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Can/Should We Purge Evil Through Capital Punishment?

Matthew H. Kramer: The Ethics of Capital Punishment: A Philosophical Investigation of Evil and its Consequences. Oxford University Press, New York, 2011

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Abstract

Matthew Kramer’s The Ethics of Capital Punishment: A Philosophical Investigation of Evil and its Consequences explores the morality of capital punishment and develops his own “purgative rationale” in support of the practice. I present my objections to Kramer’s purgative rationale and trace our disagreement to differences over the nature of evil, the autonomy of human character formation, and the concept of defilement.

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Notes

  1. See, Gardner (1989), Rhys (1966), and Maguire (2004).

  2. See Kadish et al. (2012, pp. 959–60).

  3. See Lewis and Lyall (2012).

  4. See id.

  5. See id.

  6. See id.

  7. See, e.g., Raine (2013) (exploring biological roots of crime); Goldberg (1996, p. 259) (maintaining that “malevolence is caused by the lack of fulfillment of some profound human need”); Zimbardo (2007) (emphasizing the importance of situational factors in producing evil conduct).

  8. Camus (1959, p. 30).

  9. Id. at 31.

  10. Id.

  11. Id. at 47.

  12. See, e.g., Goldhagen (1996).

  13. See “Facing History and Ourselves,” available at http://www.facinghistory.org/.

  14. I have explored in greater detail the difficulties of combating retributive arguments in favor of capital punishment in Steiker (2011).

  15. See Steiker and Steiker (2010, p. 117).

  16. See, e.g., Baze v. Rees, 553 US 35 (2008) (rejecting Eighth Amendment “cruel and unusual punishment” challenge to lethal injection protocol).

  17. See, e.g., Soering v. United Kingdom, 161 Eur. Ct. H.R. (ser. A) (1989) (holding that the extradition of a young German national to face capital murder charges in the United States would violate Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, guaranteeing the right to be free from inhuman and degrading treatment, because of the likelihood that Soering would experience the “death row phenomenon”).

References

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Acknowledgments

I thank Fionnuala Ní Aoláin and Jordan Steiker for helpful conversation and comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Carol S. Steiker

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  1. Carol S. Steiker
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Correspondence to Carol S. Steiker.

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Steiker, C.S. Can/Should We Purge Evil Through Capital Punishment?. Criminal Law, Philosophy 9, 367–378 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-013-9250-9

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