Maverick Philosopher

Hey Jackass!

Statistics on crime in Sweet Home Chicago.  "Illustrating Chicago values." By cops, for cops.  Fascinating analyses of shot placement, etc. Where do Chicagoans get shot? How many in the face? How many in the head but not in the face? How many in the chest, the buttocks? Useful information if you plan to sally out onto the mean streets of "that toddlin' town." It turns out that it  is statistically  better to wear a helmet than to cover your ass. Delightful details on how leftist lunacy can destroy a once-great city.

If you love crime. be sure to vote Democrat!  I can't wait to hear whether Lori Lightfoot survives politically. The lovely Lightfoot ordered the cops in Chi-town to refrain from foot pursuit of criminals. But of course! We can't have that. It would be racist!

Further indicators of civilizational collapse aided and abetted by Dementocratic wokery:

1) Ukraine refugee fails to find safe haven in San Francisco middle school.

2) The DFL’s Blackout Bill, requiring that all electricity be produced by wind and solar energy by 2040, has now been signed into law by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Commentary here.

3) Black thug in St. Louis calmly shoots homeless man through the head. The DA, Kim Gardner, is Soros-funded.

UPDATE (3/1). Lori Lightfoot got the boot. So not all news is bad. And this despite her 'wokifications,' being black, female, and openly gay.  Dov Fischer:

So Lori Lightfoot counterintuitively has been kicked out with a heavy boot, and we soon blessedly will have heard and seen the last of that apparition unless she appears in a future police bulletin as a crime victim during a Saturday night gang spree in Chicago. She now is the first elected Chicago mayor in 40 years to lose a reelection bid. Still, it seems that 17 percent of the voters in Tuesday night’s Chicago mayoral primary were idiots enough to vote for her reelection. Presumably, the other 83 percent of the Democrat primary voters were racists and misogynists and homophobes, voting against a Black lesbian woman (the “Democrat Trifecta” or the “Progressive Hat Trick,” your pick).

[. . .]

Or consider how Mayor Lightfoot campaigned: “I’m a Black woman and, let’s not forget, some folks frankly don’t support us in leadership roles.”

Yeah. Also some people frankly don’t support morons who lead a once-great city into the dungheap of murderous crime. In 2021, under Lightfoot’s enlightened footwork, the city suffered the most murders it had recorded in a quarter-century. Plus 3,651 shootings — comprising 1,415 more than had occurred only two years earlier. Chicago had more homicides that year under Lightfoot than any other city in America.

Crime and 'Equity'

On Biden's watch, crime is surging. It is easy to see why. For the 'woke' Left, the achieving of 'equity' is a high if not the highest desideratum. 'Equity' is wokespeak for equality of outcome. To achieve 'equity' in apprehension, prosecution, sentencing, and incarceration of blacks as compared to whites, given the much greater criminality of blacks as compared to whites and Asians, certain 'reforms' have to be made, including the elimination of cash bail. Standards have to be lowered to the point where blacks become the equals of whites and Asians with respect to such outcomes as apprehension, prosecution, sentencing, incarceration, and the like. The lowering of standards naturally brings more crime of all sorts.

 

If you believe that the upsurge of crime is a price that has to be paid to achieve the lofty goal of 'equity,' then I recommend that you continue to vote Democrat.

Willie Horton Revisited

I posted the following on my Facebook page this morning. Go there for my political linkage and 'rantage.' 

..........................................

I have a confession to make. I voted for Michael Dukakis in 1988! Do I have an excuse? If I have one, it is that my 'default setting' is apolitical. I'm a metaphysician by inclination, and I remain so inclined. I was a registered Democrat until 1991. But when I started to think concretely about social and political matters with the help of John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and the classics, I realized that there was very little to keep me among the Dems, a bunch that was increasingly moving in the direction of hard leftism and identity politics.

 

One thing that stuck in my craw and still does is that libs and lefties have a disgustingly casual attitude toward criminal behavior. You can rely on them to take the side of the screw-up, the criminal, and the underdog even when the underdog is responsible for his sub-canine status. And this while making it difficult for the decent citizen to protect himself by Second Amendment means from the criminal element that liberals coddle, excuse, and now let off scot-free.

 

Is there one prominent Dem nowadays who supports the death penalty? No. (Correct me if I am wrong!) This is clear proof that this 'woke'-controlled party is bereft of moral sense. Capital punishment is precisely what justice demands in certain well-defined cases.

 

William Voegli on Willie Horton:

. . . identity politics determined the Democratic reaction in 1988 when George W. Bush’s presidential campaign raised the “Willie Horton” issue against his opponent, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. It was intolerable, liberal activists and journalists declared, to bring to public attention an incident where a black man had brutalized a white couple. What was tolerable, by implication, was a policy (unique to Massachusetts) that gave violent felons, serving life sentences and ineligible for parole, unsupervised furloughs. Little wonder that Joe Sixpack voters tuned into Reagan Democrats as they came to associate liberalism with “profligacy, spinelessness, malevolence, masochism, elitism, fantasy, anarchy, idealism, softness, irresponsibility, and sanctimoniousness,” as sociologist Jonathan Rieder put it in Canarsie (1985). To this day, Democrats think that what Bush said about Willie Horton was outrageous but that what Dukakis did was, at worst, unfortunate. 

Fetal Rights and the Death Penalty: Consistent or Inconsistent?

Substack latest. 

Is it consistent to support both fetal rights and the moral acceptability of capital punishment? There are two senses of ‘consistency’ at issue, and in neither sense is there any inconsistency.

Contraindicated: Resisting Arrest

It may be harmful to your health.

The meme below makes a very important point. Everyone, but blacks in particular, need to learn that the police have legitimate authority and that their commands must be obeyed. Not to do so is not only illegal but highly imprudent. Michael Brown, Daunte Wright, and Adam Toledo all brought about their own deaths by their foolish  behavior. Similarly with Jacob Blake. He didn't die, but was severely injured. A cop is under no moral or legal obligation to wait for you to shoot at him before he shoots at you. 

 

Racism was not involved in these shootings. A cop will use deadly force against ANYONE who threatens him with deadly force. Race doesn't come into it, except insofar as blacks as a group are more criminally prone than other groups. To put the point as clearly as possible: while there are racist cops, and there are cops who commit murder under color of law, the vast majority of police shootings of blacks are not racist acts. Proportionally more blacks get shot because their criminality  is higher than that of Asians, whites, and other groups.  This is a well-known  fact. Bear in mind that  while there are racial facts, facts about race, there are no racist facts. This is a very simple distinction: even a 'liberal' is able to make it. Question is, will he?

 

 

 

Moral Failure and Moral Capacity

Not being capable of truly horrendous crimes and sins, we moral mediocrities sin in a manner commensurate with our limitations. It follows that  we are all equally sinful in that we all sin to the limit of our capacity. It is not that we always sin, but that when we do, we sin only as much as we are capable of.  So James 'Whitey' Bulger and I are equal in that we both sin, when we do, only to the limit of our capacity. It is just that his capacity is vastly greater than mine. I am a slacker when it comes to sin.  I have never murdered anyone because he knew too much, dismembered and disposed of the body, enjoyed a fine dinner, and then slept like a baby. Bulger did this to a beautiful young woman, the girlfriend of one of his pals when girl and pal broke up. "You're going to a better place," said the pal to the girl right before Bulger did the deed.

A while back I re-viewed* portions of the 1967 cinematic adaptation of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Can I take credit for not being a thief and a murderer when I simply don't have it in me to do such things? Instead I do things so paltry it seems absurd to confess them, the confessing of which is possibly indicative of an ego-enhancing moral scrupulosity, a peccadillo if a sin at all.

On the other hand, the harder you strive for a high standard, the more of a moral wretch you perceive yourself to be.

The moral life is no easy life either morally or intellectually.  That is to say: it is hard to live it and hard to think clearly and truly about it and what it entails.

________________

*The pedant in me would have you note the difference between review and re-view.

Almost Mugged in the Big Easy

I came close to being mugged in New Orleans' French Quarter in '90 or '91. I was there to read  a paper at an American Philosophical Association meeting.  Early one morning I left the hotel to sample the local color and grab some breakfast. Striding along Bourbon street, I noticed a couple of black dudes on the other side of the street.  I was wearing a beret, which may have suggested to the loiterers that I was a foreigner and an easy mark. One dude approached and commented on my shoes in an obvious attempt to distract me and throw me off my guard. My situational awareness saved me. That, together with my stern mien, height, leather jacket and purposeful stride.  I gave the punk a hard look, increased my pace, and blew him off.

Profiling is part of situational awareness. Profiling is just common sense, which is why 'progressive' fools oppose it. A couple of black youths loitering in a touristy area are probably up to no good. It is a well-known fact that blacks as a group and more criminally prone than whites as a group. There is nothing racist about pointing that out because a fact about race is not a racist fact.  It cannot be racist to speak the truth in situations where it is important that the truth be spoken. But if common sense and truth-telling make me a racist, then we should all be racists, including decent black folk. 

Three Arguments against Capital Punishment Demolished

Substack latest

Chutzpah

The leftist mayor of one of our most crime-ridden cities demanded police protection en route to a demonstration at which she joined in the vilification of the police.

Should Felons Have the Right to Vote?

Obviously not, as I argue at Substack.

But at this late date in the Decline of the West, appeals to reason are becoming increasingly pointless.

From a purely theoretical point of view, it is fascinating to watch one's country enter the ash can of history. It is a philosophical moment  inasmuch as "The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk." (Hegel) Some consolation may be derived therefrom. 

Unfortunately, we are not mere spectators of life's parade; we are condemned to march in it as well.

Having given up polemics for Lent, I will say only this much to you who voted for the Senile Puppet: You have a lot to answer for.

Kant on Capital Punishment

Justice demands capital punishment in certain cases, and it doesn't matter what it costs, or whether there is any benefit to society, or even whether there is any society to benefit. Recall Kant's last man scenario from Metaphysics of Morals, Part II (emphasis added):

[6] But whoever has committed murder, must die. There is, in this case, no juridical substitute or surrogate, that can be given or taken for the satisfaction of justice. There is no likeness or proportion between life, however painful, and death; and therefore there is no equality between the crime of murder and the retaliation of it but what is judicially accomplished by the execution of the criminal. His death, however, must be kept free from all maltreatment that would make the humanity suffering in his person loathsome or abominable. Even if a civil society resolved to dissolve itself with the consent of all its members--as might be supposed in the case of a people inhabiting an island resolving to separate and scatter themselves throughout the whole world--the last murderer lying in prison ought to be executed before the resolution was carried out. This ought to be done in order that every one may realize the desert of his deeds, and that blood-guiltiness may not remain upon the people; for otherwise they might all be regarded as participators in the murder as a public violation of justice.

Kant's view in this passage is that capital punishment of murderers is not just morally permissible, but morally obligatory. (Note that whatever is morally obligatory is morally permissible, though not conversely, and that 'morally justified' just means 'morally permissible.')

Here is an interesting question. The U. S Constitution grants a near-plenary power of pardon to the president. (Here I go again, alliterating.) Does this extend to convicted mass murderers such as Timothy McVeigh? If yes, then Kant would not be pleased. The president would be violating the demands of retributive justice! This of course is a secular analog of the old theological problem of justice and mercy.

Memo to self: bone up on this!  See what Carl Schmitt has to say about it specifically. Cf. his Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 56:

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. 

What to Do if a Cop Stops You

The following advice can save your life, especially if you are an impulsive black not brought up to respect legitimate authority. And yes, the authority of the police is legitimate even if the particular cop you encounter is an arrogant asshole as some of them are.

Pull over when it is safe to do so. Roll down the driver's side window. Do not exit the vehicle! (That's cop talk for 'don't get out of the car.') Put both hands on the top of the steering wheel. This shows the cop that you do not have a weapon, at least not in your hands, and it demonstrates submission to his authority. Have the scruffy guy riding shotgun put his hands on the dashboard. When the cop arrives at the window, greet him, "Good morning, officer!" Be aware that cops deal with the scum of the earth on a daily basis and they are nervous. They just want to get home to their families alive at the end of the shift. Put him at ease.

"May I see your driver's license?" "Certainly, it is in my cargo pants pocket." Point to the pocket. Then SLOWLY pull out your wallet and hand him the license.

"May I see your registration and insurance papers?" "Absolutely, they are in the glove box." Now open the glove box and pause for a second or two to allow the cop a look into it. Then SLOWLY take out your papers and hand them to the officer.

If you follow these steps, then, instead of getting roughed up or shot, the cop may likely say, "You were doing 70 in a 55 zone, but I'll let you off with a warning." Or maybe he writes you up. If the latter, then you accept the citation and you pay it. The law is reasonable; you violated it; you accept the penalty. Don't try to bribe the cop or tell a story about whatever. Be a man or a woman, not a scofflaw leftist punk. Take responsibility for your actions.

Another Reason Why Defunding the Police is Idiotic

Government is by its very nature coercive. To be effective, it has to have the power to force people to do what they might not want to do, and to refrain from doing what they might want to do, such as drive drunk, loot, and rape. It follows straightaway that eliminating enforcement agencies eliminates government.

In an ideal world in which everyone is an angel, there would be no need for government. But our world is not ideal and there is no reason to think it ever will be. Government is therefore a necessary evil as are the enforcement agencies without which government cannot exist.

To think otherwise is to live in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Presentism, Punishment, and the Past

One man steals from another. The thief is caught, the thievery is proven, and the penalty required by law is demanded.  It turns out that the thief's attorney is a philosophy Ph.D., a presentist in the philosophy of time, who could not find a job in academe. So he went to law school, and here he is in court. He argues on behalf of his client that, since the present alone exists, the past and its contents do not exist. So the act of thievery does not exist. 

Now a  person cannot be justifiably punished for what he does not do.  Since the act of thievery, being wholly past, does not exist, the criminal case against the man in the dock should be dismissed.  A man cannot be justifiably punished in the present for nonexistent past deeds any more than he can be punished in the present for nonexistent future deeds. Or so argues the defense.

The prosecutor, who is also a presentist, objects that, while the particular act of theft in question does not exist, it did exist, and that this past-tensed truth suffices to render the punishment just.  Both defense and prosecution agree that the past-tensed truth that Smith stole Jones' car is a brute truth, that is, a contingent truth that has no truthmaker, no ontological ground of its being true. 

The defense attorney replies that the past-tensed truth, being brute and groundless, is just words, an empty representation that does not  represent anything, and this for the simple reason that the event does not exist.  He adds that a man cannot be justifiably punished because of a string of words, even if the words form a sentence, and even if the sentence is true.  For if there is nothing in reality that makes it true, the brute truth's being true is irrelevant.  The defense further argues that a contingent sentence that lacks a truthmaker cannot even be true.

Our penal practices presuppose the reality of the past. But how can presentism uphold the reality of the past?  The past is factual, not fictional; actual, not merely possible; something, not nothing. 

The past is an object of historical investigation: we learn more and more about it.  Historical research is discovery, not invention.  We adjust our thinking about the past by what we discover. It is presupposed that what happened in the past is absolutely independent of our present thinking about it.

In sum, historical research presupposes the reality of the past. If there is a tenable presentism, then it must be able to accommodate the reality of the past.  I'd like to know how.  If only the present exists, then the past does not exist, in which case it is nothing, whence it follows that it is no object of investigation. But it is an object of investigation, ergo, etc.

Christianity has Civilized Us. But Islam?

Has Islam played any role in the civilizing of the peoples in the lands where it has held sway? Yes, of course. But when we consider Islamic penology, it is positively barbaric compared to that of the West.  Of the five great religions, Islam seems to have had the least civilizing effect. 

Here:

Iran’s judicial system remains among the most brutal in the world. Iran executes more people per capita than any other country and carries out more total executions than any nation but China (whose population is over 17 times the size of Iran’s). Tehran continues to target political dissidents and ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities for execution. Capital punishment can be—and often is—carried out against juvenile offenders and for nonviolent crimes.

Here:

In Somalia, a 13-year-old girl was buried up to her neck and stoned to death by 50 men in a stadium with 1000 spectators. After her death it was revealed she had been raped by three men and she was arrested after trying to report the rape to militants who control the city.

Here:  A graphic that details how people, including women and children, are stoned to death.  Imagine a death by stoning that takes two hours. Physicians (under duress) are on hand to determine when enough stoning has taken place. You wouldn't want to waste good stones on a dead girl.

Gruesome video of amputation. The actual amputation of a hand begins around 1:30.  Watch it, especially you leftist reality deniers.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Islamic fundamentalists want to impose sharia law on the entire world, not just where they live. They believe the law is sacred and just and the best way to preserve order.

In the video, two thieves are condemned, and they each provide a taped confession. Finally, their hands are cut off in a semi-medical environment. During the procedure the men are awake and fully conscious. Each forced amputation takes nearly a minute and there's blood and bone, naturally.

These are not Islamic extremists, but rather this is how Islam is practiced in many parts of the world with the full sanction of the law. This is the face of Islam. Although this punishment has been carried out under a militant force, it also happens in sharia countries with the police as opposed to a local militia carrying out the sentence.

In Islam, the right hand is cut off. This is because in that culture the left is unclean, reserved for sanitary reasons. Without their right hand, these people will be compelled to handle things with their left, including their food. It's a subtle form of permanent psychological punishment that goes beyond the simplicity of amputation.

Just as these people punish their neighbors, imagine how they might treat you, the non-Muslim. You are an atheist in their eyes and worthy of far more gruesome punishment.

WARNING: VIDEO IS EXTREMELY GRAPHIC

Is every Muslim a terrorist? No, but most terrorists are Muslims. Islam is the main source of terrorism in the world today.

Are there Buddhist terrorists? Yes, a few. But their terrorism is accidental to their being Buddhists: it does not flow from Buddhist teaching. Quite the contrary is the case with Islam.

Were cruel and unusual punishments ever inflicted by law in the West? Yes, of course.  But to bring this up is anachronistic and irrelevant.  

Is every Muslim a barbarian who supports the practices detailed above? No, but Muslim lands are lands where these barbaric practices take place. And the good Muslims have had no effect in reversing them.  (Turkey under Ataturk's influence an exception.  But did you ever see Midnight Express? I saw it the night before leaving for a year in Turkey!)

Is every leftist an apologist for radical Islam and its barbaric practices? No, but leftism is the main source of support of radical Islam in the West. The "unholy alliance" -- to cop a title from a book by David Horowitz -- between leftism and Islam is explored in my Why the Left Will Not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam and What Explains the Left's Toleration of Radical Islam?

Are some Muslim immigrants to the West willing to assimilate and accept the West's values? Yes, but they are in a small minority.

Is there a right to immigrate? No. Immigration is at the discretion of the host country and must benefit the host country.

Is there any net benefit to the West of Muslim immigration?  I'll leave this question for the reader to ponder. As you ponder it, bear in mind that immigrants bring their culture with them.  (Sicilians brought the mafia.) You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy.

Self-Defense Shootings in Times of Turbulence

Governments that favor criminals over the law-abiding cause the latter to look to their own defense, often with tragic results.  Massad Ayoob offers sage advice for citizens who plan to arm themselves. On matters of personal defense and the use of firearms, Ayoob is a reliable and recognized authority.

Ayoob has made a number of useful videos. Here is one: Don't Answer the Door!

More videos and articles here.

Don't forget: when you vote Democrat you are voting to 

• Open the borders (to illegal aliens, drugs, human trafficking, guns, and diseases)
• Empty the prisons, hamstring the police, and undermine the rule of law
• Violate the rights of citizens, especially First, Second, and Fourth Amendment rights.

Which is Worse? Crime or 'Racism'?

'Racism' obviously. Take a stand against 'racism' and vote Democratic!  

This short video demonstrates that crime is no big deal.

Is There Such a Thing as Racial Profiling?

A re-post from 5 December 2014

.................................

One of the tactics of leftists is to manipulate and misuse language for their own purposes.  Thus they make up words and phrases and hijack existing ones. 'Islamophobe' is an example of the former, 'disenfranchise' an example of the latter.    'Racial profiling' is a second example of the former.  It is a meaningless phrase apart from its use as a semantic bludgeon.  Race is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile.  A profile cannot consist of just one characteristic.  I can profile you, but it makes no sense racially to profile you.  Apparel is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile.  I can profile you, but it makes no sense sartorially to profile you.

Let's think about this.

I profile you if I subsume you under a profile.  A profile is a list of several descriptors.  You fit the profile if you satisfy all or most of the descriptors.  Here is an example of a profile:

1. Race:  black
2. Age: 16-21 years
3. Sex: male
4. Apparel: wearing a hoodie, with the hood pulled up over the head
5. Demeanor: sullen, alienated
6. Behavior: walking aimlessly, trespassing, cutting across yards, looking into windows and garages, hostile and disrespectful when questioned; uses racial epithets such as 'creepy-assed cracker.'
7. Physical condition: robust, muscular
8. Location:  place where numerous burglaries and home invasions had occurred, the perpetrators being black
9. Resident status: not a resident.

Now suppose I spot someone who fits the above profile.  Would I have reason to be suspicious of him?  Of course.  As suspicious as if the fellow were of Italian extraction but fit the profile mutatis mutandis.  But that's not my point.  My point is that I have not racially profiled the individual; I have profiled him, with race being one element in the profile.

Blacks are more criminally prone than whites.*  But that fact means little by itself.  It becomes important only in conjunction with the other characteristics.  An 80-year-old black female is no threat to anyone.  But someone who fits all or most of the above descriptors is someone I am justified in being suspicious of.

There is no such thing as racial profiling.  The phrase is pure obfuscation manufactured by liberals to  forward their destructive agenda.  The leftist script requires that race be injected into everything.  Hence 'profiling' becomes 'racial profiling.'  If you are a conservative and you use the phrase, you are foolish, as foolish as if you were to use the phrase 'social justice.'  Social justice is not justice.  But that's a separate post. 

Addendum.  There is also the liberal-left tendency to drop qualifiers.  Thus 'male' in 'male chauvinism' is dropped, and 'chauvinism' comes to mean male chauvinism, which is precisely what it doesn't mean.    So one can expect the following to happen.  'Racial' in 'racial profiling' will be dropped, and 'profiling' will come to mean racial profiling, which, in reality, means nothing. 

___________________

* See here:

Any candid debate on race and criminality in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. African-Americans constitute about 13% of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the population. [. . .]

"High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination," wrote the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz in "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice." "The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments."

The 'Progressive'

A typical 'progressive' will insist that the law-abiding citizen exercising his constitutionally protected (not constitutionally conferred) right to keep and bear arms has no need of weapons since it is the job of the police to protect the citizenry against the criminal element. At the same time, this  'progressive' works to undermine the police and empower criminals. Examples are legion, e.g. the recent bail elimination in New York State.

Cops: A Necessary Evil

I don't much like law enforcement agents (qua law enforcement agents) and I try to avoid contact with them, not because I violate laws or have something to hide, but because I understand human nature, and I understand how power corrupts people, not inevitably, but predictably. Cops and sheriffs are too often arrogant, disrespectful, and willing to overstep their lawful authority.

But there is a species of varmint that I like even less than law enforcement agents: criminals and scofflaws. They are the scum of the earth. To clean up scum you need people who are willing to get dirty and who share some of the attributes of those they must apprehend and incarcerate. I mean such attributes as courage, cunning, some recklessness, with a dash of ruthlessness thrown in for good measure. Government and its law enforcement agencies are a necessary evil. That is not pessimism, but realism.

There are anarchists and others who dream of a world in which good order arises spontaneously and coercive structures are unnecessary. I want these anarchists and others to be able to dream on in peace. For that very reason, I reject their dangerous utopianism.

The Rosenbergs: Still Guilty After All These Years

On this date in 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death as atomic spies for the Soviet Union.  They were most certainly guilty as we now know. But no amount of proof of their guilt will stop the Left from lying about them as victims of  American 'fascism.' In those days we weren't the decadent weaklings we have become, unsure of ourselves, and unwilling to defend our nation against deadly threats.

Why, for example, is Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, still alive?  He committed his crimes to the cry of Allahu akbar in 2009, was sentenced to death in 2013, but is still alive.  Why hasn't he been executed?  Why the endless appeals?  

We need a judicial fast track to execution for convicted terrorists.  Justice demands it. 

We have lost our way.  We now longer believe in ourselves. We have elected and re-elected a hate-America leftist fool who actually had the temerity to refer to Hasan's terror as "work place violence."  Many of us feared that he would  be elected for a third term in the guise of Hillary Milhous Clinton. But Trump put a stop to that. Thank God for the Orange Man! 

Should Felons Have the Right to Vote?

Bernie Sanders thinks that felons should have the right to vote even while incarcerated.  That is a foolish and irresponsible view.

1) Felons have shown by their destructive behavior that they cannot productively order their own lives. Why then should they have any say in the ordering of society?  Why should the thoughtful vote of a decent, law-abiding citizen be canceled out by the vote of an armed robber, a rapist, a drug dealer, a terrorist, or any other miscreant?  That could make sense only to someone who substituted feeling for thought.  

Criminals have no interest in the common good; their concern is solely with their own gratification.   They do not, as a group, contribute to society; they are, as a group, a drag on society. So I ask again: why should they be allowed to vote? And how many of them would even want to vote if they weren't given incentives by leftist activists?

I concede the following. Some 'felons' have been wrongly convicted. Some felonies should be misdemeanors.  There are different classes of felonies.  Some felons reform themselves and become productive members of society. But none of these concessions affects the main point, namely, that  it is foolish and irresponsible to maintain  that felons as a group should have the right to vote even while incarcerated.

2) Sanders:

. . . the right to vote is an inalienable and universal principle that applies to all American citizens 18 years and older. Period. As American citizens all of us are entitled to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly and all the other freedoms enshrined in our Bill of Rights.

By this logic, felons have the right to keep and bear arms even while incarcerated. After all, Second Amendment rights are "enshrined in our Bill of Rights."  And they are "inalienable and universal." But of course, there are excellent reasons to deny felons the right to buy and own guns, and in particular the 'right' to pack heat while in prison!  You would have to be insane to to think that an armed robber's right, qua citizen, to keep and bear arms is in no way affected by his history of armed robbery.  Rights can be lost, limited, and forfeited. Rights cannot be coherently thought of as absolute and unexceptionable.

The right to free speech does not give a person the right to say absolutely anything in any context.  There is no right to freedom of religion if your 'religion' involves human sacrifice. The right to freedom of assembly is limited by property rights.  You have no right to assemble on my property without my permission. There is no right to block public thoroughfares or destroy public property. Individual property rights are limited by legitimate eminent domain considerations. Eminent domain laws have been misused, but that is no argument against them in principle. 

But doesn't capital punishment violate the right to life? Capital punishment does not involve a violation of a citizen's right to life: the murderer or anyone who commits a capital crime forfeits his right to life by committing a capital crime.  If I use deadly force against you in a self-defense situation in which you threaten my life, and in so doing cause your death, I have done something both morally and legally permissible. It follows that I haven't violated your right to life. Rights violations are by definition impermissible.   By your action, you have forfeited your right to life.

Sanders tells us that the right to vote is a "universal principle that applies to all American citizens 18 years and older."  But if it were truly universal, then  children should allowed to vote.  Why the restriction to 18 years and older?  Nancy Pelosi recently maintained that the voting age should be lowered to 16 so as to involve young people in politics. But why 16 and not 14?  Think of how many more young people would be involved in politics if the voting age were reduced to 10.  The stupidity of this is obvious  and the motive behind it is transparent.

3) Sanders on voter suppression:

Indeed, our present-day crisis of mass incarceration has become a tool of voter suppression. Today, over 4.5 million Americans — disproportionately people of color — have lost their right to vote because they have served time in jail or prison for a felony conviction.It goes without saying that someone who commits a serious crime must pay his or her debt to society. But punishment for a crime, or keeping dangerous people behind bars, does not cause people to lose their rights to citizenship. It should not cause them to lose their right to vote.

It is true that a person who is justly incarcerated does not cease to be a citizen. But it hardly follows  that he retains every right of a citizen. To underscore the obvious, the prisoner is not free to come and go as he pleases.  He is not immune to searches and seizures. Etc. Limitation and suspension of rights is part of the punishment.

And then we have the obfuscatory leftist talk of 'voter suppression' and 'mass incarceration.'  One does not suppress the vote of illegal aliens; they have no right to vote in the first place.  Similarly, one does not suppress the vote of felons; they have no right to vote.

Sanders apparently thinks that 'people of color' are the victims of voter suppression because they are disproportionately represented among the prison population. The suggestion is that they are incarcerated to keep them from voting. Nonsense. They are disproportionately incarcerated because they are disproportionately involved in criminal behavior. 

Absurdistan: The Cross of Christ is Supposed to be an Argument against the Death Penalty!

From a German correspondent I learned about the theology blog Nachtgedanken, Night Thoughts. I agree entirely with the current post which begins:

"In der Karfreitagspredigt sagt Bischof Ulrich Neymeyr: "Der Justizirrtum, dem auch Jesus zum Opfer gefallen ist, ist eines der schlagkräftigen Argumente gegen die Todesstrafe". Tagespost 19.4.2019.

 

Diese bischöfliche Aussage evoziert eine Frage: Was wäre, wenn Pontius Pilatus dieser Justizirrtum nicht unterlaufen wäre? Jesus Christus wäre nicht gekreuzigt worden, er wäre so nicht für unsere Sünden gestorben und wir wären so Nichterlöste. Wenn aber die an Jesus Christus vollstreckte Todestrafe uns erlöst hat, sie so also Gutes gewirkt hat, wie soll dann diese vollstreckte Todesstrafe gegen die Todesstrafe sprechen? 

 

The stupidity of this 'bishop' beggars understanding.  He obviously does not understand the Christian narrative he is supposed to be articulating and promoting. Had Christ not been crucified, he would not have died for our sins, and we would not have been redeemed. It was God's will that Christ, the sinless one, suffer the death penalty. How then can the execution of Christ speak against the death penalty? 

 

Quite apart from Christian teaching, anyone who is not morally obtuse should be able to see that the death penalty is precisely what justice demands in certain cases.   The punishment must fit the crime.

 

I explain the PFC principle here and distinguish it from barbaric versions of lex talionis.

Capital Punishment is Indeed a Deterrent

Joseph M. Bessette in the Wall Street Journal:

Consider this example that the philosopher Edward Feser and I recount in our book, By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment: At a professional conference, a criminologist reported that two burglars had broken into his mother’s apartment and tied her up as they searched for valuables. As they were about to leave, one said: “She has seen us and can identify us. Should we kill her?” “No,” answered the other, “we don’t want to risk the death penalty.” They let her live. One can hardly imagine a clearer example of deterrence.

Another example comes from Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California. In the 1960s she served on the California Women’s Parole Board. At one hearing, Mrs. Feinstein asked an armed robber seeking release from prison why she never used a loaded gun. “So I would not panic, kill somebody, and get the death penalty,” she answered. That convinced Mrs. Feinstein that (in her words) “the death penalty in place in California in the ’60s was in fact a deterrent.”

A third example is recounted by law professor Robert Blecker, who had spent years interviewing prisoners. A veteran criminal told Mr. Blecker that the reason he spared the life of a drug dealer in Virginia whom he had tied up and robbed was because the state had the electric chair. In a similar situation in the District of Columbia, which had abolished the death penalty, the criminal had killed his victim. “I just couldn’t tolerate what they had waiting for me in Virginia,” he said.

These examples are powerful illustrations that the death penalty can and does deter some would-be murderers. Like the rest of us, criminals want to live, and, as the these examples show, they will often adjust their behavior accordingly. Without the death penalty, what incentive would a “lifer” have not to kill while in prison or, if he escaped, while on the run?

There is also a deeper kind of deterrence, largely overlooked in discussions of the death penalty, which doesn’t require rational calculation. When society imposes the ultimate punishment for the most heinous murders, it powerfully teaches that murder is a great wrong. Children growing up in such a society internalize this message, with the result that most people wouldn’t even consider killing another human being.

I would add that eliminating the death penalty undermines the message that murder is a great wrong and contributes to leniency and a ratcheting down of penalties in respect of non-capital crimes such as rape. 

Here the principle of justice, which demands that malefactors receive a punishment proportionate to their offense, and deterrence of this deeper sort meet. If we abolish the death penalty for even the most heinous and coldblooded murderers, we fatally undermine the idea of justice as the cornerstone of our criminal-justice system. Over time justice will be replaced by a therapeutic or technocratic model that treats human beings as cases to be managed and socially engineered rather than as morally responsible persons.

A Note on Beccaria and Kant on Capital Punishment

Here:

According to [Cesare] Beccaria, punishment has two fundamental objectives: to restrain the criminal from committing additional crimes and to deter other members of society from committing the same crime. The first purpose is served by imprisonment, so we are left with the issue of deterrence.

Not so fast! Imprisonment obviously does not prevent criminals from committing additional crimes since criminals continue to commit all sorts of crimes in prison, including murder. Execution of murderers, however, is a most effective means of restraining them from committing additional crimes. It works every time.

Just as dead men tell no tales, dead men commit no crimes.  Does it follow that we ought to exterminate humanity to prevent crime? I don't think so!  

The topic of deterrence raises the following question.  Suppose the execution of a murderer has no deterrent effect whatsoever. Would the execution be nonetheless morally justified?  I should think so, on retributivist grounds. Retribution, impartially administered by the state apparatus, is not revenge, but a form of justice.  Immanuel Kant takes this line in perhaps its most rigoristic form. 

Justice demands capital punishment in certain cases, and it doesn't matter what it costs, or whether there is any benefit to society, or even whether there is any society to benefit. Recall Kant's last man scenario from Metaphysics of Morals, Part II (emphasis added):

[6] But whoever has committed murder, must die. There is, in this case, no juridical substitute or surrogate, that can be given or taken for the satisfaction of justice. There is no likeness or proportion between life, however painful, and death; and therefore there is no equality between the crime of murder and the retaliation of it but what is judicially accomplished by the execution of the criminal. His death, however, must be kept free from all maltreatment that would make the humanity suffering in his person loathsome or abominable. Even if a civil society resolved to dissolve itself with the consent of all its members--as might be supposed in the case of a people inhabiting an island resolving to separate and scatter themselves throughout the whole world--the last murderer lying in prison ought to be executed before the resolution was carried out. This ought to be done in order that every one may realize the desert of his deeds, and that blood-guiltiness may not remain upon the people; for otherwise they might all be regarded as participators in the murder as a public violation of justice.

Kant's view in this passage is that capital punishment of murderers is not just morally permissible, but morally obligatory. (Note that whatever is morally obligatory is morally permissible, though not conversely, and that 'morally justified' just means 'morally permissible.')

Here is another interesting question. The U. S Constitution grants a near-plenary power of pardon to the president. (Here I go again, alliterating.) Does this extend to convicted mass murderers such as Timothy McVeigh? If yes, then Kant would not be pleased. The president would be violating the demands of retributive justice! This of course is a secular analog of the old theological problem of justice and mercy.

Memo to self: bone up on this!  See what Carl Schmitt has to say about it specifically. Cf. his Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 56:

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. 

Shooting Up Chicago

This is what happens when leftists are in charge. And you are still a Democrat? Perhaps you need to see a proctologist who specializes in head injuries.

An explosion of drive-by shootings erupted on Chicago’s South and West sides this weekend. At least 74 people were shot, and 12 killed, between 3 p.m. on Friday and 6 a.m. on Monday.

[. . .]

Meantime, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and Illinois attorney general Lisa Madigan recently celebrated the issuance of a 232-page draft consent decree for the Chicago Police Department, possibly the longest police consent decree ever written. Among numerous other red-tape-generating provisions, it requires the CPD to revise its protocols regarding “transgender, intersex, and gender non-conforming individuals,” to make sure that the CPD policies properly define these terms and that officers address intersex, transgender, and the gender non-conforming with the “names, pronouns and titles of respect appropriate to that individual’s gender.” 

Does Capital Punishment Infringe the Unalienable Right to Life?

Paul J. Griffiths in Against Capital Punishment gives the following argument against C. P.:

The U.S. is a constitutional democracy, committed in theory to serve and protect the inalienable rights of its citizens, who are also its sovereigns. Those inalienable rights include the right not to be killed. A sovereign authority that permits or requires itself to alienate that right from any one of its citizens, for whatever reason, performs an incoherent act. It arrogates to itself the right to make exceptions to the universal economy of rights it theoretically serves, and thus makes itself sovereign over the economy of rights it is supposed to recognize, acknowledge, and serve. Dictatorships can coherently do this; constitutional democracies can’t. 

Here is my pithy formulation of the argument. It is logically contradictory to maintain both that (1) the right to life is a unalienable and thus inviolable natural right logically antecedent  to the state and its constitution, and that (2) the state has the right to violate the right to life as a punishment for certain crimes.

Edward Feser in Hot Air vs. Capital Punishment: A Reply to Paul Griffiths and David Bentley Hart  is not impressed with Griffiths' argument:

Then there is Griffiths’ claim that, at least in the American context, when the state executes an offender it “performs an incoherent act.” How so? Because, says Griffiths, the American system is “committed in theory to serve and protect the inalienable rights of its citizens” and “those inalienable rights include the right not to be killed.” But there are at least four serious problems with this argument. First, it proves too much. While it is true that the Declaration of Independence refers to “unalienable rights,” and includes the right to life among them, it also includes the right to liberty. Hence, Griffiths’ argument, followed out consistently, would entail that in the American context the state performs an “incoherent act” even when it imprisons offenders, and indeed when it inflicts any punishment at all, since all punishments in some way or other infringe on an offender’s liberty. Presumably Griffiths would not want to do away with the entire system of criminal justice. In that case, though, he cannot consistently appeal to the Declaration as a justification for abolishing capital punishment, specifically.

Second, precisely because Griffiths’ interpretation would have such absurd consequences, it is hardly plausible to suppose that Jefferson and Co. meant for the term “unalienable” to be understood the way Griffiths understands it. Surely what they had in mind is the idea that an innocent person cannot have his basic human rights taken from him by the state. A guilty person, however, forfeits his rights by virtue of his offense, and for all Griffiths has shown, this can include the right to life no less than the right to liberty. (Indeed, the same generation that gave us the Declaration of Independence enacted capital punishment laws in every one of the original thirteen states and in the First Congress. The Bill of Rights itself recognizes that citizens may be deprived of “life, liberty, or property” as long as there is “due process of law.”)

Third, it is in any case far from obvious that the presence of these words in the Declaration would make the American system “incoherent” even if we accepted Griffiths’ interpretation of them. For while the Declaration expresses certain widely shared moral ideals, it does not follow that they have, simply by virtue of being in the Declaration, any legal or constitutional significance. While an explicit or implicit contradiction in the law itself would plausibly ground a judgment to the effect that there is “incoherence” in the U.S. system of criminal justice, a mere reference to widely shared and vaguely defined moral sentiments hardly provides a compelling argument.

Fourth, what matters ultimately is not what the Declaration says, but what natural law reasoning actually establishes. And what it establishes, as we argue in the book, is that an offender can forfeit his right to life, just as he can forfeit his right to liberty. Human law, including the American system of criminal justice, is answerable to natural law, not the other way around.

Feser 1 - Griffiths 0.

Punishment and Proportionality

This just in from Daniel M.:

Thanks for the recent posts on capital punishment. I acknowledge the distinction you make between lex talionis (LT) and "punishment must fit the crime" (PFC), which you use to rebut this objection from a reader:

If your argument is that the punishment must fit the crime, what about cases of extreme cruelty (Ted Bundy, e.g.)? Should the state have tortured him? Of course not, that would be inhumane. What makes this different from the death penalty?

The idea, I take it, is something like:

(1) If PFC, cruel acts should be punished with cruel acts.

(2) Punishment shouldn't be cruel.

(3) So PFC is wrong (and so can't be used to support the death penalty).

(Another line of thought here might just be: the death penalty is inhumane!)

I can't speak for the reader, but it's not clear to me that this sort of argument depends on conflating PFC with LT. Admittedly, here's one way of supporting (1):

(A) If PFC, the manner of punishment should resemble the crime.

That's a spurious basis for (1), as it confuses PFC with LT, as you explain. But here's my concern: might there be another way of motivating (1), or at least a related claim to the effect that PFC sometimes licenses cruelty in punishment?

Suppose A and B are killers, but that A's crimes are more cruel and depraved than B's. If the gravity of the punishment should match that of the crime, doesn't PFC call for a more severe punishment for A? But suppose the only way the state can make A's punishment more severe than B's is by adding cruelty into the mix. To make this a bit more concrete, suppose B gets death by injection, and that this is fitting. Then by PFC, that punishment would be too lenient for A. To emphasize that this doesn't depend on LT, we might suppose that whatever extra treatment A deserves need not resemble the particular cruel acts in A's crimes.

I'm not endorsing cruelty in punishment, but just trying to articulate a problem or puzzle, as I see it, for PFC.

RESPONSE

I agree that that there is a bit of a problem for PFC.  Suppose A rapes a woman and then kills her gently to keep her from talking.  B rapes a woman and then tortures her to death over a 12-hour period. He crucifies her and whenever she is at the point of passing out, he revives her with smelling salts so that she suffers her agony to the fullest.

Both deserve the death penalty. But if the punishment is to fit the crime, or be proportional to it, then the penalty inflicted on B ought to be more severe than the one inflicted on A.  Or so it seems if we go by PFC.

How implement this intuition? Well, crucifying people is out. But death by lethal injection is too lenient.  There is death by firing squad, which is slightly worse, and death by hanging which is considerably worse.  Gas chamber and 'the chair' are somewhere in the middle. So one approach would be to consider options that are not cruel, but tougher to endure than lethal injection.

Or one could solve the problem by simply stipulating that death by lethal injection shall be punishment enough for all capital crimes, no matter the number of victims or how they are killed.

The latter would be my practical suggestion.

REPLY BY DANIEL M. (8/6):

Thanks! It's indeed tempting to take there to be some "anti-cruelty" moral principle that constrains the implementation of PFC. (It seems to me that this is what you're suggesting.)  One proposal you float is allowing for a spectrum of execution penalties, some "tougher to endure" than others, to accommodate the fact that some capital crimes are worse than others - yet while avoiding cruelty. You also float the idea of stipulating that one kind of punishment is "punishment enough" for all capital crimes.

Either proposal seems promising as a way of honoring both PFC and an anti-cruelty principle. However, I think they also weaken, or at least complicate, the PFC-based case for the death penalty. This may be more clear with the second proposal. If some kind of punishment is "punishment enough", that implies that we can't simply use PFC to infer, from someone's deserving to die, that the state is morally required to bring that about. For on this proposal we're granting that PFC doesn't require the state to always give someone the full extent of what he deserves. So it seems something further is needed to take us from PFC to the rightness of the death penalty.

RESPONSE:

Suppose Ali cuts the throat of only one innocent Christian while Murat cuts the throats of a thousand innocent Christians.  My second proposal implies that some non-cruel form of C. P.  is punishment enough for both jihadis. This of course is counterintuitive.  For if the punishment must be proportional to the crime, then it would intuitively seem that the penalty for the second jihadi ought to be more severe.  Intuitively, Ali gets what he deserves whereas Murat gets far less than what he deserves.

On the other hand, we cannot jettison the PFC principle. A just punishment for a crime must correspond both in quality and quantity to the nature and extent of the crime.  What exactly this 'correspond' comes to is part of the problem.

One thing to note is that we have already modified PFC to disallow the raping of the rapist, the gouging-out of the the eye of the eye-gouger, the crucifixion of the crucifier, and the burning down of the house of the arsonist.  Otherwise PFC is just the lex talionis in its crude "eye for an eye" form. So we have a precedent for modification. We simply take it a step further if we say that the capital punishment of the mass murderer should be no different in quality than the capital punishment of one who commits only one murder.

We must also bear in mind that just punishment must respect both the dignity of the person punished and the dignity of the punishers. Execution by torture degrades both the object and the subject of the execution.  C. P. is morally permissible only if it does not degrade the object or the subject of the penal procedure.

If I understand Daniel's question, he is not asking whether C. P.  is morally permissible, but how it could be morally obligatory if it is not morally obligatory that Murat the mass murderer in my example receive a worse penalty than Ali the one-time murderer. It is not clear to me why I can't just say that PFC does the trick provided it is hedged by the anti-cruelty/anti-degradation principle.

I have said more than once that justice demands C. P. in certain cases. That implies that C.P. is morally obligatory in certain cases. One could also hold that C. P. is morally permissible but not morally obligatory.  But the main battle, I think, is between those who maintain that C. P. is never morally permissible and those who maintain that it is sometimes morally obligatory.

'The Punishment Must Fit the Crime' and Lex Talionis

In my various defenses of capital punishment (see Crime and Punishment category) I often invoke the principle that the punishment must fit the crime.  To my surprise, there are people who confuse this  principle, label it PFC, with some barbaric version of the lex talionis, the law of the talion, which could be summed up as 'An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.'  The existence of this confusion only goes to show that one can rarely be too clear, especially in a dumbed-down society in which large numbers of people cannot think in moral categories.  Recently I received the following from a reader:

If your argument is that the punishment must fit the crime, what about cases of extreme cruelty (Ted Bundy, e.g.)? Should the state have tortured him? Of course not, that would be inhumane. What makes this different from the death penalty?

This question shows a confusion of PFC with the 'eye for an eye' principle.  Everything I have written on the  topic of capital punishment assumes the correctness of Amendment VIII to the magnificent  U. S. Constitution: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments imposed." (emphasis added).

The exact extension of 'cruel and unusual punishments' is open to some reasonable debate.  But I should hope that we would all agree that drawing and quartering, burning at the stake, crucifixion, the gouging out of eyes, and disembowelment are cruel and unusual.  And here in the West we would add to the list the stoning of adulterers, the cutting off the hands of thieves, the flogging of women for receiving a kiss on the cheek from a stranger, genital mutilation, and beheading.

So PFC does not require the state-sanctioned gouging out of the eye of the eye-gouger, or the raping of the rapist, or the torturing of Ted Bundy, or the beheading of the beheader, or the poisoning by anti-freeze of the woman who disposes of her husband via anti-freeze cocktails.  ("Try this, sweetie, it's a new margarita recipe I found on the Internet!")

PFC is a  principle of proportionality.  The idea is that justice demands that the gravity of the punishment match or be  proportional to the gravity of the crime.  Obviously, a punishment can 'fit' a crime in this sense without the punishment being an act of the same type as that of the crime.  Suppose a man rapes a woman, is caught, tried, convicted, and sentenced to a night in jail and a $50 fine.  That would be a travesty of justice because of its violation of PFC.  The punishment does not fit the crime: it is far too lenient.  But sentencing the rapist to death by lethal injection would also violate PFC: the punishment is too stringent.

Now consider the case of the man Clayton Lockett -- a liberal would refer to him as a 'gentleman' -- who brutally raped and murdered a girl, a murder that involved burying her alive.  His execution was supposedly  'botched' because ". . . lethal injection has becoming increasingly difficult after European pharmaceutical companies stopped exporting drug compounds used for the death penalty in line with the EU outlawing of executions . . . ." I am tempted to say: if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

Death is surely the fitting punishment for such a heinous deed. If you deny that, then you are violating PFC.

But if death is the appropriate punishment in a case like this, it does not follow that the miscreant ought to be brutally raped, tortured, and then buried alive.  That would be 'cruel and unusual.'  Death by firing squad or electric chair would not be cruel or  unusual.

Now either you see that or you don't.  If you don't, then I pronounce you morally obtuse.  You cannot think in moral categories.  You do not understand what justice requires. At some point there has to be an appeal to moral intuition, and only some of us have sound moral intuitions.

Three Arguments Against Capital Punishment Demolished

The Epistemological Argument

The first argument contra could be called the 'epistemological' argument or the argument from ignorance: it can't be known with certainty that one accused of a capital crime is guilty.  The argument sometimes takes this enthymematic form:

P2. Capital punishment is sometimes inflicted on the innocent.

Therefore

C. Capital punishment ought to be banned.

But this argument is invalid without the auxiliary premise:

P1. Any type of punishment that is sometimes inflicted on the innocent ought to be banned.

In the presence of (P1) the conclusion now follows, but  (P1) cannot be accepted. For if we accept it, then every punishment ought to be banned. For every type of punishment  has been at some time meted out to the innocent.  Obviously, to be found guilty in a court of law is not the same as to be guilty of the crime with which one has been charged.

Our first argument, then, suffers from probative overkill: it proves too much. I reject the argument for that reason, and you ought to too.

If the wrong person has been executed, that person cannot be restored to life.  Quite true. It is equally true, however, that if a person has been wrongly imprisoned for ten years, then those years cannot be restored to him.  So the cases are exactly parallel.  At this point liberals will often say things that imply that their real objection to capital punishment is that it is capital.  Well, yes, of course: it has to be. 

For the punishment must fit the crime, and anything less than capital punishment for certain crimes violates the self-evident moral principle that I put in italics.  Justice demands capital punishment in certain cases.  If you don't agree, then I say you are morally obtuse.  On this issue which divides Right and Left either you see that justice demands capital punishment in certain cases or you are morally blind. End of discussion.  To argue with the morally blind is as pointless as arguing with the color-blind and the tone-deaf. Such people need to be defeated by political means. There is no point in further discussion with them.

The Consistency Argument 

Another argument repeatedly given against capital punishment is that it involves doing to a person what in other circumstances would be deemed morally wrong. We could call it the 'consistency argument.'  The argument is that, since killing people is  wrong, then the state's killing of people is also wrong. The trouble with this argument, however, is that it, like the preceding argument, 'proves too much.'  

For if the argument were sound, it would show that every type of  punishment is impermissible, since every type of punishment  involves doing to a person what otherwise would be deemed morally wrong. For example, if I, an ordinary citizen, demand money from you under threat of dire consequences if you fail to pay, then I am committing extortion; but there are situations in which the state can do this legitimately as when a state agency such as the Internal Revenue Service assesses a fine for late payment of taxes.  (Of course, I am assuming the moral legitimacy of the state, something anarchists deny; but the people who give the sort of argument I am criticizing are typically liberals who believe in a much larger state than I do.)

The state is a coercive entity that limits the liberties of individuals in all sorts of ways.  It has to be coercive to do its job.  If you hold that the state is practically necessary and morally justifiable, then you cannot reasonably balk at the state's killing of certain of its citizens in certain well-defined circumstances.

The main purpose of the state is to protect life, liberty, and property. It cannot do this if it does not have the power to punish those who take life and liberty and property.

If justice demands the execution of certain miscreants  then this justice must be administered by some agency.  It had better be an agency dispassionate and impartial hedged round by all sorts of rules and safeguards. Otherwise vigilantism.  The job falls to the state.

The Cost Argument

And then there is the 'cost' argument.   The idea is that capital punishment is not cost-effective. It is claimed that the benefit to society does not outweigh the cost. A utilitarian might be able to rig up such an argument, but I am not a utilitarian. The issue is one of justice. Justice demands capital punishment in certain cases, and it doesn't matter what it costs, or whether there is any benefit to society, or even whether there is any society to benefit. Recall Kant's last man scenario from Metaphysics of Morals, Part II (emphasis added):

[6] But whoever has committed murder, must die. There is, in this case, no juridical substitute or surrogate, that can be given or taken for the satisfaction of justice. There is no likeness or proportion between life, however painful, and death; and therefore there is no equality between the crime of murder and the retaliation of it but what is judicially accomplished by the execution of the criminal. His death, however, must be kept free from all maltreatment that would make the humanity suffering in his person loathsome or abominable. Even if a civil society resolved to dissolve itself with the consent of all its members--as might be supposed in the case of a people inhabiting an island resolving to separate and scatter themselves throughout the whole world--the last murderer lying in prison ought to be executed before the resolution was carried out. This ought to be done in order that every one may realize the desert of his deeds, and that blood-guiltiness may not remain upon the people; for otherwise they might all be regarded as participators in the murder as a public violation of justice.

In any case, there is nothing necessary about high costs. They could easily be reduced. A limit could be set to appeals -- and ought to be set to them. Endless appeals make a mockery of justice. And if   malefactors were executed in a timely fashion, the deterrent effect would be considerable. Thus a fourth argument, the 'no deterrence' argument, is also worthless in my opinion.  Apart from the suicidal, people love life -- criminals included.  Swift and sure execution for capital crimes could not fail to have a deterrent effect.

I will add that if it could be shown that in some jurisdiction the capital penalty was not being applied fairly and justly (due to prejudice against people of Middle Eastern descent, let us say), then I would support a moratorium on the penalty in that jurisdiction. But this question is distinct from the question of principle.  That alone is what I have been discussing.

Capital Punishment

Public Discourse:

On August 2, 2018, Pope Francis announced an update to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, making a prohibition on the death penalty official Catholic teaching. Prior to this change, many scholars believed that the historic teaching of the Church did not declare capital punishment intrinsically immoral, even if the practice is, as a matter of prudence, not required in countries with modern prison systems that can safely isolate dangerous criminals. Other scholars argued that the natural law duty to respect all human life does in fact render any intentional taking of human life morally unacceptable, and that this development of doctrine does not contradict any infallible teaching.

The articles below lay out this debate, with clear summaries of the arguments on both sides.

Rod Dreher comments on the Pope's announcement and quotes extensively from the writings of our friend Ed Feser.

Leftists Love Criminals

You will never understand the Left until you understand that they reliably take the side of losers, underdogs, and criminals, who comprise their clientele and path to power.  And with lefties it is always about power, first and forever.

Here we read about a 78-year-old Englishman who, in defending himself against a screwdriver-wielding home invader, caused the miscreant's death and is now facing a murder charge.

Dear old England, the mother country. It is sad to see your mother, senile and decrepit, go down the toilet, having lost all her moral sense and the will to live.

Once again one sees the justification for my political burden of proof:

As contemporary 'liberals' become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I call the political burden of proof.  The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so  morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.

Actually, that is far too mild a statement. Perhaps tomorrow I will tell you what I really think.

Black Crime Rates

Here are some facts that 'progressives' ignore:

Who is killing and shooting black crime victims? Overwhelmingly, not whites, not the police, but, tragically, other blacks. The high black homicide-victimization rate is a function of the black homicide-commission rate. Blacks commit homicide nationally at seven times the rate of whites and most Hispanics, combined. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at 10 times the rate of white and most Hispanic males between the ages of 14 and 17. Officer-involved shootings are not responsible for the black homicide-victimization rate, either. In fact, a greater percentage of white and Hispanic homicide victims are killed by a police officer than black homicide victims: in 2015, 12 percent of all whites and Hispanics who died of homicide were killed by a cop, compared with 4 percent of black homicide victims who were killed by a cop. Nor is white violence responsible for the black victimization rate. Blacks commit most interracial violence. Between 2012 and 2015, there were 631,830 violent interracial victimizations, excluding homicide, between blacks and whites, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Blacks committed 85.5 percent of those violent victimizations, or 540,360 felonious assaults on whites, while whites committed 14.4 percent of those violent victimizations, or 91,470 felonious assaults on blacks.

So we are not all the same?

Heather Mac, I salute you for your civil courage!

Related: There is no Systemic Racism

Derbyshire's Defenestration Revisited

UPDATE (1/6)

A reader from St. Louis refers us to this St.Louis Post-Dispatch article in which it is reported that the majority of the 200+ STL slayings in 2017 were of black men.

Collusion is not a Crime . . .

. . . and even if it were, there is no evidence that Trump colluded with the Russians. That is the considered opinion of Alan Dershowitz who, by the way, voted for Hillary.  I hope you will grant me that the Harvard professor knows something about the federal criminal  code. Watch this video which is less than five minutes in length.

Dershowitz reports that his liberal pals won't have him over for dinner any more. It's their loss. What a pack of idiots!

It is time for the witch hunt to end.

 Hillary's Boomerang: What goes around comes around.

The Destructive Left

A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment

David Bentley Hart reviews  Edward Feser and  Joseph M. Bessette,  By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment, Ignatius Press, $24.95, 424 pp. (HT: Karl White)

I will add my two cents later if time permits.

Meanwhile, if you care to know where I am 'coming from,' feel free to poke around in my Crime and Punishment category.  Trigger Warning: not for liberals!

Anecdote.  I once asked Dale Tuggy how Ed Feser, a friend of both of us, does it. How does he sire a house full of kids, teach a heavy community college load, read papers all over, maintain an excellent, content-rich blog, and write so many books (see second article below)?

Dale, who has written on mysterianism in connection with the Trinity, replied, "It's a mystery."

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Thomas Merton's Hostility to Scholastic Manualism and the Forgotten Fr. Hickie

If a Black Shoplifts is it Shoplifting?

Here

How to Stifle Policing

The Obama Era continues to hinder police effectiveness.

Are the Police Racist?

A short video by Heather MacDonald. Can you spare five and one half minutes?

Question for liberals: If a statement about race is true, is one a racist for making it?  Is one a racist for reporting the following?

Homicide numbers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Supplementary Homicide Reports, 1976–2005 indicate that young African-American males account for homicide victims at levels that are ten to 20 times greater than their proportion of the population and account for homicide offenders at levels that are 15 to 35 times greater than their proportion of the population.

Academic Criminology Little More than Leftist Ideology that Gets Almost Everything Wrong

Here. Excerpts:

Evidence of the liberal tilt in criminology is widespread. Surveys show a 30:1 ratio of liberals to conservatives within the field, a spread comparable with that in other social sciences. The largest group of criminologists self-identify as radical or “critical.” These designations include many leftist intellectual orientations, from radical feminism to Marxism to postmodernism. Themes of injustice, oppression, disparity, marginalization, economic and social justice, racial discrimination, and state-sanctioned violence dominate criminological teaching and scholarship, as represented in books with titles like Search and Destroy: African American Males in the Criminal Justice System, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, and Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse.

[. . .]

When it comes to disciplinary biases, however, none is so strong or as corrupting as liberal views on race. Disproportionate black involvement in violent crime represents the elephant in the room amid the current controversy over policing in the United States. Homicide numbers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Supplementary Homicide Reports, 1976–2005 indicate that young African-American males account for homicide victims at levels that are ten to 20 times greater than their proportion of the population and account for homicide offenders at levels that are 15 to 35 times greater than their proportion of the population. The black-white gap in armed-robbery offending has historically ranged between ten to one and 15 to one. Even in forms of crime that are allegedly the province of white males—such as serial murder—blacks are overrepresented as offenders by a factor of two. For all racial groups, violent crime is strongly intraracial, and the intraracial dynamic is most pronounced among blacks. In more than 90 percent of cases, the killer of a black victim is a black perpetrator. (emphasis added)

 

Willie Horton Revisited

From William Voegeli, Liberals, Shipwrecked:

As a result, identity politics determined the Democratic reaction in 1988 when George W. Bush’s presidential campaign raised the “Willie Horton” issue against his opponent, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. It was intolerable, liberal activists and journalists declared, to bring to public attention an incident where a black man had brutalized a white couple. What was tolerable, by implication, was a policy (unique to Massachusetts) that gave violent felons, serving life sentences and ineligible for parole, unsupervised furloughs. Little wonder that Joe Sixpack voters tuned into Reagan Democrats as they came to associate liberalism with “profligacy, spinelessness, malevolence, masochism, elitism, fantasy, anarchy, idealism, softness, irresponsibility, and sanctimoniousness,” as sociologist Jonathan Rieder put it in Canarsie (1985). To this day, Democrats think that what Bush said about Willie Horton was outrageous but that what Dukakis did was, at worst, unfortunate. (emphasis added)

I have a confession to make. I voted for Dukakis in 1988! Do I have an excuse? If I have one, it is that my 'default setting' is apolitical. I'm a metaphysician by inclination, and I remain so inclined. I was a registered Democrat until 1991.  But when I started to think concretely about social and political matters with the help of John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and the classics, I realized that there was very little to keep me among the Dems, a bunch that was increasingly moving in the direction of hard leftism and identity politics.

One thing that stuck in my craw and still does is that libs and lefties have a disgustingly casual attitude toward criminal behavior. You can rely on them  to take the side of the screw-up, the criminal, and the underdog even when the underdog is responsible for his sub-canine status. And this while making it difficult for the decent citizen to protect himself by Second Amendment means from the criminal element that liberals coddle.  

Is there one Dem nowadays who supports the death penalty? No. (Correct me if I am wrong!) This is clear proof that this party of obstructionist crapweasels is bereft of moral sense. (I seem to be warming to my theme.) Capital punishment is precisely what justice demands in certain well-defined cases. 

Willie Horton was one bad hombre.

Jordan Peterson on the Problem with Atheism

Earlier this evening I was watching Tucker Carlson. He had a psychology professor on whose YouTube videos had been blocked  by Google but then later unblocked. His name is Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto. I had never heard of him, and his performance on Carlson's show was not particularly impressive.  Having viewed his The Problem with Atheism, however, I am now impressed! 

My finding of this video is serendipitous in that it ties in with a discussion I was having yesterday with Malcolm Pollack. Malcolm is a naturalist and atheist in the Dennett-Dawkins-Harris camp.  He seems to think that an objective, agreed-upon, and life-enhancing morality has no need of a transcendent foundation, and perhaps also that there is no need that the majority believe in any such transcendent foundation. In an earlier thread Malcolm wrote:

. . . one can accept the principle of equality before the law, based on a fundamental sense of shared humanity and liberty, merely as a stipulation, a premise one accepts because one thinks it leads to a just society, without belief in a transcendent foundation in God. It is simply a choice that a person, or a society, can make; we do that with all sorts of other premises and conventions.

I replied:

Can someone who emphasizes the biologically-based differences between groups and sees cultural differences percolating up out of those differences [justifiably] appeal to a "sense of shared humanity" sufficiently robust to support equality before the law?

It may be that the West is running on fumes, the last vapors of the Judeo-Christian worldview and that your sense of equal justice for all is but a vestige of that dying worldview. Can belief in that moral code survive when belief in a transcendent Ground thereof is lost? The death of God has consequences, as Nietzsche appreciated.

This is the question that Professor Peterson addresses with passion and skill and with a slam or two at Sam Harris. (3:03) Peterson's point is essentially the one that Nietzsche made: belief in and respect for the authority  of Christian morality stands and falls with belief in the Christian God.  The death of God-belief in the West among the educated classes leads inevitably to moral nihilism.  

Malcolm thinks we needn't drag the Transcendent into it; we can just agree on some set of moral conventions that will guide us.  Sounds utopian to me. We don't agree on anything anymore: so how can we agree on this?  Because it would be the rational thing to do to insure human flourishing?

But why should one care about the flourishing of anyone outside of oneself and one's tribe? Peterson raises the question of why it would be irrational, say, to exploit others for one's use and enjoyment.  Why is it irrational for the strong to enslave the weak?  How is pure naked self-interest irrational, Peterson asks. (3:53)

Your move, Malcolm.

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Is the Death Penalty Ever Moral?

A Prager U video by the man himself. About five minutes in length. Please take a few minutes to improve your thinking on this topic.

See the Crime and Punishment category for my thoughts on the topic.

Homo Homini Lupus

A 28-year-old Gypsy girl from the Tene Bimbo crime family 'befriends' an 85 year-old single man, marries him, and then poisons him, causing his death, in an attempt to steal his assets.  The two were made for each other, the evil cunning of the woman finding its outlet in the utter foolishness of the man.  What lessons are to be learned from this?

The first is one that serves as a criterion to distinguish conservative from liberal.  The latter lives and dies in the pious belief that people are inherently good and that it is merely such contingent and remediable factors as environment, opportunity, upbringing and the like that prevent the good from manifesting itself.   The conservative knows better: human nature is deeply flawed, structurally flawed, flawed beyond the hope of merely human amelioration.  The conservative takes seriously the idea of original sin, if not the particulars of any particular doctrinal formulation. Even the atheist Schopenhauer  was well-disposed toward the doctrine.  

Though capable of near- angelic goodness, man is capable of near-diabolical evil.  History records it, and only the foolish ignore it.  The fact of radical evil cannot be gainsaid, as even the Enlightenment philosopher Kant (1781-1804) deeply appreciated.  The timber of humanity is crooked, and of crooked timber no perfectly straight thing has ever been made.  (Be it noted en passant that conservatives need to be careful when they generalize about the Enlightenment and wax critical of it.  They might want to check their generalizations against the greatest of the Enlightenment philosophers, the Sage of Koenigsberg.)

My second point will elicit howls of rage from liberals, but their howling is music to my ears.  The victim must bear some moral responsibility for the crime, albeit a much lower degree of responsibility than the perpetrator.  For he allowed himself to be victimized by failing to make use of his faculties. (I assume the 85 year-old was not senile.)  He did not think:  "What could an attractive young woman see in a decrepit old specimen like me?  What is she after?"  He let his vanity and ego swamp and suborn his good judgment.  He had a long life to learn the lesson that romantic love is more illusion than reality, but he failed to apply his knowledge.  Blaming the victim is, up to a point, justified.

So man is a wolf to man and man is a lamb to man.  Wolf and lamb 'need' each other.  Be neither.  You have a moral obligation to be neither.

Story here.

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The Decline of the Culture of Free Discussion and Debate

Needed Changes at DOJ

Would this have happened under Hillary? (That is what we call a rhetorical question.)

[Atty Gen'l Jeff] Sessions has made immigration enforcement a top priority. Late last month he put “sanctuary cities" on notice, announcing that grant money would be withheld from state and local governments that refuse to cooperate with federal authorities and turn over undocumented immigrants arrested for crimes.

Bozo de Blasio will of course scream in protest. This is the guy who thinks "it is OK to shield undocumented immigrants who drive drunk from federal authorities . . . ."  As if drunk driving is not a very serious felony.

What does it say about the citizens of New York City that they would would choose as mayor such a destructive leftist?

Once again we note the characteristic liberal-left tendency to take the side of the criminal, the loser, the underdog, regardless of what they have done to acquire their status.

An illegal alien who drives drunk is a criminal twice over, first by entering the country illegally, and then by committing the serious felony of drunk driving.  

But so-called liberals have an exasperatingly lenient and  casual attitude toward criminal behavior and little or no respect for the rule of law.  Theodore Dalrymple is good on this.

You should be grateful that Hillary was handed her walking papers and won't be coming back.

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Like Being the Chief Rabbi in Mecca

Kitty Genovese

53 years ago, today.

"Tookie" Williams Executed

From the Powerblogs archive.  Originally posted 13 December 2005.  

As you all know by now, Stanley "Tookie" Williams was executed at San Quentin, California at 12:35 AM PT. I take no pleasure in this man's or any man's death; but I do take satisfaction from justice's being served. I simply do not understand how anyone who is not morally obtuse can fail to see that justice demands capital punishment in cases like this.

Not only did this fellow brutally murder four people, three of them members of a Chinese family, "Buddha-heads" in the miscreant's lingo, but he also helped found the Crips gang. So he is indirectly and partially responsible for hundreds and perhaps thousands of other crimes including rapes, carjackings, murders, you name it. Not only that, he failed to show any remorse, failed to take responsibility for his deeds, and played the predator right to the end, attempting to stare down the press there to witness his last moments.

But no fact and no argument I or anyone adduces will make any impression on liberal gush-heads like Bill Press, Ed Asner, Mike Farrell and their ilk. Bill Press the other day opined that capital punishment is "cruel and unusual." To say something so stupid, and so typical of a liberal, is to empty that phrase of all meaning. Williams died by lethal injection, painlessly. He wasn't broken on the wheel, drawn and quartered -- or cut in half by a blast from a 12-gauge  shotgun, which is how he murdered one of his victims. 

So there is cause to celebrate: not the death of a man, nor the awesome power of the state, but that justice was done and the Left was  handed a stinging rebuke.

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O. J. Trial NOT the Trial of the Century

How soon they forget, and what paucity of historical sense!  Or perhaps journalists just don't care to get things right. Chalk it up to truth decay. The O. J. Simpson murder trial was not the trial of the century.

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Clinton's State Department: A RICO Enterprise

Andrew C. McCarthy ought to know. Damning.  

As we go to press, the stunning news has broken that the FBI’s investigation is being reopened. It appears, based on early reports, that in the course of examining communications devices in a separate “sexting” investigation of disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, the bureau stumbled on relevant e-mails — no doubt connected to Huma Abedin, Mr. Weiner’s wife and, more significantly, Mrs. Clinton’s closest confidant. According to the New York Times, the FBI has seized at least one electronic device belonging to Ms. Abedin as well. New e-mails, never before reviewed by the FBI, have been recovered.

If You Don't Want Your Daughters Raped by Foreigners, Are You a Xenophobe?

Brexit was sparked by rape and crime

British girls raped by Muslim gangs on 'industrial scale'

Why did British police ignore Pakistani gangs abusing 1,400 Rotherham children?

According to Roger Scuton, because of political correctness:

A story of rampant child abuse—ignored and abetted by the police—is emerging out of the British town of Rotherham. Until now, its scale and scope would have been inconceivable in a civilized country.  Its origins, however, lie in something quite ordinary: what one Labour MP called "not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat."

Muslims protest to support UK girl's rapists

The fact that Brits object to their daughters being abused by foreigners shows that they are benighted nativists, racists, white supremacists with an irrational fear, a phobia, of foreigners.  Right?  And that is what Brexit was all about: an irrational fear of foreigners.  Right?

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On Seinfeld

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