept as part of membership in a social order from which one derives benefits and protection from certain harms. Thus, we have the concept of “just” wars.
Is it “just” to kill another in other circumstances? The consensus is yes, in regard to the obligations of defense of a child, of one’s self, even of one’s property. And the extremes or distortions of concepts of one’s own perceptions of obligation – such as insane rage or other derangements.
So, is it really the killing that brings into question of “just?” Or is it something else?
When a legal system (of even the most primative kind) is engaged by a social order to function as the means of dealing with obligations that would otherwise fall on its members (by vengeance, etc.) the issues are often resolved by balancing the priorities of obligations, such as preserving order, eliminating forms of violence, conforming conduct and interactions, etc.
Like all resolutions that concern performance of obligations, because of conflicts among them, the performance is seldom, if ever, perfect; and thus justice is seldom perfect; and what is “just” will always be dependent on a determination of the obligations that give rise to the question.
Jack, too bad I didn’t see your comment when I posted mine, as it seems that our thinking is similar. I have one question though: why cannot the heirs demand financial retribution regardless of execution or lack thereof?
Well, that could be a possibility, though I think the working out of such a detailed code should be best left to superbly qualified jurists, or any modern equivalents of Samuel, from the Judges book in the bible. I suppose in the murder trial, the judge could confirm the jury’s guilty verdict and then set a minimum “wergild” blood money price for compensation. This could be paid whether the murderer is executed or not, and only a substantial payment agreed beyond this standard “wergild” would save the outlaw murderer from the fatal wrath of the aggrieved parties. The victim’s heirs could also be placed first in line to funds from the outlaw’s property, in the event of his death, to fund the compensation. But what if the murderer is penniless? Killing him in retribution would mean no compensation, and then we get into all sorts of boundary condition problems. Also does the removal of the murderer’s life not compensate for the victim’s life, without any further compensation being necessary? Or should we all have a “wergild” set, so heroin addict bums in the gutter are awarded one wergild where captains of industry are awarded another? However, I think this kind of detail goes beyond whether capital punishment is just, or not. I think it is, but only in the most extreme of totally proven cases and only with those who have then been subsequently declared outlaws with absolutely no legal protection.
Furthermore, I don’t see the existence of heirs as an issue regarding capital punishment. Take the example I brought above, and say it’s not your wife, but a strange woman or child standing in a checkout line in a supermarket next to you.
In the stateless future I wish for, I cannot foresee many people being without insurance protection for all acts of violence against them, including fatal ones. The insurance companies will probably act as plaintiff in all such cases. (However, I think the legal heirs should still be the prime movers.) But if you were next to a small child assaulted next to you, as a juror I would be quite happy for you to defend the child on its behalf, or phone the insurance company, or its parents, or even act as accusatory plaintiff if no insurance company or heirs/family were available for such a task. I should also imagine that with everything being private property in this stateless place, including the streets (and excluding wildernesses where many of these outlaws might end up), there will be lot better security arrangements in place than those we currently have with useless public police and public streets.
I think we can’t actually imagine too clearly how the legal systems of the future will fall out, once we have removed the state. (Except by perhaps raking over medieval Icelandic, Manx, and Irish law.) We will just have to try it and see what happens. I foresee that insurance companies will become much more important in people’s lives, providing them with security protection, but none of us really know. All we can do with certainty is discover the true and fair principles of a natural law system, and then let the future market decide the rest. And from the key element of proportionality, capital punishment as a principle is just, I reckon. The practice, as you say, especially with the element of restitution, is a lot more tricky! 🙂
Hugo wrote:
If the right to liberty is inalienable, then imprisonment is also unjust.
No, imprisonment is not unjust.
Clearly this is absurd.
Indeed, which is why it’s wrong.
If you commit certain crimes, you forfeit your right to liberty.
No, you don’t. You forfeit the practice of that liberty. And when the sentence is finished, the practice of that liberty is restored to you.
A right and the practice of a right are not same thing. The State can forcibly remove the practice of a right to liberty (and is the only legitimate power that can) and can restore that practice at a later time. What it cannot do is remove the practice of life and then later restore it.
What Sunfish said.
I find myself saying that a lot.
I’m reminded of Lord Halifax’s sentiment that ‘we do not hang a man for stealing a horse. We hang a man, that horses may not be stolen’ and the associated thought that ‘we do not hang a man to reform him, but to reform everybody else’. And I think that the salutory deterrent effect is at-least as important as the punishment of the individual.
For the murderer, I see his punishment as a simple exchange of rights. You took a person’s natural right to life and his enjoyment of it – you must pay with your own. And that would extend, as others have touched upon, to acts which go to deprive another of his life unjustly – so, for example, for acting or conspiring to unjustly have an innocent man convicted of a capital crime.
Blackstone expressed a version of the idea of the exchange of rights, which is probably why I like it. He extended it so far as to acts which, while not murder, had the same effect as murder – to remove a person from the enjoyment and opportunities of a free society and his earned and proper place within it. So, for example, he likened the maiming of a workman, so as to render him incapable of earning a living and supporting his family, as something very close indeed to murder, and certainly sufficient grounds for self-defence up to and including the use of deadly force.
llater,
llamas
So in other words, I think on can only ask if it is effective. Asking if it is Beatiful or Just or Honorable is an illegal move in the language game.
Yes, it’s effective. No executed murderer has ever committed another one.
And I’m perfectly prepared to let voters decide this issue. If they’re in favor of State-administered capital punishment, that’s good enough for me.
Jack:
What if any other kind of offender is penniless? Murder is not different in that regard. Insurance does seem like a good idea, but then there will always be people who cannot even afford the premiums, however low.
No, it doesn’t, that was my original point: the two issues are separate. The execution is supposed to compensate for the victim’s life, the monetary retribution is supposed to compensate for the monetary loss of the heirs, if any.
Sure. If someone blows up a fancy apartment building, an owner of a fancy apartment is entitled to a different amount of compensation than a guy who sleeps in a carton box in an alley right next to the building.
Absolutely.
The death penalty should be an option for the immediate family of the victim.
If I will not convict a father for shooting his son’s murderer, then I can hardly deny him the right to demand the death penalty.
That being said, I would demand extraordinary proof … something akin to the new heinous crime laws ( express-lane death row appeals ) in the US … multiple witnesses or one witness + videotape.
No.
No, it is not just; two wrongs don’t make a right. And you didn’t ask, but that never stopped me before:
– no, it is not practical. Every western society using capital punishment has/had lengthy, extensive and expensive procedural steps in an effort to avoid mistakes – but mistakes were and are still being made. You can give a lifer a sincere apology and golden handshake if he’s subsequently found not guilty – once you’ve offed him it’s too late.
– no it’s not punishment, per se. As a parent, I note that punishment is intended to teach the miscreant not to do something – a dead man learns nothing. Nit-picky, I know…
– no it does not deter. Side-by-side States with contiguous populations, some with, some without, would show any deterrent effect. It’s not there.
– yes it does protect the public, but you can do that without killing the guy. Convicted murderers’ cell doors don’t have a lock, they have a pad – you shove him in the cell and weld the door shut. “CRUEL!!!” scream the bleeding-hearts – sure, but is it as cruel as killing him?
– revenge? One of the first things any republican government does when imposing law-and-order, is choke-out duels and feuds; am I correct? As a libertarian, I vociferously object to the government doing anything it doesn’t allow its citizens to do, so there!
Ultimately, Capital Punishment must be administered by the government; I’m sorry, but they’ll insist. I don’t trust them to sign their own names, I CERTAINLY don’t trust them with their citizens’ lives. As well, the death penalty has become a political football in the States, with governors staying home from debates to supervise executions because it makes them look “tough on crime” – I consider that one of the ultimate outrages of the human condition.
Jim+
Forgetting what I said last night, could someone define “just” for me? I’m not 100% that we’re all talking about the same thing.
Donovan: at least in my state, perjury which leads to the imposition of the death penalty is one form of first-degree murder, and as such is capital-eligible itself.
Colorado Revised Statute 18-12-102(1)(c)
Considering that we’re wimps when it comes to the death penalty, I can’t imagine us to be the only state to have this on the books. However, I don’t know of any actual cases brought under this statute, if only because we execute so few people that an innocent person set up for the needle doesn’t appear to have happened yet here.
Midwesterner has observed a rather different case in his own state, where a dirty prosecutor actually did send someone to death row via perjury. But he knows that story better than I do.
RRS:
I suspect that’s because legal systems try to achieve justice, or at least to approximate it. Which doesn’t get around the fact that the 15 or 20 people in this thread will give 15 or 20 answers when I ask “What is justice?”
If you’ll excuse me, I need to wash my hands.
That’s debatable…
But you do trust the state with imposing life imprisonment. What’s the difference ?
Jacob, isn’t it obvious that life sentence, unlike death sentence, is reversible? (OK, partly reversible: I do think that any time spent in prison is time that a person will never get back, and that if they were wrongly convicted, they should be compensated as fully as possible).
In the case of Josef Friztl, for example, there is no doubt about that…
Sunfish:
Perhaps I was not clear (as usual).
Legal Systems, being only systems, don’t do anything, they are employed by the members (and often only by a dominant coalition, e.g., Russia) of a social order for specific functions concerning interactions within the order.
As one of the 15 or 20 who might have been asked (but weren’t and did not volunteer) I took a shot at “Justice,” based on an admittedly inadequate understanding of the deontic in human conduct.
During service in WW II, I was taught: ” The function of Military Justice is discipline.” That will really get one to wash up.
That difference is obvious, but unrelated to the matter of putting our trust in the state. If the state is not trustworthy to administer justice, as the commenter said, it isn’t any more trustworthy in imposing life sentences than in imposing death sentences, and, as I said, it’s debatable which is worst.
Jack,
I disagree. I think cases may be brought on behalf of third parties. Anybody who believes they have a stake in having the alleged violator prosecuted would be morally justified in bringing a case.
I strongly disagree. Anybody must be allowed to file on behalf of anybody. The penalty/restitution would generally be in the hands of the victim or heirs, but the prosecution is everybody’s business.
For example, permitting this would also tend to make your Tolstoy example not the unlikely total loss it might at first glance appear. In the case of domestic violence, it is quite possible that some victims will choose to do nothing. But the conviction will be a matter of public record and having it rendered and published would be a substantial benefit to others who may have contact with the violator. I think you already started down that path in one of your later paragraphs –
You bring in a point that I think is essential to any minarchist/anarchist society, that people are declared ‘outlaw’, beyond the protection of the law. I view the law as a cooperative agreement between many people and violating that agreement removes its protection from the violator. This also means that any member of a cooperative agreement could bring charge against any other for any reason. It could be on behalf of a third party or not, as long as they were willing and able to assume the cost of the trial they should be permitted.
Like you, I see a strong role for insurance companies in pursuing these cases. Think of it as an Underwriter’s Laboratories for crime instead of tort, by which I mean an industry that is funded by people seeking to avoid future loss.
Sunfish,
I went looking for a concise report of that case (I fear I may have actually voted for one of the guys in an earlier election) but got sidetracked when I read this(Link).
I encourage everybody here to read that link. It cuts to the heart of this topic.
The state must never EVER have the power to kill its members. The system of justice is a political process. We have tried for millennia to create a system of justice that is immune to popular pressure but have failed. It is particularly interesting Radley’s observation that after somebody is executed, the case is closed and the evidence is often destroyed. He attributes this as a primary reason that wrongful executions are never discovered.
Can the death penalty be hypothetically ‘just’? Yes, obviously. Can we trust the state with that power? Yeah, right. We can’t even trust the state to administer ‘just’ elections.
Midwesterner,
You bring in a point that I think is essential to any minarchist/anarchist society, that people are declared ‘outlaw’, beyond the protection of the law. I view the law as a cooperative agreement between many people and violating that agreement removes its protection from the violator.
This outlaw state could be the key to the whole matter, and could even prevent us from needing to debate the justness of capital punishment. The Romans rather successfully had the rule that anyone convicted of a capital crime would be denied fire and water within Rome’s precincts. This essentially meant that you had to get out of Italy or be robbed/killed by anybody who fancied it, because you no longer enjoyed any form of legal protection.
If you murder someone, you break the legal contract (dare I call it the ‘social contract’), and therefore you could simply be removed from the legal system, as with the Romans. Therefore anyone can do anything they like to you if they find you on the streets. This way we don’t even have to talk about whether capital punishment is just; we simply have to talk about whether being placed into the status of outlaw is just. I don’t think too many of us would disagree with a murderer being judged as outlaw, for having broken the legal compact with everyone else by committing murder. And then perhaps they would get what was coming to them.
But how could they get themselves back into the legal system? And who is going to compensate the heirs for their loss? And who could prosecute? Also, who protects people from being serially prosecuted, by rivals? Who shall appoint the judges? Who shall appoint the juries? These are all difficult matters of detail, and I think legal experts and jurists should be left to work out such complex matters. All we can do is work out whether ‘a life for a life’ is a just concept, and then let the jurists figure the rest out. (If only we could revive the Bible’s Samuel and ask his opinion!)
In the meantime, I must re-read Bruce Benson’s “The Enterprise of Law“, which IMHO is one of the finest books in this area.
And there is also, of course, Uncle Murray’s “Ethics of Liberty“, particularly the chapter on proportionality. (Though Kinsella also has lots of interesting things to say, too, in this PDF link.)
Once the legal principles are worked out, I’m sure the future insurance companies of the stateless world will work out the technical details. And let’s face it, they couldn’t possibly do a worse job than our current bunch of statist clowns and their appalling public police forces.
It can be just in individual cases.
Recidivism will be impossible, so in those cases it is effective as well.
However, I would not trust those fallible humans to administer this punishment justly…
Can Capital Punishment be just?
Yes.
Turn the question around – is it ‘just’ to permit merderers to live? Not in my book.
Two ‘wrongs’ CAN make a right! In mathematics, when you apply a negative value to a negative value, you get a positive. Mathematics is the language of the physical world. Justice should be based on reality.
It is as close to just as is practical. If there is an afterlife, I am content to leave the final balancing of scales to them. That the murderer will have no more opportunities to murder will suffice.
My only quibble re capital punishment relates to flaws in the method of determining guilt, which is known to be imperfect.
Here’s my opinion, copied straight from an old blog post:
If it is properly codified by statute and there is a legal process and the judgment is duly made according to that process and fits the requirements of the statute, then yes it JUST.
For the purposes of this hypothetical we assume that there are no procedural issues here. In other words that there is no possibility of a wrongful execution. Under these circumstances, I see little difference between locking a man in cage for the rest of his life or executing him. In either case you are depriving him of his liberty forever. If one buys the notion of Lockean self-ownership, life long imprisonment is equal to execution. Under these assumptions, if the one is just, so must the other be.
That being said, outside this hypothetical, as someone who doesn’t trust the State to deliver his mail or provide his health care, I must oppose capital punishment absolutely.