Why is torture intrinsically evil but not the death penalty?

[kentuckyliz]

Ever have surgery and they came to your room and gave you Demerol first?

Where do I tip the bartender?!

Makes me want to have more surgeries!!! LOL

That is/can be done with the death row prisoner going to execution.

My mom was a social worker and would sit with the mothers and wives of men being executed. I deeply respect her ability to do this courageous ministry. I don’t think I could do it.

 

[kentuckyliz]

The guillotine has a bad rep as a symbol of the Reign of Terror and the Third Reich, but remember, it was invented by a surgeon to be a more humane way of capital punishment than other existing methods at the time. It continued to be the method in France until the abolishment of capital punishment in 1981, and it was also used in Germany until 1966.

I was joking (about my love of rowing and the pain it causes me) that you gotta love a sport that started out as a form of capital punishment! LOL Actually it was an alternative to capital punishment but it was dreaded worse than death. I can row for about an hour and a half before the pain gets bad, but to do it all day? Yikes!

About the galley sentence in southern Europe: read pp. 5-10 of this article.

Galley slave (wikipedia)

I didn’t know St Vincent de Paul had been a slave, and a chaplain to galley slaves! Wow.

 

[Windmill]

Kentucky,

Of course life-time incarceration is a possibility, and of course this is not something that was always possible. However, the Catholic Church has always taught that there is an aspect of capital punishment that is justly spiritually satisfactory (IOW, the sinner satisfies the temporal punishment due to his capital offense). There is also a justice inherent in capital punishment (an innocent life is taken, and so the guilty person’s life is taken to satisfy justice). There is the aspect of protecting society, but in this one area lifetime incarceration fulfills the goal. Finally, there is the fact that it acts as a deterrent to future crimes of the like (if you do this horrible crime, you will die). The Church has always taught that these are legitimate reasons for the state reserving the right to use the death penalty. To say that lifetime incarceration protects society, and therefore we should do away with Capital Punishment altogether is to deny the traditional teachings justifying the other aspects of CP listed above.

Life time incarceration is not a recent phenomena. It is the change in secular ideas that has made the Church deemphasize recourse to Capital Punishment. However, the Church could never say that Capital Punishment is inherently unjust. They can encourage state officials to avoid it, but they can never say it is wrong when the punishment is commensurate with the crime.

 

[FaithBuild18]

That makes no sense. People have asserted that torture is subjective, but they are wrong.

You do a pretty good job in this post, I think, of showing that torture isn’t subjective. When you inflict pain and suffering in order to extract information (or a confession), that’s torture. It’s no more subjective than violence.

Agreed.

The answer is quite simple: in torture the pain and suffering are not inflicted as a judicial punishment but in order to attain an end extrinsic to the person on whom the suffering is inflicted. (I’m not a fan of inflicting pain and suffering as a judicial punishment, but this is a separate issue.) It may be that the torture will be in some spiritual sense “good” for the person being tortured. But that’s extrinsic to the purpose of the torture itself.

It’s a clear answer. You just don’t like it, for reasons I find confusing.

You’ve heard a definition. You just seem to prefer muddle, even when earlier in the post you state the issue with admirable clarity.

Why? Why the desperate desire to defend torture? When did torture suddenly become one of those things that good Christian people are supposed to protect and support? This is one of the most disturbing developments in the modern ideology that still claims the noble name of “conservatism.”

Edwin

Easy killer, I appreciate the response. I assure you I’m not trying to muddle or defend torture. I’ve assumed it to be true that instances of torture had Church approval in the past, as did many executions for reasons beyond protection of the society at large. My questioning stems from the apparent contradiction of the modern Church, if you were to interpret the CCC with a liberal mindset. Obviously, the Church *doesn’t * contradict herself, so there must be something that I hadn’t clearly understood, either my reason or my history was wrong. That’s why I think Ender’s posts were useful, because they offer a possible perspective that explains that indeed the church doesn’t contradict herself.

Sorry if I appear to be, as I said, blood-lusting, ha. I promise I am not.

 

[Ender]

Here’s the key: when a person commits a grave sin, they forfeit their human dignity by making themselves like beasts who have no reason or intellect.

I don’t think I agree with this. What murderer forfeits is not his dignity but his right to life. When an animal kills a person it is put down without a second thought but when a person commits murder he is executed with the recognition that this is an awe-full event. If his dignity was forfeit then his execution would not be any more significant than the elimination of a dangerous animal … but it is. His death, if it is willingly accepted, will pay the debt for his crime, something I suspect would not be true if he was without human dignity.

Ender

 

[Ender]

Which specific premise are you claiming is wrong? That the Church teaches torture is an intrinsic evil? Or some premise about capital punishment?

The assumption made that capital punishment is an affront to human dignity.

Ender

 

[Ender]

In most modern societies, there is the actuality of being able to lock up a serial killer, cop killer, kidnapper-murderer, rapist-murderer (capital crimes type murderers) securely for life without parole, for the protection of law-abiding citizens.

This is an assertion based on an evaluation of prison statistics, or rather it should be. What it appears to be is merely an assumption based on no real analysis at all. What it is clearly not is a doctrine of the Church. It is an opinion.

Remember, this is a fairly recent development! Through most of human history, this wasn’t true. Capital punishment was the only way to truly protect the human community.

This assertion is simply false. Societies have had ways to protect themselves from dangerous criminals at least since the Romans first sent convicts into the tin mines or chained them in galleys. Felons in super-max prisons have more contact with the outside world than prisoners rotting away in the dungeons of some moldy castle.

Ender

 

[Windmill]

Maybe a better way for me to phrase it is how we “descend” from that dignity rather than say we “forfeit” it. However, when we are talking about capital punishment, where a person can be justly executed for grievous wrongs, we are talking about serious falls from “dignity”.

 

[Contarini]

Not so. When we grievously sin, God is justified in condemning us upon our death in an unrepentant state. Our “dignity” as human beings is not inviolable by God, from whom and by whom we receive that dignity through Grace.

On the contrary, the fact that we can’t lose our dignity as human beings is the only reason I can think of to explain the doctrine of eternal punishment (i.e., why doesn’t God just annihilate those who finally reject Him?).

God justly judges us as beastly.

No–beasts cannot be damned. Damnation is, in a very strange and disturbing way, an expression of human dignity.

As to notorious grave sins that affect the good of the state and society, the Church has always said that the State reserves the right to exact capital punishment for capital offenses.

But the Church has never said that this is because those who commit grave offenses have lost their human dignity.

As to the claim that my statement is not traditional, Aquinas himself stated in the Summa:

By sinning man departs from the order of reason, and consequently falls away from the dignity of his manhood, in so far as he is naturally free, and exists for himself, and he falls into the slavish state of the beasts, by being disposed of according as he is useful to others” (ST, II-II, Q. 64, a.2)

OK–you have me on that one.

I would say that this is a case of Aristotle having a malign influence on Aquinas:blush:. As in Aquinas’s defense of slavery or his view of women as biologically inferior to men.

Edwin