28/01/2020 Capital Punishment, Sanctity of Life, and Human Dignity - Public Discourse

Culture, Natural Law

Capital Punishment, Sanctity of Life, and Human

Dignity

September 16, 2011 By Christopher O. Tollefsen

Intentional killing is always wrong, and support of capital punishment often

stems from a misunderstanding of the nature of human dignity.

Capital punishment is receiving some renewed attention in the Republican

primary race, largely as a result of questions put to Rick Perry in recent
debates, and, additionally, as a result of the striking response by the
debates’ audiences: cheers and applause when Perry’s death penalty
record in Texas was mentioned. Support for capital punishment has been a
traditional platform of Republicans and social conservatives, but not
without some signi cant dissent. Speci cally, those who defend the lives of
the unborn, the senescent, and the severely retarded by appeal to the
sanctity of human life sometimes take as their starting point for such
positions the following moral claim: it is always wrong intentionally to kill a Privacidade - Termos

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human person. And from this claim, a principled opposition to capital

punishment follows.

The sanctity of life view is often accompanied by a set of claims about

human dignity, namely, that human beings possess essential, underived, or
intrinsic dignity. That is, they possess dignity, or excellence, in virtue of the
kind of being they are; and this essential dignity can be used summarily to
express why it is impermissible, for example, intentionally to kill human
beings: to do so is to act against their dignity.

This view—call it the Essential Dignity View—should be distinguished from

a more deeply theological account of human dignity, which holds that our
dignity comes from our origin in divine creation, and from our destination
in eternal life with God. While defenders of the Essential Dignity View
frequently assert these additional claims, they typically hold that human
freedom and reason, even if well-described as rendering us “in the image
of God,” can be understood and appreciated without reference to their
divine origins.

The Essential Dignity View should also be distinguished from accounts of

dignity according to which dignity depends upon some achievement or
some bestowal of status by others. Many philosophers who use the
language of “personhood,” for example, appropriate the language of
dignity, and speak of the loss of human dignity when a human being,
though remaining alive,  ceases to possess those properties upon which
“personhood” is dependent. Similarly, one might think that dignity is a
property dependent upon some form of social recognition; absent that
recognition, a human being, such as a zygote, would not be “one of us.”  On
both kinds of view, intentional killing of some human beings would not be
incompatible with dignity, for those human beings would have no dignity.
Such views arbitrarily designate some members of the human family as
unworthy of moral respect despite the fact that they are beings of the same
kind as ourselves.

By contrast, the Essential Dignity View identi es a much deeper connection

between human nature and human dignity, and warrants the claim that all Privacidade - Termos

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human beings have human dignity, regardless of age, achievement, degree

of development, or social status. It thus is a perfectly adequate way of
supporting the fundamental claim of respecting the sanctity of human life:
no intentional killing of human beings.

However, even among the most important proponents of the natural law
tradition, and the most important articulators of the notion of essential
human dignity, this inference to the Essential Dignity View has not always
been drawn. For according to some such thinkers, human dignity can be
lost. Here, for example, is St. Thomas, describing just this loss of human
dignity in order to justify intentional killing: “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). Clearly, if taken literally, this
claim would justify intentional killing.

A related objection to the Essential Dignity View, advocated by some in the

natural law tradition, is that some human beings deserve to be killed.
Although not much e ort is made to distinguish this view from the view
articulated by St. Thomas, there is this subtle di erence, assuming that
what Aquinas says is literally true: no beast genuinely deserves to die. If it
were possible genuinely to alienate one’s dignity and fall into the state of
the beasts, one would thereby take oneself out of the moral domain
altogether; killing would not be a matter of desert, but only of, perhaps,
prudence.

So I will treat the two views separately, in turn. Rebutting them does not
serve, of course, to settle fully the morality of capital punishment, but it
should serve to raise questions among social conservatives, including
those who cheer the state of Texas’s distinguished record for executing
criminals.

To begin with Aquinas’s view, it appears to border on incoherence: if

“dignity” claims are intended to summarily capture certain truths about
what it means to have a particular sort of nature, then one can lose one’s Privacidade - Termos

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dignity, if one initially has it, only by losing one’s nature. But losing one’s
nature just is ceasing to exist as the sort of thing one must be if one is to
exist at all: it is to go out of existence altogether. This thought is impossible
to sustain of a criminal who is the abiding subject of the drama of crime,
investigation, apprehension, trial, conviction, and punishment, as even
Aquinas’s language, which refers to “he” throughout, makes clear.

Moreover, the position seems unstable. If dignity can be lost or alienated

through wrongdoing, whether through loss of nature or in some other way,
why can it not also be lost by other means? That Aquinas’s view is
dangerously proximate to the view according to which personhood can be
lost is apparent in the work of Nigel Biggar. Biggar is no friend of those
views that make personhood dependent upon achievement or status, but
he resists the idea that those properties that give our life unique meaning
and worth cannot be lost. Thus, he writes, of cases involving severe brain
damage or unrelievable pain, that “it could be morally permissible to
intend to take human life because, that life having lost its unique
preciousness—its sacred value—the intention would not be malevolent.”
Most natural law thinkers would resist this strenuously; their ability to do
so is compromised, I believe, to the extent that they are committed to
Aquinas’s view about criminals.

Finally, there are questions of gradation here. Not every crime is of equal
gravity, but possession of a nature, or of essential dignity, is an all-or-
nothing thing. What constitutes the dividing line between those crimes
that, while wrong and degrading in some sense, are nevertheless
insu ciently severe to cause us to fall to the level of the beasts, and those
crimes that are so severe? It is di cult to imagine a principled account
here.

Now let us turn to the second view and the question of desert. One could
hold that some human beings—criminals guilty of extremely great wrongs
—are still in possession of their nature as free and equal, and thus still
subjects of essential dignity, yet hold that these human beings deserved

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death. Thus, intentional killing of these human beings would be

permissible.

It is clear that the conclusion of this argument does not follow from the
premise, even if we grant it. Perhaps some human beings do deserve
death; that need not be enough to warrant the permissibility for anyone of
killing that human being. It could well be that no human being has the
authority to warrant intentional killing, even of the guilty.

Moreover, the ranks of those deserving death might be greater than many
think. Looked at from a certain point of view, none of us is so without sin
and wrongdoing on our conscience that we could guarantee our own
immunity if desert were made the sole criterion for a right to life. And while
as a legal matter, we in the West are inclined to think that life should only
be taken for the taking of life, it is not obvious why this should be so. Does
the adulterer really not deserve death if the murderer does? Again, it is not
clear why not. Justi cations that rest on the idea criminals deserve death
are thus doubly problematic: there are di culties both with the claim to
authority, and with the boundaries of those who deserve to die.

Here, though, is the deepest reason to be opposed to capital punishment.

From the practical perspective of an agent re ecting on those human
goods that give point to human action and that underwrite possibilities of
human ourishing, such as the goods of life, friendship, marriage, and
personal integrity, we should recognize the following: each of the basic
goods, in each of its possible instantiations, considered just in itself, only
gives us reason for action, only is capable of motivating us for action on its
behalf, and only is an aspect of genuine human well-being. Just in itself,
action directly (intentionally) contrary to any human good makes no sense,
is void of practical intelligibility. The same is also true of action against the
life of even a seriously degenerate criminal. Insofar as he is a human being,
his life gives us reason, and only gives us reason, for its protection and
promotion.

It does not seem to me, then, that the Essential Dignity View should be
accompanied by the claim that dignity can nevertheless be alienable or be Privacidade - Termos

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overridden for those who deserve death; the Essential Dignity View and the
sanctity of human life thus naturally go hand in hand.

Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South

Carolina and a Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton
University. He is the editor of Bioethics with Liberty and Justice: Themes in
the Work of Joseph M. Boyle. Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public
Discourse.

About the Author

CHRISTOPHER TOLLEFSEN
Christopher O. Tollefsen is College of Arts and Sciences
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of
South Carolina.

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