Capital Punishment

Having in Chapter 1 set forth a basic conception of responsibility which not only serves as part of the informational content of the concept of desert, and having in Chapter 4 set forth and defended a novel conception of retributivism that evades (to some meaningful extent) the difficulties posed by numerous punishment theorists, and having in the previous chapter articulated notions of forgiveness and apology that are sensible for any plausible positive theory of punishment (especially retributivism), it is time to discuss the moral justificatory status of capital punishment. This is especially important in that retributivism and other plausible positive theories of punishment require punishments to be at least approximately proportional or fitting to crimes, and some crimes, such as murder, seem to require, at least intuitively, the taking of the murderer's life for what she has done illicitly. Indeed, I have argued that both responsibility and proportionality require capital punishment for cases of murder, that is, where the offender satisfies strongly each of the conditions of responsibility articulated in Chapter 1.

It should be noted that I do not assume herein that death is the worst punishment possible for offenders who deserve it based on their strongly satisfying the conditions of responsibility articulated in Chapter 1. Indeed, torture might well be worse. There might, for all I know, be even worse punishments for particularly heinous crimes. But the primary aim of this chapter is to come to terms philosophically with the socially and politically volatile issue of capital punishment. And we ought not assume that because there are worse punishments than death that somehow it follows logically that capital punishment is unjust. Nor would it follow that innocent and law abiding taxpaying citizens ought to cover the cost of housing duly convicted murderers serving “life” sentences instead of being put to death, especially in light of Jeremy Bentham’s principle of frugality pertaining to punishment, explicated in Chapter 4.