Edward Feser on Capital Punishment

[porthos11]

For me capital punishment seems to be more of an “eye for an eye” attitude rather than seeking justice we seek revenge.

That cannot be good.

“Eye for an eye” is a limiting condition, not a license for revenge. It demands a “punishment fits the crime” penal policy, and disallows killing an offender for inflicting injury, or massacring a village for the murder of one person.

The death penalty is a just penalty for certain types of crimes; this is upheld by both Scripture and the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. Whether it should always be imposed is another question, and one the current Church thinks is not appropriate in this day and age.

But to claim that the death penalty is an intrinsically immoral act, thereby lumping it with abortion and euthanasia, is not acceptable.

 

[porthos11]

We are not perfect, mistakes can and will happen in human judgements / trials.

Are you going to risk innocent people be put to death?

That is a prudential question, not a moral one, and a very strong argument against its use.

It still does not make the death penalty instrinsically immoral.

 

[John10]

It still does not make the death penalty instrinsically immoral.

Ok agreed it is not intrinsically evil. However

The Catechism now says the death penalty is ‘inadmissible’ — it should not be used — because it violates the dignity of the person and because ‘more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.’”

So today using it is immoral in all cases.

 

[porthos11]

porthos11:

It still does not make the death penalty instrinsically immoral.

The Church rejects the death penalty in all cases because it “counters the inviolability and the dignity of the person” and denies guilty people the “hope of redemption and reconciliation with the community,” he said.

How can the Church oppose something in all cases if it is not intrinsically evil today? Granted in the past the Church allowed it for a very limited and narrow cases (almost non-existent cases).

Because the Church is unable to declare something intrinsically immoral that wasn’t before. Otherwise, it undermines its claim to infallibility.

The Church opposes the death penalty today on prudential, not moral grounds. If you grant that the Church allowed it in the past no matter how limited, then that in itself is proof that the death penalty is not intrinsically evil. It can still be immorally applied, even universally so, but not due to intrinsic reasons, but for reasons external to the death penalty itself.

 

[Londoner]

protection is only a secondary objective of punishment, and that while capital punishment may (the point is debatable) not be needed for protection this leaves unanswered the question as to whether it is needed as a matter of justice

I don’t believe that capital punishment is ever necessary to serve the ends of justice. Life imprisonment is more than adequate for those purposes. Arguably, imprisoning somebody for life is a greater punishment than administering a swift death (although in the US system I do know that it is never swift).

prudential judgments do not oblige our assent, and to disagree with them “ is not to dissent from church teaching .”

I think Church teaching has now changed. While there may be vanishingly rare instances where capital punishment is necessary (use of lethal force against an unjust aggressor), Church teaching, according to Pope Francis, is that the death penalty is now inadmissible. Read in context, I think it is clear that the Church now considers the death penalty to be inadmissible, while recognising that at an earlier stage of the development of the state it may sometimes have been necessary. So perhaps it is not a prudential judgement after all. To be honest, I don’t know why conservative Catholics get so caught up in the language of prudential judgements when it is perfectly clear what the Holy Father is saying. Catholics are also not required to be experts in philosophy. You are using philosophical language to try to argue that the Church says something that it doesn’t.

That was neither DBH’s position

If you read the full DBH review he is pretty clear that he is morally repulsed by capital punishment:

The most appalling aspect of this book is finally not its shoddy reasoning or theological ignorance, but its sheer moral coarseness. For example, Feser and Bessette twice adduce the career of Giovanni Battista Bugatti—the official executioner of the Papal States who from 1796 to 1865 executed 516 convicted criminals, by decapitating them with an axe or a guillotine, or slitting their throats, or crushing their heads with a mallet, or having them drawn and quartered—as some sort of proof of the Catholic Church’s commitment to the essential justice of the death penalty. On neither occasion do they express the slightest alarm at, or disapproval of, either the number or the savagery of these killings. This is typical of the entire tone of the book: every page exudes an atmosphere of almost numbing callousness. There are times when a faint touch of false tenderness on the authors’ part would have been, at least, decorous.

 

[Ender]

Notice: Most people will probably not be interested in much of the following and these posts will not be responses to what others have posted here, but to an article written by David Bentley Hart and referenced by Londoner. My comments are in response to Hart’s article (and I apologize if they seem tedious.)
D.B.Hart:

…it is more or less inevitable that any substantial attempt at a Christian defense of capital punishment will repeat two tediously persistent exegetical errors—a misuse of Genesis 9:6 (hence the title) and a misreading of Romans 13:1–7. But it makes some difference which of the two is accorded priority. If the latter, then in all likelihood the argument being made is merely that the death penalty is theologically licit ; if the former, that it is morally necessary .

First, those are the two Scripture passages the church herself recognizes as of primary importance in understanding this topic. The were not cherry-picked to support a false argument.

If the Pope were to deny that the death penalty could be an exercise of retributive justice, he would be overthrowing the tradition of two millennia of Catholic thought, denying the teaching of several previous popes, and contradicting the teaching of Scripture (notably in Genesis 9:5-6 and Romans 13:1-4). (Cardinal Dulles, 2002)

Second, it really doesn’t matter which of those passages is accorded “priority” inasmuch as they are addressing different questions. The passage in Romans addresses the source of a State’s authority. Genesis identifies one of the actions to which that authority extends. There is no question of “priority.” Nor does Hart recognize that Romans had already been specifically rejected even as a source of legitimacy in support of capital punishment. That is, it was Pius XII who explicitly denied the assertion that Romans legitimized capital punishment.

Nor does the above citation from Paul’s letter to the Romans legitimate capital punishment, but only upholds the authority of civil government and its power of coercion in general. In regard to this passage and specifically to the “sword borne by public authority,” Pope Pius XII taught that Paul was referring to “the essential foundation itself of penal power and of its immanent finality,” and not to the content of “individual juridical prescriptions or rules of action. (Address, 1955)

It is the interpretation of Gn 9:5-6 that matters. If it either requires or permits capital punishment it is Romans that recognizes that the State has the legitimate authority to apply it.

 

[Ender]

Ok agreed it is not intrinsically evil. …
So today using it is immoral in all cases.

Something that is immoral in all cases is by definition something that is intrinsically evil; that’s what the words mean. One statement repudiates the other. If you want to emphasize that today it is intrinsically evil, but it wasn’t in the past, you have to reject the doctrine that morality does not change with time or place. According to what the church teaches it is not possible for something to change its nature from moral to immoral.

I don’t believe that capital punishment is ever necessary to serve the ends of justice.

This is precisely the argument that needs to be made, because if it is necessary to serve the ends of justice then whether or not it is needed for protection is irrelevant.

So perhaps it is not a prudential judgement after all. To be honest, I don’t know why conservative Catholics get so caught up in the language of prudential judgements when it is perfectly clear what the Holy Father is saying.

Words matter. As Dulles said, “prudential has a technical theological meaning” and this meaning is actually quite important here. Nor do I believe that what Francis said is clear at all. It’s not even clear to you or you wouldn’t have said: “…perhaps it is not a prudential judgement after all.” He has implied something he could easily have said but didn’t, and I think the reason he didn’t is because he recognized he couldn’t.

If you read the full DBH review he is pretty clear that he is morally repulsed by capital punishment:

Perhaps, but what is not true is that “all the recent popes have identified is that capital punishment is completely inhuman and barbaric”. None of the 265 popes prior to Francis (and I include JPII & BXVI) made any such statement.

 

[goout]

The Church’s moral teaching always serves an objective good , and if you don’t start with that objective good as a premise, you quickly get lost in competing assertions.

One of the key arguments against capital punishment is that it is no longer necessary as a means of protecting the public, one of those objective goods. What this argument ignores is that the church always held that death was a just punishment for certain crimes, and that retribution (retributive justice) is (not was) the primary objective of all punishment. Justice is surely an objective good of the highest order.

This where you are missing the point.
Human justice, or civil justice, is not a higher good than the right to exist.
That is false. And so you are basing your evaluation of this issue on a false (or inadequate anyway…) objective.

 

[Rhubarb]

The Sentence is pointless when you can then follow up with

“In the 21st century, in the United States (just where I live, I’m sure you can substitute numerous countries), capital punishment is always wrong”

 

[Ender]

D.B.Hart:

Feser and Bessette approach their topic from a variety of angles, but they are obviously on familiar ground only when they frame the issue in terms of natural law.

I am not qualified to comment on natural law arguments, but since Hart himself makes none, that’s not much of a handicap here. “It is all quite unconvincing” is not much of a rebuttal.

Let us grant, for argument’s sake, that the death penalty is indeed a just and proportionate response to willful murder. So what? That has never been the issue for Christians, for the simple reason that the Gospel does not admit the authority of proportional justice, as either a private or a public good.

I’m not sure what he means by “the authority of proportional justice”, but proportionality is precisely what justice requires, and the church has been quite clear about it. Again, from 2266:

Legitimate public authority has the right and duty to inflict penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime.

If we accept Hart we have to reject Aquinas: “Punishment is proportionate to sin in point of severity, both in Divine and in human judgments..” We would in fact have to reject the very meaning of justice. I think what Hart is getting at is that justice is trumped by mercy.

 

[Ender]

D.B.Hart:

Again and again, the New Testament demands of Christians that they exercise limitless forgiveness, no matter how grievous the wrong, even in legal and public settings. And it insists that, for the Christian, mercy always triumphs over judgment. In a very real sense, Christian morality is nothing but the conquest of proportional justice by the disproportion of divine love.

First, his initial claim is simply wrong: mercy is not unconditional, and it is not universally applicable.

Hence Augustine says (De Civ. Dei ix, 5) that “this movement of the mind” (viz. mercy) “obeys the reason, when mercy is vouchsafed in such a way that justice is safeguarded, whether we give to the needy or forgive the repentant.” (Aquinas citing Augustine, ST II-II 30,3)

Both of Catholicism’s greatest theologians recognize that mercy compliments justice. Mercy does not trump justice, and second they both recognize that mercy is not universally appropriate. To receive mercy one must be repentant. Forgiveness is conditional.

In no passage of the Gospel message does forgiveness, or mercy as its source, mean indulgence towards evil, towards scandals, towards injury or insult. In any case, reparation for evil and scandal, compensation for injury, and satisfaction for insult are conditions for forgiveness. (JPII, Dives in Miserecordia)

Second, even if someone is forgiven this does not imply that he escapes punishment.

God, after describing himself as “a God merciful and gracious … forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin”, adds: “yet not without punishing” (JPII, General Audience, 1999)

Third, Hart speaks of the obligations of the individual to forgive and implies that this is also the obligation of the State, but this is decidedly not the case. The individual is obligated to forgive, but the state is obligated to punish. What is forbidden the individual is the duty of the State.

Fourth, if you argue that mercy forbids the state from executing a prisoner you first have to acknowledge that the just punishment for his crime is death, otherwise it would be opposed as unjust, not unmerciful. That, however, leaves you with no objection whatever in those cases where the criminal is unrepentant and therefore does not satisfy the obligation for mercy to be offered. Remember, both Aquinas and Augustine (not to mention JPII) recognized that mercy is conditional and not always appropriate.

 

[goout]

Human justice does not trump the sanctity of every human life created in the image and likeness of God.
End of story.
please…

 

[fide]

Excellent.

 

[Ender]

This where you are missing the point.
Human justice, or civil justice, is not a higher good than the right to exist.
That is false. And so you are basing your evaluation of this issue on a false (or inadequate anyway…) objective.

This is not what the church teaches.

Even when it is a question of the execution of a condemned man, the State does not dispose of the individual’s right to life. In this case it is reserved to the public power to deprive the condemned person of life in expiation of his crime when, by his crime, he has already disposed himself of his right to live. (Pius XII, Address, 1952)

If we speak of legal justice, it is evident that it stands foremost among all the moral virtues, for as much as the common good transcends the individual good of one person. (Aquinas, ST II-II 58,12)

 

[goout]

Excellent.

No, it’s not. Sorry to be blunt. It has a couple things backwards.

1. capital punishment is the only way to attain justice
   wrong
2. human justice is a higher good that the sanctity of life
   wrong

 

[goout]

goout:

This where you are missing the point.
Human justice, or civil justice, is not a higher good than the right to exist.
That is false. And so you are basing your evaluation of this issue on a false (or inadequate anyway…) objective.

This is not what the church teaches.

Even when it is a question of the execution of a condemned man, the State does not dispose of the individual’s right to life. In this case it is reserved to the public power to deprive the condemned person of life in expiation of his crime when, by his crime, he has already disposed himself of his right to live. (Pius XII, Address, 1952)

If we speak of legal justice, it is evident that it stands foremost among all the moral virtues, for as much as the common good transcends the individual good of one person. (Aquinas, ST II-II 58,12)

This is the same confusion that pro-aborts use to justify abortion.
Do you realize that?

 

[Ender]

This is the same confusion that pro-aborts use to justify abortion.
Do you realize that?

No, I don’t because there is no comparison whatever between an action the church has acknowledged as permitted by Scripture and one that the church has explicitly rejected as an intrinsic evil.

Was Aquinas confused? Was Pius XII? Were all of the Fathers and Doctors of the church confused? Was the Magisterium confused for over 2000 years? Was every pope prior to Francis confused? That is what your position would require us to believe.

The church never approved capital punishment as legitimated based on a perceived need for protection. Protection cannot justify the death penalty. Justice, however, can.

 

[fide]

I’ll borrow your license for brevity/bluntness, and say,
your sense or understanding of justice is incomplete.
Read Ender’s arguments - he is spelling it out very well.

 

[goout]

I’ll borrow your license for brevity/bluntness, and say,
your sense or understanding of justice is incomplete.
Read Ender’s arguments - he is spelling it out very well.

Justice is not for it’s own sake. Justice is good because/when it serves love and the good of human beings. The two are a seamless garment.
The problem Ender is having is misplacing human justice above the sanctity of life.
It’s very simple.

Moral evaluation points to an objective good, the highest good available.
As good as ice cream is, I can’t choose ice cream to nourish myself when I am diabetic, or when kale is available.

Justice is good and it should be sought, but never at the expense of the sanctity of life.
Capital punishment is virtuous only when there is no other remedy to protect the lives of others.

And if you don’t believe me, believe the Magisterium of the Catholic Church.
Does that work?

 

[goout]

Have a blessed day everyone. Finito.