The Death Penalty

The death penalty itself is a major dividing line between liberals and conservatives. Supporters tend to be conservative and opponents tend to be liberal. Nurturant Parent morality militates against the death penalty. The major legal argument given rests on fairness, which, as we have seen, arises in Nurturant Parent morality from considerations of empathy and nurturance. The argument is that the courts do not have a way to guarantee that the death penalty is applied fairly. Prejudice and politics do enter into murder trials. If a person unfairly convicted of murder is executed, then there is no recourse if he is later discovered to have been innocent. Most of the people on death row are poor and black and are unable to afford adequate legal representation, which, it is argued, makes it more likely that they will get the death penalty. The same penalties should apply to all racial and economic groups. If that is not true of the death penalty, the death penalty should not be applied at all.

But liberals' feelings about the death penalty run much deeper than that. Nurturance itself implies a reverence for life, which is a form of the unconditional love of nurturant parents for their children. If the government is conceptualized as a nurturant parent, then it should have such an overwhelming reverence for life itself. The death penalty denies such a reverence for life, and so is inconsistent with the conception of the government as nurturant parent.

In Strict Father morality, the strict father metes out punishment for the wrongdoings of children. The Nation As Family metaphor makes the government into the Big Daddy who is meting out punishment. Are there any limits on the harshness of punishment? The lack of such limits in the family would make it moral for a parent to kill his child in the name of discipline. When parents are abusive, this can happen, and all too frequently does. Infanticide is what the death penalty amounts to in the Nation As Family metaphor. The spectre of the state functioning like a murderously abusive parent is, I believe, what lies behind the constitutional prohibition against cruel and inhuman punishment and behind liberals' abhorrence of the death penalty.

For these reasons, I believe, liberals find the death penalty uncivilized and point out that nations around the world have banned it. It sets a bad example for the state to be engaged in killing people, the worst crime someone could commit. Just as parents can set bad examples, so, according to the Nation As Family metaphor, can the government. Governments should not be in the business of killing people.

Arguments against the death penalty are not just about the death penalty itself. They are emblematic of a broader issue. They are about how the state should be conceptualized and how it should function in general.

The liberal arguments, of course, cannot possibly be persuasive to conservatives. If the very basis of morality is reward and punishment, then in a moral society the way to deal with crime is punishment, an eye for an eye – period. The argument that the death penalty does not deter murder doesn't really matter that much. To conservatives, the death penalty is part of a moral society, in which the Morality of Reward and Punishment rules supreme.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14