Who exactly is the Monster we are discussing?
An ongoing discussion. Necoras is arguing in favor of performing human experiments on death row inmates. In reply to a pointed question, he write this:
Degrees of murder are a legal matter. You are (were) the lawyer and can easily argue circles around me there. If evidence is strong enough to condemn a man to death, it should stand up to experimentation, particularly if that experimentation is given as an alternative choice to an electric chair.
I’ve never been a big fan of the "no cruel and unusual" punishment clause. To paraphrase Heinlein "a punishment must be cruel and unusual or it is not a punishment." Criminal punishment is meant to be a deterrent, not a day spa. Death sentences are made "humane" for the sake of those pulling the trigger, not the dead man. What does he care? At the end of the day he’s still dead. The executioner is the one who’s been forced to kill (not murder) another and has tolive with it. Why force the executioner to torture him first?
Your rabid dog will be taken as a health concern and burned. If your son had ebola he likely would be to. One can hold a remembrance service without a body. A murderer’s corpse is the property of the community he has stolen from (the state) and should be treated as such. The wife may take solace in the fact that out of her husbands actions there was some minor restitution.
My comments:
"The man who has done murder is now less than a man. I stand by it."
This makes not even a particle of sense. A man who has committed a murder is still a man; he is merely one who has committed a murder. The murder gives the state, acting as the representative of the people, to kill him in what is basically an act of self-defense, and righteous retribution. However, since the widow would not have had the right to torture her husband’s killer slowly to death, the state has no such right.
"Infect him with whatever you want, throw him to the wolves."
Murder does not give the state the right to use a man as livestock, as a gladiator, as an object of sadism (which is a mental disease), or as a raw material to be exploited in the name of science.
Indeed, we do not even have the right to humiliate him as he dies, such as by dressing him in a clown suit, chopping off his arms and legs, and drowning him in sewerage while children laugh and pelt him with bricks.
That is barbarism. That is the way savage men who live without an idea of rule of law behave.
The whole difference, and the only difference, between civilized behavior and barbarism is that civilized men respect the sanctity of the human person, even the sanctity of the person of a criminal whom their laws condemns to death.
"Fight him to the death and pay off the widow of the murdered (I do have a problem with the degradation of a society who cheers at fights to the death, but that is a separate issue)"
If you have a problem with the degradation of a society that cheers at fights to the death, then, logically, you must have a problem with the thing that causes the degradation. To will the cause is to will the effect. The cause, of course, is the devaluation of human life, or, to be blunt, barbarism.
"I’ve never been a big fan of the "no cruel and unusual" punishment clause. To paraphrase Heinlein "a punishment must be cruel and unusual or it is not a punishment." Criminal punishment is meant to be a deterrent, not a day spa."
Heinlein is a windy idiot, deceptive and shallow. He is an idiot because any idiot can look in a civics book, or a history book, or a law book, and find out what the phrase ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ actually means.
‘Cruel and unusual’ means that the judge has the discretion to inflict torture, maiming, branding in a fashion that is not uniform for all men committing the same crime. One thief gets a day in gaol and another thief has his hand chopped off. One man is killed cleanly, with a single blow of a headsman’s ax; the other is killed cruelly, by being tied to a post below the tideline, and slowly drowning inch by inch was the tide comes in. These are real examples of real legal penalties that the Fifth Amendment struck down. That is cruel and unusual punishment.
No one argues punishments are kind and quotidian. Only an idiot wastes his time with this sort of straw-man argument.
Heinlein is deceptive because he masks the true meaning of the phrase, and shallow because he does not see the connection between allowing cruelty and allowing torture and desecrating human life.
Once human life is no longer sacred, you have no argument against Soylent Green.
"Death sentences are made "humane" for the sake of those pulling the trigger, not the dead man. What does he care? At the end of the day he’s still dead."
This is merely false. The humane treatment of criminals and murderers is to prevent people like you, the barbarians, from overrunning civilized society. It is done to establish law and order. It is done to prevent cruelty and sadism.
It is done because we all have a natural bent toward cruelty and sadism which only a careful husbanding of virtue and shame can keep in check. You cannot be kept in check, barbarian, because you have no sense of shame.
Just listen to yourself. Do you hear what you are arguing? Our beautiful and brilliant system of law, the most just, the most perfect in history, does not even violate the right of an executed man to make out his will! He can leave his property to his heirs as he wishes. (That is the meaning of the clause in the Constitution which forbids bills of attainder).
Why do we do this? Why not turn his property over to the state, or the widow of the victim? Because the murderer is a human being, not a slave, and he dies a free man.
For a fan of Heinlein, you seem to forget that Mike the Martian would not impose on the dignity of murderers even so much as to allow them to be incarcerated. Heinlein was not much one for slaveholding, or for Nazi experiments on human victims.
"Degrees of murder are a legal matter."
Granted, but humanity is not a question of degree. Or is it?
Your logic says first degree murder divests a man of all humanity: he is now (in your eyes) a dog, a Jew, a Negro, a fetus, to torture or kill as we like, however we like: my question merely is one of degree.
Can we harvest the liver from a Second Degree murderer? It could save a life. What about removing only one eye from a man guilty of manslaughter? A cornea donation could save a little girl from going blind.
Can we grind up the corpse for Soylent Green? If human life has no value, then it is merely a natural resource to be used.
"A murderer’s corpse is the property of the community he has stolen from (the state) and should be treated as such. "
You see what you leave behind when you leave civilization behind? You have just declared that another human being is the property of Caesar, and can be tortured or killed in any fashion as amuses or pleases Caesar.
The Romans used to train slaves to act in stageplays, so that when the story called for fornication, the slave committed the sex act on stage, and when the story called for the character to die, the slave was killed on stage, and the Patricians applauded. By your logic, there is nothing wrong with that, provided the box office receipts go to defray the costs of the trial or the victims’ family.
"I merely speak the truth of what I see."
What you do not see is that human being has an innate value, even sinners, even murderers. The murder has forfeited his life, but no more than that. You are pretending to be a bad-ass, all hard-core and tough-as-nails, and you are also pretending not to notice, or not to care about, the difference between killing a man with dignity (you know the drill: blindfold, one last cigarette) and torturing a man to death in a laboratory with inhuman cruelty (cutting off both arms and drowning him in a latrine while while raping his wife). And I am laughing at your pretensions. You are being ridiculous.
Has it really come to this? Is our civilization so rotted that it is necessary to explain the difference between civilization and barbarism to a modern barbarian? Between torture and execution, between Christian decency and Heinlein sadism?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
