I generally do not care to write much about social, and really domestic issues. While I used to be greatly invested in domestic (that is, American) politics, I have recently decided to take a step back from it. It is easier to remain objective writing about the politics and affairs of foreign countries as opposed to your own, in part because there is so much less one knows.

Furthermore, it is not like capital punishment is a major political issue one way or the other. General political trends indicate that capital punishment is declining. The Death Penalty Information Center states that just five states conducted a total of 16 executions in 2022 so far, with Texas and Oklahoma each executing five. This is down from 43 in 2012. Furthermore, politicians in general, whether Republican or Democrat, barely talk about executions. Trump rambled something about executing drug dealers when he announced his candidacy, but even the most rabid Trump supporter acknowledges that Trump says much he doesn’t mean. They attribute it as part of his brilliancy.

So why write about such a non-issue? Because a lot of the arguments in this discussion, and especially from the pro-capital punishment side, are nonsensical. There are reasonable concerns with the death penalty, and I can sympathize with the idea of limiting capital punishment. But the idea of abolishing it completely? It is self-deceptive and hypocritical for reasons that will be explained.

The Bad Arguments

One thing I find intensely distasteful about the entire debate about capital punishment is how much of it revolves around money. Pro capital punishment types will say something like it is cheaper to kill a prisoner than to feed him for life. Anti capital punishment types will counter that saying the death penalty is more expensive because of the various appeals attached to capital punishment, and so on.

These are people’s lives we are talking about. A state is not going to be financially burdened in the slightest way one or the other by how it cares for a half dozen death penalty inmates. The debate around the death penalty should revolve around other questions about justice, reconciliation, forgiveness, and such themes.

And above all, there is the possibility of the state making a mistake. George Will once observed back in the mid-2000s that the fact that Americans were more accepting of capital punishment compared to Europeans actually signified that Americans were more trusting of their government compared to Europeans. Europeans had historical memories of dictators and states who would not hesitate to use the death penalty not for justice, but for their own selfish ends. Americans were willing to trust that the state would get the death penalty process correct.

But over the past few years, it has been become apparent that mistakes were made. The Innocence Project has shown multiple cases of men sentenced to the death penalty who were wrongly convicted. And while a man wrongfully sentenced to life in prison may be released and receive compensation for his wrongful suffering, there is no undoing the death penalty.

This line of thinking has been combined with a growing conservative distrust of the police and the national security state, and so there are conservatives who have been more accepting of ending capital punishment. To some degree, I am one of them. I do think that there need to be careful limitations on how the death penalty is used, and more restriction may need to be put in place on it.

But not ended. There are real philosophical problems with ending the death penalty.

The Responsibility of the State

Why does the state exist?

That question has been discussed for hundreds of years, and men like Locke, Hobbes, and Montesquieu can answer that question far better than I ever can. But what I would argue is this: the state is fundamentally an instrument of violence. It exists to commit violence so that the people as a whole can abjure violence, as Orwell said.

The other functions of a state can be done by the people. It may not be done well. It may be better for the state to handle things like healthcare or roads or utilities than the people. But it still could be done. But violence is the one thing which must be left to the state.

And there is nothing more violent than executing a person.

The state may exhibit violence in many ways. Some of these ways do not even physically harm a person. But the plainest, most visible expression of violence is when the state, at the behest of the people it represents, executes a criminal who by his actions has made himself a figure outside of the community.

As a matter of fact, a state must always have the physical ability to execute people. It may choose not to do so, and that is the case in many states across the world and in the United States. Yet let us suppose that the United States abolished the death penalty entirely. Even in that supposedly more gentler world, there is no denying that if the state wanted to kill me, or my neighbor, or even a powerful individual like Jeff Bezos or Barack Obama, that there would be little any one of us could do to physically prevent their deaths.

And we know what the world is where the state lacks that capability? It is the former Afghan government which lacked the ability to remove the Taliban and was eventually destroyed by it. It is the Mexican government’s inability to destroy the cartels. The result is the horror of anarchy and civil war.

To eliminate the death penalty, then, is not to deny that the state should not have the capability to kill people. It is to argue that the state, in its benevolence, has chosen not to kill people, That it is a gentler, more humanitarian state.

That is arguably the most dangerous thing of all.

Respecting the State

The state is not your friend. It is not your nice buddy, giving you free monies in the form of free healthcare or public education out of the goodness of its heart. It is a terrible, dangerous beast that as Thomas Paine observed was a necessary evil at best. It is not benevolent, or gentle, or humanitarian. And as it is an institution fundamentally rooted in the art of violence, it cannot be those things.

Of course, this is not to suggest that the state should be allowed to be as savage as possible, or I would not have stated above that I support restricting the death penalty. But the death penalty, even in a restricted form, serves as a stark reminder that the state is an instrument of violence. Eliminating it will inevitably create the illusion that it is not, even as it sends police (never mind the absurdity of some who think that you can just have “social workers” do everything that police should do) to commit violence to maintain the order and stability which we all need.

The Norwegians generally eliminated the death penalty at the beginning of the 20th century. Yet even then, they still shot the Nazi traitor Vidkun Quisling at the conclusion of the Second World War. There are always small exceptions here and there to any great moral principle.

It is true that the death penalty is not one of the great issues of the day, and I do not argue that it should be. Nevertheless, eliminating the death penalty eliminates one more warning sign that the state is your friend and takes us one step further towards viewing the state as a Father Protector or Big Brother, gentle and kind. By taking the state’s ability to manage life and death for a dozen or so prisoners, you may only extend the state’s ability to manage life and death for the millions upon millions of citizens.