Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life-Life Tradeoffs

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that capital punishment may have a significant deterrent effect, preventing as many eighteen or more murders for each execution. This evidence greatly unsettles moral objections to the death penalty, because it suggests that a refusal to impose that penalty condemns numerous innocent people to death. Capital punishment thus presents a life-life tradeoff, and a serious commitment to the sanctity of human life may well compel, rather than forbid, that form of punishment. Moral objections to the death penalty frequently depend on a distinction between acts and omissions, but that distinction is misleading in this context, because government is a special kind of moral agent. The familiar problems with capital punishmentpotential error, irreversibility, arbitrariness, and racial skew-do not argue in favor of abolition, because the world of homicide suffers from those same problems in even more acute form. The widespread failure to appreciate the life-life tradeoffs involved in capital punishment may depend on cognitive processes that fail to treat "statistical lives" with the seriousness that they deserve.Many people believe capital punishment is morally impermissible. In their view, executions are inherently cruel and barbaric. 1 Often they add that capital punishment is not, and cannot be, imposed in a way that adheres to the rule of law. 2 They contend that as administered, capital punishment ensures the execution of (some) innocent people, and also that it reflects arbitrariness, in the form of random or invidious infliction of the ultimate penalty. 3

Valuing different human lives.

“…Negafive rights are usually thought to be more stringent and more fundamental than positive rights. The latter idea relates to a broader (though not always endorsed) distinction between acts and omissions (see, e.g., Bennett, 1966;Hall, 1989;Singer, 1979;Spranca, Minsk, & Baron, 1991;Stacy, 2002;Steinbock & Norcross, 1994;Sunstein & Vermeule, 2005). More directly, philosophers have also argued that the right not to be actively killed is more fundamental than the right to be saved (or aided) and, correspondingly, that the duty not to kin is therefore more stringent than the duty to save (Abelson, 1982;Cartwright, 1996;Dinello, 1971;Foot, 1978;Green, 1980;Quinn, 1989;Thomson, 1985;Trammell, 1975).…”

From the ‘econometrics of capital punishment’ to the ‘capital punishment’ of econometrics: on the use and abuse of sensitivity analysis

“…14 of these studies report some deterrence, seven show no deterrence and one is ambiguous. 3 Sunstein and Vermeule (2005) draw on the collective deterrence evidence to argue that if there is deterrence, then government has an *Corresponding author. E-mail: prubin@emory.edu 1 The Solicitor General of the United States, for example, introduced Ehrlich's findings to the Supreme Court in support of capital punishment (Fowler versus North Carolina, 428 US 904, 1976).…”

The Moral Murderer. A (More) Effective Counterexample to Consequentialism

“…This is, in my view, quite close to say that the Main Empirical Claim is not ridiculous or farfetched. For example, Sunstein and Vermeule, in an important (and controversial) paper on capital punishment, take Dezhbakhsh's study as true (Sunstein et al. (2005–2006)).…”