Tuesday 24 June 2014

Morals: Capital Punishment Pt.1


Capital Punishment Pt.1

For the past fifty years or so the tide of public opinion in Western countries has been running against capital punishment.

Not surprisingly churches have on the whole run with the spirit of the age and condemned capital punishment with high sounding moral arguments which I think their counterparts even a few decades earlier would have rejected as complete rubbish.

However on the other hand if we go further back into history we find churches equally vociferously supporting their own momentary majorities in ways we find morally repugnant. Calvin happily supported the execution of 'heretics', Luther urged slaughter of rebelling peasants, Catholics slaughtered Protestants and vice versa. The Inquisition for Catholics and the witch trials for Protestants are now cited as textbook examples of human evil.

Sadly, I suspect that from St Paul applauding the murder of Stephen onwards there is probably no Christian church which has not condoned executions and lynchings that we would judge to be grave miscarriages of justice and in some cases judicial murder.

Besides this churches raised, so far as I know, little protest about capital punishment inflicted even for relatively trivial crimes. One of my forebears was sentenced to death by a court in England in the 1830's for just stealing a sheep, even though he was only a young teenager. In his case the sentence was, on the morning of the execution, commuted to transportation for life to Australia – otherwise I would not be here to write this!.

So again we are confronted again with the problem that those who claim to be custodians of the Holy Scriptures seem to make it say whatever fits the views popular at the time. This is deeply disturbing. I want to consider this recurrent problem a little further here before we launch into the topic at hand.

It is easy to throw up our hands in despair and say: “Well if the Bible can be made to endorse any position on a moral issue how can we use it at all?” Indeed that has been used as an argument against “religious” ethical systems. But as I carefully worked through in my early posts, that way out of the frying pan just lands one into the fire!

As I said at the beginning: “If there is no God morals is just a matter of might becomes right. If money is king, then the golden rule is indeed as in the old joke “the man with the gold makes the rules”. If vie et armis is on top then to quote another old joke “a Smith & Wesson (hand-gun) beats four aces”. If, as people often think Western nations at present, rule is by democracy, then whatever the momentary majority says is right is right. (PS the “as people think” is because we are generally constitutional democracies – that is there are some restraints on what the momentary majority can do! This may be inconvenient say for the anti-gun lobby in the United States: their constitution accords citizens a right to weaponry. But a constitution or similar moderating force has this enormous benefit: it saves us from the truly terrible dictatorship of mob rule.)

In the other hand, if there is a God, there is some external standard of right and wrong. Humans may not fully grasp it, they may at times try to twist it to their own ends, they may argue over what it entails. But for all this, the situation is still infinitely better than having no absolute standard at all.

Moreover our human nature echoes that fact that there is indeed a standard by which all human actions can be measured. We do understand things such as injustice. For instance I read this denouciation of a particular military dictatorship:”They could arrest you on Tuesday because you did something which was legal when you did it on Monday, try you for it as a capital crime on Wednesday, execute you for it on Thursday, and make it legal again on Friday.

But we do feel this is an abuse. Right and wrong are somehow above the arbitrary whim of dictators and by extension I say above the whim of momentary majorities.

So Once again I come back to my basic contention that our primary source of moral understanding must be the Bible. If people argue over what it means: that is to be expected; they argue over everything else! If people twist it so serve their own evil ends: that too is to be expected; the world is full of evil people who will twist the best and most noble things to serve their evil ends.

These are not arguments against using the Bible as our source of moral knowledge; they are arguments for using it wisely and diligently and then fighting to preserve “good” and destroy “evil”.


Before I go further, let me share with you some facts relating to Australia that I gleaned from Wikipedia.

a) the last execution in Australia was in 1967. (that was for the shooting murder of a prison guard during an escape)

b) All Australian states now have laws that no one can be executed for any crime.

c) A reputable opinion polling company got the following answers to the question:
"In your opinion, should the penalty for murder be death or imprisonment?"
Year “death” “imprisonment” not sure
1953 68% 24% 8%
1995 53% 36% 11%
2009 23% 64% 13%

d) No political party in Australia currently advocates reintroduction of the death penalty

So it is against this background of the state of current popular opinion, the obvious changeability of the opinion of the momentary majority and the dangers of reading into the Bible what we want to find that I launch into this exploration.

In my engineering studies I was taught that the way to tackle complex problems was to break the problem into bite-sized components. I think that will be of help here. There are many interlocking aspects of “Capital Punishment : the moral issue”. I will take them one bite at a time.

Next week: Is capital punishment ever morally right for even for the worst imaginable crime?


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