C.S. Lewis on retribution
The other day I randomly was thumbing through a collection of C.S. Lewis’ spiritual works and unexpectedly came across this passage from The Problem of Pain:
Some enlightened people would like to banish all conceptions of retribution or desert from their theory of punishment and place its value wholly in the deterrence of others or the reform of the criminal himself. They do not see that by so doing they render all punishment unjust. What can be more immoral than to inflict suffering on me for the sake of deterring others if I do not deserve it? And if I do deserve it, you are admitting the claims of ‘retribution.’ And what can be more outrageous than to catch me and submit me to a disagreeable process of moral improvement without my consent, unless (once more) I deserve it? On yet a third level we get vindictive passion — the thirst for revenge. . . . The good thing of which vindictive passion is the perversion comes out with startling clarity in Hobbes’s definition of Revengefulness, ‘desire by doing hurt to another to make him condemn some fact of his own.’ Revenge loses sight of the end in the means, but its end is not wholly bad — it wants the evil of the bad man to be to him what it is to everyone else.
C.S. Lewis here expressed what I was saying in this previous post and in my comments on this post at Mark Bennett’s Defending People blog. I suppose that I am in the minority among libertarians and criminal defense attorneys in my belief that in principle the death penalty is sometimes in rare instances justified, although I wholly agree that the way the death penalty is in fact administered by the State is generally atrocious and unjust. When I say I believe that the death penalty is in principle sometimes justified (as a matter of retribution rather than deterrence or incapacitation), I have in mind those psychopathic murderers (and perhaps also people who’ve raped young children) who’ve demonstrated sadistic pleasure in torturing their victims before murdering them, with regard to whom there is no shadow of doubt as to guilt, and for whom there are no material mitigating factors. I imagine what it must feel like for the families of the victims of such crimes to see the murderer/torturer sentenced merely to life in prison without parole, and to understand that the monster has no remorse and no conscience. With nothing more to lose, there is nothing to deter such a psychopath from openly mocking their victims and the victims’ families.
In this comment thread on an Althouse post about the execution of Saddam Hussein, I and another commenter wrote:
- John Kindley said…
- I agree with Ann that contemplating and watching the actual methodical state execution of any human being is terribly sad if not horrific, and should be. The fact that his prayers were interrupted in his last moments by the taunts of his enemies makes it more so. Any man is capable of redemption (in some cases, perhaps after a few hundred years in purgatory or being reincarnated as a pig), and we should hope and pray for that, rather than that the man burn in hell. It’s been said that there is one “death bed conversion” in the Gospels (the thief on the cross next to Jesus) lest we despair, but there is only one, lest we presume. Some theologians (albeit mostly medieval ones) have argued that capital punishment is actually a mercy to the condemned man, since there is nothing like knowing the date of one’s impending death to focus the mind and encourage a serious examination of conscience.
I remember the odd effect seeing “Dead Man Walking” had on me when it came out. At the time I generally felt that I was opposed to the death penalty, and I knew that the people behind the movie were opposed to the death penalty. The movie let you see and sympathize with the condemned man as a real human being, with a conscience and genuine remorse for what he had done. But at the end of the movie, the scenes cut between the methodical execution of the condemned man and flash backs to the horrific crimes he had committed with an accomplice (involving raping a woman with a knife in front of her boyfriend while also knifing the boyfriend). I left the movie (based on real events) in the odd position of recognizing the humanity and apparently sincere reformation of the condemned man, while newly convinced that capital punishment was sometimes appropriate and that it was appropriate and just in his case.
It’s fitting that Saddam was executed in the very place that he had others tortured and executed. Perhaps if we saw video of those other tortures and executions alongside the video of Saddam’s execution we might be inclined to better understand and even cheer those who taunted Saddam in his final moments. But I’d echo the final words of the condemned man to his executioners in “Dead Man Walking” — “Killing’s wrong, whether I do it or you do it” — and say instead, “Hatred’s wrong, no matter who you hate.”
PatCA said…
- You know, John, bringing up Dead Man Walking, I felt the subtext of that movie was (unintentionally I’m sure) that only the powerful certainty of his own impending execution was enough to change this loutish killer into a human being, that is, an entity with a spiritual dimension. I got to thinking, what is the purpose of life anyway, to live as long as possible, in whatever craven or debauched manner? He would have died one day anyhow, as so will we all, so would it have been better if he moldered in his cell writing appeals for the rest of his life? I don’t think so. It would not have made us more “moral” to shrink from evil.
In a strange way, this movie reaffirms the righteousness of his sentence. But for that he would have been lost.
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C.S. Lewis, a theologian, can be excused the naive belief that a human-built and human-run criminal justice system could ever be capable of rendering just punishment other than by sheer coincidence.
“They render all punishment unjust”? No, they recognize that there will inevitably be injustices in a human system, and they seek to minimize them.
I see a few problems, just off the top of my head, with your theoretical death-deserving murderer:
1. A psychopath is, by definition, sick. If a person’s disease makes him kill, how can you say that he deserves to die for his actions?
12. There are always material mitigating factors. The mentally healthy person, brought up in a household that is neither abusive nor neglectful, without brain injury, doesn’t wind up murdering anyone.
3. If we don’t see the material mitigating factors, it doesn’t mean they’re not there. It just means we’re not omniscient.
4. To the family of the victim, every killer might look deserving of death. That’s not the measure we use, and shouldn’t be.
LOL, you really need to read Lewis’ “Humanitarian Theory.” You are committing exactly the absurdities he talks about.
And my, you ARE condescending.
2Thank you for your comment. Your most persuasive point for me is the suggestion that our human-run criminal justice system is so imperfect and so riddled with conscious and unconscious corruption that we simply can’t trust it to ever decide justly whether a known murderer deserves to live or die. I could be persuaded by that pragmatic argument, i.e., that in light of the unavoidable risks of wrongful conviction, the finality of the death penalty, and the difficulty of drawing a principled and non-slippery bright-line between those crimes and those criminals which are worthy of death and those which are not, along with the racial and economic disparities in its real world application thus far (not to mention costs to the taxpayers), the death penalty simply isn’t worth it.
To the extent your argument about the fallibility of our human criminal justice system applies not only to the death penalty but also to the doubtfulness of its capability to ever render “just punishment” (by which I assume you refer to “retribution”), I’d say that same fallibility applies equally to its capability to ever render sentences that appropriately and proportionately deter, reform, or incapacitate. That same fallibility applies not only to the death penalty but also to prison sentences. Apart from the important fact that an execution once carried out can never be undone (which is why I think that the standard of proof of guilt to impose the death penalty should be beyond any “shadow of a doubt”), and acknowledging that there is a qualitative difference between a death sentence and a life sentence, a prison sentence takes life just as surely as a death sentence. There are some who would rather die than spend the rest of their life or even a significant number of years in prison, as the occasional suicide of a person facing prison attests, and I can’t say that such a preference is completely devoid of reason.
While death is from the human perspective horrible, and human life should never be taken as frivolously as the State takes it in its wars, death is not the worst that can befall a man, as it eventually befalls all of us.
With regard to your points about the psychopath being by definition sick, and there always being mitigating factors, the same could be said of every criminal to a greater or lesser degree. (And I suppose that you are not opposed in general to there being consequences for genuinely criminal actions.) I am actually sympathetic to this view. I did my undergraduate thesis in philosophy on “the metaphysical nature and cause of moral evil.” Basically, for evil to be truly evil, the evil-doer must know and understand what is truly good and yet choose not to do it. But his choice not to do it suggests that he didn’t in fact understand and wasn’t convinced in his own mind that what was good was truly good. There is a paradox here which defies reason and explanation and suggests that moral evil truly is a sickness. It supports Socrates’ notion that “sin is ignorance.”
Some want to take account of this plausible psychological understanding of crime by treating it as a sickness and protecting the public to the extent necessary by quarantining in prisons the criminals who suffer from this sickness. Hence the focus on deterrence, reform, and incapacitation. But as C.S. Lewis points out, such purposes when divorced from desert are almost by definition unmoored from justice.
I can certainly empathize with criminals, being something of a criminal myself, as we all are. I agree with Socrates, who said that he would rather suffer evil than do evil, and that the man who does evil is more to be pitied than the man who suffers evil. But how to treat this sickness, this willingness to harm others in order to “benefit” ourselves? As barbaric and medieval as it may sound, I think there is something to Lewis’ understanding of retribution as “want[ing] the evil of the bad man to be to him what it is to everyone else.” A psychopath is a narcissist who has no empathy and no regard for others. If anything can teach a psychopathic murderer/torturer like BTK the error of his ways and develop in him the seeds of a conscience, perhaps it’s the knowledge that on a certain day and at a certain time his own life will be terminated, just as he himself terminated (albeit far less humanely and with far more suffering) the lives of fellow human beings for his own sadistic pleasure.
3When looking at the full story, the pro death penalty positions are stronger.
1. A psychopath is, by definition, sick. A sickness does not necessarily remove legal culpability. We all know that.
2. Murderers come from good families and bad ones. About 99.9% of all of those who come from disfunctional families do not commit capital murder. The abuse excuse can be credible and can be non credible. We all know that.
3. If we don’t see the material aggravating factors, it doesn’t mean they’re not there. It just means we’re not omniscient.
4. We have specifically taken the decison making away from the victims and placed it into a system of legal justice. About 80% of US citizens, overwhelemingly not murder vicitm survivors, support the death penalty for some crimes. They find the death penalty just and appropriate for some crimes, the same foundation for all sanctions.
4C.S. Lewis lived through the worste times of human error and wrote and spoke about them quite often, with clarity and understanding.
He is a fine example of someone not naive.
Let’s look at the death penalty in the context of Bennets
The “human-built and human-run criminal justice system – (how could it) ever be capable of rendering just punishment other than by sheer coincidence.”
“The Death Penalty: More Protection for Innocents”
http://homicidesurvivors.com/2009/07/05/the-death-penalty-more-protection-for-innocents.aspx
“A Death Penalty Red Herring: The Inanity and Hypocrisy of Perfection”, Lester Jackson Ph.D.,
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=102909A
“The Innocent Executed: Deception & Death Penalty Opponents”
http://homicidesurvivors.com/2009/10/08/the-innocent-executed-deception–death-penalty-opponents–draft.aspx
The 130 (now 139) death row “innocents” scam
http://homicidesurvivors.com/2009/03/04/fact-checking-issues-on-innocence-and-the-death-penalty.aspx
“Cameron Todd Willingham: Another Media Meltdown”, A Collection of Articles
5http://homicidesurvivors.com/categories/Cameron%20Todd%20Willingham.aspx