Category Archives: Ethics

Why are Internet discussions less polite?

In the comments section of another post, St. Martel observes that:

Discussion fora on the Internet do have a tendency to make people a little less polite than they would be in person. Not sure why that is…

[May I point out how glad I am that my readers are capable of noticing this and correcting for tone on their own? Yes, I may? Okay, I will then.]

I think there are 3 main reasons why internet discussions are less polite:

1) Anonymity. People feel free to say things they wouldn’t otherwise say when it can’t be traced back to their “real” identity, so that there are no consequences (for those with limited capacity to feel guilt, anyway).

While this probably accounts for many of the worst abusers, I don’t think it’s all that relevant in the case of a) people like myself who blog under our real names, or b) people with robust consciences who don’t like trolling and insulting people so much.

2) Lack of bodily interaction. We human beings consist of both bodies and souls. When we have conversations face-to-face, we aren’t just communicating with words. Our social instincts, evolved over millions of years, involve all kinds of subtle communications when we talk in person. Even merely talking over the phone (by voice) provides subtle clues which are not present in internet conversations. Whereas, on the internet we have a conversation between disembodied minds. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a wonderful technology, but it’s missing a lot of color, the sense of the other person as a person, the embodied almost-sacramental aspects of human relationships.

Hence the email convention of including a smiley to say when we are joking. :-) (That wasn’t a joke, that was just an example of a smiley.) Although, that doesn’t always work either. As my father St. Larry once said:

You know how people are sometimes rude on Usenet or on a mailing list. Sometimes they’ll write something that can only be taken as a deadly insult, and then they have the unmitigated gall to put a smiley face on it, as if that makes it all right.

This helps explain why you should avoid quarrelling with somebody by email. It seldom brings disputing parties into agreement. Emotionally tense situations are best resolved in more personable settings, if you can handle it. (Though sometimes email or a physical letter can be useful to broach a sensitive topic if you’re too chicken to initiate the exchange in person. But that’s different from quarrelling.)

So on the one hand, arguing with somebody face-to-face can trigger an unpleasant sense of Conflict! Conflict! with an accompanying adrenaline surge. It’s annoying if your body starts trembling with fear when your mind just wanted to have a nice friendly conversation about how somebody else is wrong about politics or something. On the other hand, we instinctively know this and most of us adapt in order to be more personable and friendly when there’s an actual face on the other end. It’s much easier to see what’s going on and correct it mid-stream. This leads to a 3rd point:

3) Long comments with a delay in responding. If I speak to you in person, then if I put my foot in it and begin to misunderstand you, or say something insulting, you will immediately respond and I have the ability to self-correct before anything goes too terribly wrong.

But if I’m in an argument on the Internet, that’s not how things work. Suppose you read a long response from somebody and you start obsessing about in what ways it is wrong and needs correction. So then you write a long response of your own, but it’s pretty easy to get carried away. If the tone is wrong, it won’t be corrected until several hours or days later when an equally strongly worded message comes back, and that of course will itself generally be a disproportionate response (for the same reason) which triggers a similar reaction.

Of course, the whole thing can be nipped in the bud if both parties make a conscious effort to be unusually polite and respectful, but it’s surprising just how much greater an effort it takes.

But even if the discussion is totally polite, there’s a downside for philosophy. Long-winded comments make it too easy to talk at cross purposes, without correction from the other point of view. After all, when I’m writing a long argument I’m putting myself into the brain state where I am right and the other person is wrong, and one stays there for quite some time. This is dangerous to one’s sense of balance and fairness.

Psychological studies have shown that when people hear evidence that their own strongly-held political views are wrong, the usual response is to argue against the new evidence. Paradoxically, this causes them to become more certain of their previous point of view [too lazy to find a link right now, but I promise I’m not just making this up].

From this perspective, arguments are rather dangerous things! Simply by expressing an argument for X, one naturally causes somebody on the other side to compensate by arguing for ~X. But this puts them in the position of a lawyer trying to make the best case for one side, not a judge disinterestedly weighing the evidence for and against. And as we all know, lawyers have a tendency to come to believe that their own side is right (even if it was basically a coin-toss which side they would be assigned to in the first place.)

This is something I worry about quite a bit as somebody who enjoys arguing about religion on my blog (and in person). Rational people should settle disputes rationally, but what if providing rational arguments don’t tend to actually cause this to happen? What does one do instead?

One could compensate for this by asking people to argue for the other side of the debate for a change (one implementation of this is the Ideological Turing Test, adapted to religious arguments by St. Leah Libresco.) But this only works if we presuppose a strong interest in finding the truth. The “debate team” mentality where the goal is to win by coming up with sophistical bogus arguments, is not really improved by the fact that the positions are assigned randomly. That just makes it even more relativistic.

To try to get around some of these issues, the Socratic method of dialogue requires that the participants ask each other questions instead of arguing directly, and respond by making short speeches, not long. The other rule is that you can take things back as needed without any shame, instead of getting stuck defending one’s initial reaction to the question. As St. Socrates says to Polus in St. Plato’s Gorgias:

SOCRATES: Illustrious Polus, the reason why we provide ourselves with friends and children is, that when we get old and stumble, a younger generation may be at hand to set us on our legs again in our words and in our actions: and now, if I and Gorgias are stumbling, here are you who should raise us up; and I for my part engage to retract any error into which you may think that I have fallen-upon one condition:

POLUS: What condition?

SOCRATES: That you contract, Polus, the prolixity of speech in which you indulged at first.

POLUS: What! do you mean that I may not use as many words as I please?

SOCRATES: Only to think, my friend, that having come on a visit to Athens, which is the most free-spoken state in Hellas, you when you got there, and you alone, should be deprived of the power of speech—that would be hard indeed. But then consider my case:—shall not I be very hardly used, if, when you are making a long oration, and refusing to answer what you are asked, I am compelled to stay and listen to you, and may not go away? I say rather, if you have a real interest in the argument, or, to repeat my former expression, have any desire to set it on its legs, take back any statement which you please; and in your turn ask and answer, like myself and Gorgias—refute and be refuted.

So I guess the really philosophical way to argue on the Internet is chat! Text chats (IM) are still disembodied, but they have a much quicker turn-around time, perfect for Socratic dialogue. I use gmail chat all the time to talk physics with my physics collaborators, but I don’t usually have philosophical discussions that way. But maybe I should.

Questions about Adam

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In the comments to my post on Flesh and Sprit II: Original Sin, a couple readers asked questions about the historicity of Adam:

1) A reader who goes by the pseudonym i like pizza asks:

i don’t want to get too off-topic here, but i’m curious about your thoughts on whether or not adam was a historical person. and if you believe that he was not, what are your thoughts on paul apparently believing (and teaching?) that he was (rom 5:12-20; 1 cor 15:45-49)?

What counts as believing and teaching that Adam was historical? I know a lot of conservative Christians use this argument: person or event X is mentioned by Jesus or an apostle in the New Testament and therefore X must have been historical. Well that doesn’t follow. As an example, I don’t believe Adam and Eve were necessarily historical individuals, and yet I still referred to their story in Genesis.

Suppose for the sake of argument that the Adam story was a mythical story, inspired by God, which illustrates a point about the human condition, and that St. Paul knew this. Would it follow from this that St. Paul would never refer to that story in his own writings? Not unless we think that St. Paul couldn’t have found any value in the story unless it was historical. But the rabbinic use of midrashim (fictional stories to tell a point, often about biblical characters) shows that they did not in fact think this way.

Basically the argument is circular: you should take Genesis literally because St. Paul did, and we know St. Paul was, because no reasonable person could get meaning out of the Adam story unless they themselves took it literally. But that is exactly the question which is at stake.

Did St. Paul in fact believe that Adam was a historical person? I doubt he ever considered the issue explicitly, but very likely he assumed he was (Acts 17:26 is probably better evidence for this than his epistles). Did he teach that he was historical? Well, we have to decide what do we mean by this…?

If the question is, does St. Paul’s teaching collapse as meaningless if Adam was not historical, I think the answer is clearly no. The point of the references to Adam in Romans and 1 Corinthians is to establish the existence of a sinful human nature to illustrate by comparison the new human nature which comes from Christ. But this purpose is served just as well by a mythical Adam representing some pre-historical rebellion against God with unknown details; since the resulting Old Human Nature is in any case a real thing that exists in the present and needs redemption. In any case, St. Paul also emphasizes the differences between the two figures:

But the gift is not like the trespass. For if by the one man’s trespass the many died, how much more have the grace of God and the gift overflowed to the many by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ. And the gift is not like the one man’s sin, because from one sin came the judgment, resulting in condemnation, but from many trespasses came the gift, resulting in justification. (Roms 5:15-16)

We could also ask, did St. Paul make it explicit that one could not disbelieve in a historical Adam and still be a Christian? This is not a silly thing to ask, because earlier in the 1 Cor 15 passage he did do exactly this, when it comes to the question of whether Christ really rose from the dead.

But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. (15:12-9)

There is no similar statement that the Christian preaching and faith are useless unless Adam was really historical. St. Paul’s teaching is relentlessly Christological. Everything, including Old Testament stories, is important only for the light it sheds on the Christ-event. Christ is the center, so it matters whether he was historical. Adam is peripheral; his story is there to teach us more about the meaning of Jesus and the Church (who is the new Eve, the spouse which was formed from his pierced side after he had fallen into the temporary sleep of death).

If Adam’s story is of great and irreplaceable value in explaining the true meaning of Christ’s sacrifice, then for that very reason, the Holy Spirit was justified in putting that story in our Bible, regardless of whether it happened literally.

2) St. Declan writes:

I’ve been reflecting on my belief in evolution and Christianity as a whole and realized that there are many questions to think about that I can’t appropriately answer.

You mentioned evolutionary psychology as an explanation of why we have sinful inclinations. Yet some advanced mammals like chimpanzees seem to demonstrate an ability to go against their evolutionary instincts by demonstrating kindness to a wounded chimp when other chimps don’t. Does this demonstrate that animals too, can sin?

And if animals can sin, then it would seem that Pauline soteriology is pretty false: Sin didn’t enter the world through one man. What do you think Dr Aron?

About a year ago I read a very interesting book about The Moral Lives of Animals, by a zoological writer named Dale Peterson. It had a bunch of very interesting examples of moral-like (and immoral-like) animal behaviors.

One could quibble whether many of the examples should really qualify as ethics: if an animal mistreats another animal and the other animals get annoyed, so the first one stops, is this really ethics or just obvious social behavior? Granted that chimps engage in e.g. rape, do they actually feel guilty about it?

But it seems clear enough that there exist social instincts in animals which could at least be called proto-ethics. I don’t think Christians have any need to deny this. Why shouldn’t God provide the early animals with some moral-like instincts, especially if he intended one of them to evolve into a species capable of bearing his Son. It would be a much worse world if no animals ever felt affection for each other or for us. But recall what I said in my previous post:

Or if we were still just animals, who had never known better, we would still have the innocence of animals. A cat is morally innocent when it plays with a mouse, not because that is morally wonderful but because it doesn’t know any better. But now we know better (or else ought to know better but are in denial), and it pains us to experience our own worst impulses.

Do animals sin? A sin is an offense against God (Psalm 51:4). For something to rise to the level of sin, the organism in question needs to be high enough to potentially be in relationship with God and feel guilty for disobeying. (Or to deny the possibility of any such higher authority in order to avoid feeling guilty, which is a different manifestation of the same issue.) I don’t see any evidence that any animals are sinners in this sense.

An animal may loosely be said to commit an ethical (or more accurately social) violation against another animal, but human beings don’t usually morally condemn them for this because we don’t consider them morally responsible because they are animals. So presumably God doesn’t either. No animal is smarter than a 4 year old human, and we barely consider 4 year-olds to be morally responsible (we treat them as if they were in order so that they grow up to be morally responsible, but we don’t consider them e.g. criminally or spiritually responsible). We have Reason, a qualitatively greater capacity for abstraction, which allows us to recognize a Law which comes from somthing above us. (Even if not all of us humans conceptualize that Law as being related to a divine Lawgiver, we still tend to act as if it did.)

So far as I can tell, animals are not capable of belief in God. I would be extremely interested in whether humans could teach chimps about the existence of God, but I doubt the type of scientists who currently do chimpanzee-learning experiments would countenance that one.

The closest an animal ever comes to sinning, is if they are domestic pets, and they rebel against a human being in authority over them. Cats and dogs are both capable of adoring human beings as a higher order of creature, though cats are rather weak on the concept of obedience. So let’s consider a bad dog who disobeys and then feels shame after being scolded by his master. Since human beings are created in the image of God and are his priests to the animals, this is like sin. But it is only an analogy, since sin, properly speaking, is a spiritual offense against God, not a social offense against Man.

(Of course, for us humans, who have been raised to the divine image and can recognize consciously the value of human beings in the abstract, for us to sin against other human beings is to sin against the God who made them.)

So understood in this theological sense, the first sin must, almost by definition, have come after the first moment that a being recognized their Creator as being in authority over them. There could have been plenty of affection, cooperation, violence, or theft before that time, but this was the moment that human beings in a spiritual sense came to be.

Of course, my speculations about the actual course of pre-historic events are just that: speculations. But if there is going to be a speculative field of secular evolutionary psychology, I don’t see why Christians shouldn’t join in the fun.

Separation of Physics and Theology?

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Down in the comments section of this post, reader St. TY has the following kind thing to say about me:

What an excellent blog. I have been looking for one like this for a long time. I tell what I like about it: Although we all know St. Aron’s Christian bias, but he does not let it intrude into his physics and, as one with a mathematical background, I like that separation of Church and State.

As for the format I’m old fashioned and I like the written word because good writing demands clarity and coherence I must add honesty, and so I like reading Aron’s pieces and the comments.

I would like Aron to put all of this meaty stuff in a book.
Would you, Aron?
Thank you.

Thanks so much for your gracious compliments about my blog! It’s too bad really, that I must strongly disagree with you when you say that

Although we all know St. Aron’s Christian bias, but he does not let it intrude into his physics and, as one with a mathematical background, I like that separation of Church and State.

Your proposal that I keep a separating wall is not really very undivided, is it? I expressed a different aspiration in my About page:

“Undivided Looking” expresses the aspiration that, although compartmentalized thinking is frequently helpful in life, one must also step back and look at the world as a whole. This involves balancing specialized knowledge with common sense to keep both kinds of thinking in perspective.

So in response I would say, that one’s physics views can and should be influenced by one’s theological views (or vice versa), if there is a legitimate reason why it should do so. There is, after all, only one universe, and therefore no compartments can be kept completely watertight. For example, most economists don’t need to know much about chemistry, but if they’re talking about buying things that might explode then there needs to be some cross-talk.

Christianity is not a “bias”, but a “belief”, one which happens to be true. Deducing things from one’s beliefs is not bias unless it is done in an irrational and capricious manner. But perhaps you were speaking in a semi-humorous way, in the way that we might say that all scientists seek to be biased towards the truth!

Reasonable physicists will probably have similar intuitions about how physics should be done (I’m excluding unreasonable people like Young Earth Creationists), regardless of whether they are atheists or theists. Or rather, people have different intuitions about physics but they mostly don’t correlate with religious views! But if on a particular matter (e.g. the universe having a beginning in time) somebody happens to be influenced by their religion (or lack thereof) to think that one viewpoint is more likely than another, I don’t think that should be taboo.

Far from corrupting the scientific process, I think science usually works better when people explore a variety of intuitions and options. As I said in discussing the importance of collaboration in science:

Healthy scientific collaboration encourages reasonable dissent. Otherwise group-think can insulate the community from effective criticism of accepted ideas. Some people say that scientists should proportion their beliefs to the evidence. However, there’s also some value in diversity of opinion, because it permits subgroups to work on unpopular hypotheses. I suppose things work best when the scientific community taken as a whole proportions its research work to the evidence.

It doesn’t necessarily matter whether the source of the original intuition is something that could be accepted by all scientists. What matters is that the resulting idea can be tested. Sometimes, the original motivation for a successful scientific theory is rather dubious (e.g the Dirac sea motivation for antimatter), but nevertheless the resulting theory is confirmed by experiment and later is motivated by a different set of considerations.

So I don’t believe in the complete separation of Physics and Theology, hence the blog. But maybe I believe in something else which has some similar effects on my writing. You must after all be detecting something about what I am doing which provoked your favorable statement.

Perhaps it is this: I believe in being honest. I must to the best of my ability weigh the evidence on fair scales, and be open about what I am doing. It would be dishonest if, because I want to prove the truth of Theism, I were to report the relevant Physics data in an imbalanced way, playing up anything which might seem to help my case and playing down anything which does not. People often do this kind of thing reflexively when they argue, even to the extent of first deceiving themselves before they deceive others. But it’s still unfair tactics, especially when deployed by the expert against the layman.

It is not dishonesty for me to have my own views about what’s important in Physics and what’s not, but it would be dishonest if I implied that all physicists agreed with me about that when they don’t. Nor would it be dishonest if my views about speculative physics are influenced to some extent by my theological views—I think this is inevitable, and possibly not even fully conscious—but to pretend that a view is based on purely physical considerations when it is not, or to distort the data about Physics to match a preconceived agenda (theological or otherwise) is repugnant to me.

So I’ll do the best I can to be honest, and hopefully that will tilt the scales in the right direction.

Once upon a time, a college friend and I planned to write a book about Science-and-Religion topics, but that never got off the ground. A few of the ideas from that time are being recycled here.

I originally started this blog because an elder Christian whom I respect back in Maryland told me (and gave me to understand that it was a divine revelation to him, and I trust him to know the difference) that I should not neglect my gift of teaching when I went to Santa Barbara. At first I tried to start a Bible study with my church, but it already had lots of other groups, and it kept not working out for various reasons; then I thought of the idea of blogging instead.

Once I reach a critical mass on the blog, perhaps some of them could be organized into book format. But I don’t need to decide that yet. For the time being, the informal blogging environment seems more fruitful for developing ideas.

True Justice

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After writing about the death penalty recently, I was reflecting about the real meaning of Justice. It’s tempting to think that Justice refers to the thing which happens (or should have happened) in Law Courts. And of course we hope that the laws and the “justice system” will work out in a way which is actually just. However, there is a sense in which the justice system is a million miles away from true Justice, if we define Justice as harmonious reciprocal relationships.

Even if the justice system worked perfectly on its own terms, it would be a mistake to think that this is Justice. The fact that crimes are committed (or else people are suing each other in civil courts) means that the harmonious relationships in society have already been disrupted. Our Law Courts are, at best, a means for correcting injustice, and even then they can only do so in limited respects: judges can restore property and restrain criminals, but they cannot change people’s hearts to love each other again.

We call a hospital part of the “health-care system” not because lying in a hospital bed is Health, but because it is something we use to remedy sickness. The best sort of Health is not needing to go to the hospital in the first place.

Let’s see what the Prophet Zechariah has to say about this. Someone came and asked him a question about what the (religious) law should be:

In the fourth year of King Darius, the word of the Lord came to Zechariah on the fourth day of the ninth month, the month of Kislev. The people of Bethel had sent Sharezer and Regem-Melek, together with their men, to entreat the Lord by asking the priests of the house of the Lord Almighty and the prophets, “Should I mourn and fast in the fifth month, as I have done for so many years?” (Zechariah 7:1-3, NIV)

Some context is important here. The Jews had formerly been captured and exiled to Babylon, as a divine punishment for their sins. Jerusalem and its Temple had been destroyed, and the fast in question commemorated that.

But now the Persians are in charge, and they have authorized the City and Temple to be rebuilt. So the Bethelites have a natural question. Do we have to still keep fasting or not? The fast has become part of their religious practices, and they want to know whether it still applies to them. What will Zechariah tell them?

Religious people naturally trend into thinking of religion as a certain set of rules which have to be kept, as if it were a secular legal code and they just have to stay on the right side of the law. They want to know which way God wants things to be—but in fact either Yes or No would be misleading, because God wants a different sort of thing entirely:

Then the word of the Lord Almighty came to me: “Ask all the people of the land and the priests, ‘When you fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh months for the past seventy years, was it really for me that you fasted? And when you were eating and drinking, were you not just feasting for yourselves? (7:4-6)

Stop asking whether you should fast or feast—it’s the wrong question. Instead ask why you were fasting, and why you were feasting. Was it really for God, or was it just to mourn your own sorrows and celebrate yourself?

And the word of the Lord came again to Zechariah: “This is what the Lord Almighty said: ‘Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. In your hearts do not think evil of each other.’ ” (7:8-10)

The Lord replaces the people’s question with a different command—do justice, resuce the oppressed. THIS is the point of all of the religious rules, not which days are appropriate for fasting. This is reiterated later:

“These are the things you are to do: Speak the truth to each other, and render true and sound judgment in your courts; do not plot evil against each other, and do not love to swear falsely. I hate all this,” declares the Lord. (8:15-17)

There is indeed a role for Law Courts in this notion of Justice. Zechariah was speaking to a broken society which had lost its bearings, which needed legal stability and fair dealing in order for any reconstruction to occur. But the requirement of Justice goes deeper than just institutions. The Just person is not just characterized by legal justice but by honesty and integrity in all of his dealings.

The Law Courts are a means and not an end. What end it is a means towards may be seen in this beautiful passage:

This is what the Lord Almighty says: “Once again men and women of ripe old age will sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each of them with cane in hand because of their age. The city streets will be filled with boys and girls playing there.”

This is what the Lord Almighty says: “It may seem marvelous to the remnant of this people at that time, but will it seem marvelous to me?” declares the Lord Almighty. (8:4-6)

We have now nearly ascended the treacherous craggy slopes of Mount Justice. Peering into the misty summit, upon which the Earthly Paradise is located, what do we see? Children playing games with each other! And sentimental elders looking on and reminiscing.

We do not see here the perfect restoration of body at the Resurrection, but we see the highest vision of Justice between humans beings which any society here and now can attain. Doubtless the children sometimes accuse each other of cheating. But the ideal of neighborliness is there, which is indeed the point of the command to Love your Neighbor. This is Justice.

There is also a harmonious relation of the entire people to God:

This is what the Lord Almighty says: “I will save my people from the countries of the east and the west. I will bring them back to live in Jerusalem; they will be my people, and I will be faithful and righteous to them as their God.” (8:7-8)

This is Justice too. The establishment of a truly just earthly society (harmony between human beings) requires also a correct relation to the God who works justice and righteousness in the earth:

This is what the Lord Almighty says: “You who now hear these words spoken by the prophets who were there when the foundations were laid for the house of the Lord Almighty, let your hands be strong so that the Temple may be built. Before that time there were no wages for man or beast. No one could go about his buisness safely because of his enemy, for I had turned every man against his neighbor. But now I will not deal with the remnant of this people as I did in the past,” declares the Lord Almighty.

“The seed will grow well, the vine will yield its fruit, the ground will produce its crops, and the heavens will drop their dew. I will give all these things as an inheritance to the remnant of this people.” (8:9-12)

God, humans, animals, the environment; all harmoniously related. This is Justice.

Once the Temple is established (not just as a building but in our hearts) then there is a bond between neighbors which allows children to play safely in the streets. Humans and animals can be fed for their work, because they are treated fairly. Commerce is possible because people don’t need to be afraid of aggressors (this is why the Law Courts aren’t optional). Responsible cultivation of Nature is possible because the Temple trains us that things which belong to God are sacred.

Only then does the Prophet return to the question of fasting:

This is what the Lord Almighty says: “The fasts of the fourth, fifth, seventh and tenth months will become joyful and glad occasions and happy festivals for Judah. Therefore love truth and peace.”

This is what the Lord Almighty says: “Many peoples and the inhabitants of many cities will yet come, and the inhabitants of one city will go to another and say, ‘Let us go at once to entreat the Lord and seek the Lord Almighty. I myself am going.’ And many peoples and powerful nations will come to Jerusalem to seek the Lord Almighty and to entreat him.”

This is what the Lord Almighty says: “In those days ten people from all languages and nations will take firm hold of one Jew by the hem of his robe and say, ‘Let us go with you, because we have heard that God is with you’.” (8:18-23)

Real Justice is attractive, and causes celebration and emulation. It is no longer a question of rules, but of God’s promises. Whether or not you abstain from anything else, abstain from injustice. Days for producing Justice are always festivals. Therefore, rejoice always whatever you do.

Thoughts about the Death Penalty

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In the previous post I mentioned that I support the death penalty, without providing any details. Commenter Darryl asks:

Aron, (and other commenters, too!) I wonder if I might probe your notions on the death penalty. Given that in the US alone at least 120 (a fairly conservative estimate depending on which sources one consults) persons on death row have been exonorated by DNA evidence, what are your thoughts on this quote I came across the other day: “So, as long as the death penalty is in place, you are pretty much guaranteed to occasionally execute an innocent person.”

I agree with the quote at the end of Darryl’s comment. However, I would add that “So long as imprisonment is in place, you are pretty much guaranteed to occasionally imprison an innocent person,” and “So long as fines are in place…” etc. Any human system of justice, no matter how careful, risks punishing the innocent. And the more cautious the system is to protect the innocent, the more often the guilty will remain unpunished.

In this respect, the only thing that is different about the death penalty is that once you do it, it cannot be reversed. However, this is a relative rather than an absolute distinction. If you sentence someone to 25 years and then the person is exonerated 20 years later, you can give back the 5 years but you cannot give back the 20 years. (In politically unstable countries, the reversibility of imprisonment may even be an argument for the death penalty, if one is worried e.g. that the genocidal dictator’s old faction will retake power and set him free.)

I also do not think that the death penalty is really even an order of magnitude worse than life imprisonment. If I were unjustly accused of a crime, I would prefer A) 50% chance of being released to rejoin my family and my career; 50% chance executed, over B) 100% chance of life imprisonment w/o possibility of parole. Remember all those Revolutionary War slogans about liberty being more important than life!—do we still believe that?

Obviously, whenever an innocent person is executed this is a travesty of justice, a very bad outcome. We live in a modern, first-world nation in which long-term humane imprisonment is possible. Therefore, if there is no particular good to be had from executions rather than imprisonment, then it is our moral duty to abolish the death penalty. But is that really true?

The trouble with most debates about the death penalty is that the begin in the middle (quibbling about statistics) rather than at the beginning, which is to ask why one might have the death penalty at all. Until you first ask what the purpose of the death penalty is, you cannot know whether the trade-off is worth it.

Here are some possible motivations for punishing the guilty:

compensation of victims
prevention of future wrongdoing
deterrence
rehabilitation of the offender
retribution (i.e. because they deserve it)

In our system of justice, we make a clear distinction between civil proceedings (which exist to compensate the wronged) and criminal proceedings (which exist to vindicate the state’s abstract interest in justice). I think that this is a good distinction, and that therefore #1 is irrelevant to the current question.

With respect to #2 and #3, life imprisonment and executions are probably about equally good. In principle, if execution is worse, people ought to be motivated more strongly to avoid it. But I’m not sure it works out that way in practice, given criminal psychology, and the remoteness of the punishment from the crime. (However, there is an important exception in the case of inmates who murder prison guards or other prisoners—in this case locking them up obviously doesn’t prevent the crime, and if they already have a life sentence, the death penalty seems necessary as escalation.)

With respect to #4, the death penalty may well be better than life imprisonment. True, life imprisonment provides more time to repent. But the death penalty provides better circumstances. If the prospect of one’s own immanent death—due to one’s own crimes, no less—does not cause someone to reconsider their way of life, it is hard to see what would. Here the nonreligious and Christian might part ways. The former is likely to feel that it doesn’t matter much if a person repents, if you have to kill them to get it. While for those like myself who believe in an eternal divine judgment following death, it is a matter of the greatest importance.

But I think the core issue at stake is actually #5: does anyone deserve to die? Is it possible for someone (such as the mass murderers described in my last post) to be so polluted by guilt, that it is a travesty of justice for them NOT to be executed? I think so, and it is for this reason that I support the death penalty.

For example, a while back there were two Judges in Pennsylvania who accepted bribes from a privately-run juvenile jail, in order to send the kids that appeared before them to jail, regardless of the nature of the circumstances. These men betrayed their position of power and deliberately perverted justice in a way likely to corrupt and destroy the innocent. Words cannot express how reprehensible their crime was. Actions are better. They ought not to have been allowed to go on breathing. (Instead they received 28 and 17.5 years.)

I said earlier that the death penalty didn’t seem that much worse to me practically than life imprisonment, which is permanent exile, slavery, and confinement all wrapped up in one package. But there is one other respect in which “death is different”, namely that it is psychologically horrible (and fascinating).

Ironically, I think the controversy over the death penalty itself illustrates this psychological response. Passions are stirred; zealous anti-death advocates hasten to show that the person was convicted unjustly. Those 120 people who were exonerated due to DNA tests were probably lucky to be on death row—if not, their cases would probably have been neglected, and they would still be in jail.

Death is numinous. In that post I wrote concerning the concept of atonement for guilt:

This is a numinous problem, not just an ethical problem. So it needs a numinous solution.

As the Bible says in a chilling passage:

“Whoever sheds man’s blood,
By man his blood shall be shed;
For in the image of God
He made man.” (Genesis 9:6)

Unless there is such a thing as real guilt, there is also no such thing as real forgiveness. Thank God that we have the “sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (Heb. 12:24), which is sufficient to atone for all of our sins!

Now, how much evidence should we have before we execute someone? I can see nothing wrong with the standard implicitly required by the U.S. Constitution, namely beyond a reasonable doubt. If it is unreasonable to doubt whether the person did the crime, then it is unreasonable to take into account the possibility of their innocence when sentencing them.

In this country, no one is executed unless either (a) 12 citizens unanimously agree that they are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, or (b) the accused waives his right to a jury trial. After that there are usually 5 different levels of appeals courts empowered to inspect the case for procedural flaws.

It may well be that juries fail to apply beyond a reasonable doubt to the cases that come before them, and as a result some innocent people are found guilty. But this has nothing per se to do with the death penalty. If you are not found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, the correct judgment is an acquittal—not life imprisonment. Not even a $20 criminal fine can be imposed in this case. If our current justice procedure is unreliable, this is a problem for all cases, not just capital ones.

If there are people on death row whose cases were never proven beyond a reasonable doubt, they should be released! That is not a good reason to commute the sentences of those criminals who were proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.