Monthly Archives: April 2006

It's Okay To Kill: A Libertarian Argument for the Death Penalty

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For those of us who believe in limited government and the fallibility of human certainty, the death penalty can pose quite a problem. Is it ever okay to kill someone because of his own criminal actions? I confess to being torn about the morally proper answer to this question. Even if I am sure a mistake of innocence has not been made, do I or anyone else have the moral authority to take a life?

Last week’s episode of Penn and Teller’s excellent libertarian show, Bullshit, was about the death penalty, to which they are deeply opposed for two reasons. The first, that it is possible that innocent people can be wrongly killed, is a strong objection and one I find convincing enough to support doing away with the death penalty except in cases where guilt is beyond doubt.

It’s their second reason, though, that I believe is difficult to morally support. Interestingly enough, the objection is itself grounded in the morality of the death penalty. Penn and Teller claim, with great conviction, that it is never okay to kill someone unless that person presents an immediate threat. Call it a clear and present danger. If that isn’t the case, you, I, and the government are prohibited from ending a life. This strikes me as unrealistic and, more broadly, morally wrong.

In order to understand the problem with the position Penn and Teller have on the morality of the death penalty, several notions need to be unpacked. Let’s start with the interesting claim the hosts make that it is only okay for government to kill people in times of war. We need to keep in mind that when we talk about the “government” killing people, what we really mean in a non-metonymic sense is individual people killing other people when the former have been told to do so by still others in a position of power within the structure we refer to as government. So if you believe that killing enemy combatants during wartime is morally permissible, then you believe that it is okay under some circumstances to kill at the request of government. The question now becomes, what are those circumstances? I’ll address an answer to this question below, but other clarifying duties need to be tackled first.

We now turn our attention to the issue of killing itself. Namely, is it okay, in any situation, to kill someone who does not constitute an immediate threat to you or someone else? This, in fact, is what the death penalty amounts to. To answer the question, yet another must be posed: Are human rights—including the right to life—inalienable? The Declaration of Independence says they are but even its signatories didn’t believe that in the absolute. After all, they listed liberty as a right but were more than willing to lock people up who broke the laws of the land. This disconnect can be rectified by differentiating between internal and external alienation of rights. In short, while it is not okay for you to act to strip me of my rights, I can engage in actions that remove those rights from myself.

What’s interesting about this claim is that, while it initially seems to preclude third parties from engaging in rights removal, in fact third parties are a necessary ingredient. Take the right to liberty, for example. I can act in such a way as to remove that right from myself. I could steal your car, for example. Because of the theft I’ve committed, I can no longer claim liberty as a right—I’ve removed it from myself. But unless someone else comes along and locks me up, that right hasn’t actually been removed. Even if I were to confine myself to my apartment under self imposed house arrest—perhaps out of shame for what I’ve done—I can leave that house at any time. Only if a third party enforces the confinement can it be said that I have truly given up the right to liberty.

Most of us don’t have a problem with third parties participating in rights removal as outlined above. You’re unlikely to hear people arguing that criminals convicted of grand theft ought not be put in prison but should, instead, retain their right to autonomy. So why do we have an issue with third parties removing the right to life? It’s irreversible, yes, but that goes to concerns about false guilt, not the actual immorality of the death penalty.

What I want to do now is construct a libertarian argument for the morality of punishment by death. I want to show that a libertarian who believes that government should have very few powers can still think it okay for that government to kill its citizens under a strict set of circumstances. I’ll do so by employing that classic libertarian liberty, freedom of contract.

Let’s say I’m the father of a twelve year old daughter, to use the same example Penn and Teller do. My daughter is hanging out with friends when she’s abducted by a man she doesn’t know. He ties her up, rapes, tortures, and then murders her. Has this man given up his right to life? I would say so. He doesn’t deserve to continue living because he has stripped another of the same right and has, therefore, removed that right from himself. Of course, if he is to do so, he must be aware of the wrongness of his actions. This is why we allow an insanity defense in criminal proceedings. But let’s say he knows rape and murder are morally impermissible yet he just doesn’t care. As the father of a slain girl, am I justified in killing this man myself? Assume for purposes of argument that there is no doubt of his guilt. He’s admitted the crime and is proud of it. Many people—Penn and Teller likely included—would answer yes. It’s okay for the father to kill the rapist. To broaden this example, would it be okay for a family member of a victim of the 9/11 attacks to kill Osama Bin Laden? Yes. Bin Laden, through his own horrific and heinous actions, has given up his right to life.

From this line of argument, we’ve established that it is okay for you to take the life of someone who has seriously wronged you—or someone close to you—in a beyond the pale fashion. Now there’s a new question: can you hired a hit man to carry out the deed? What I mean is, is it morally permissible for you to offload the actual duty of execution onto a third party? Let’s go back to the example of the father of the raped and murdered daughter. What if the father had been in a terrible car accident and was paralyzed from the neck down. He is incapable of killing his daughter’s murderer. In this situation, could he as his brother to carry out the deed?

To answer no seems very odd indeed. If the murderer has given up his right to life, what does it matter who actually takes the actions necessary to enforce that right removal? And if it is okay for the grieving father to have his brother act as executioner, can he ask his best friend? What if neither is willing to do it? Would the father then be justified in seeking out an unrelated third party and forming a contractual agreement to kill the murderer? If you accept that the father can kill the guilty party and that he can rightfully ask his brother to do so, you’d have to also accept the contractual killing. To do otherwise would be draw an unjustifiable and arbitrary line.

All that being said, what is the difference between a third party hit man agreeing to kill the murderer and the government doing the same? After all, as I showed above, the government is really nothing more than a large group of third parties. If you can make a contract with any one of them, why can’t you make a contract with a representative group of them?

In this sense, the government is not actually going out and killing the guilty. Instead, it is acting as a killing agent in the place of the families of victims. If those families are justified in seeking death, it is morally permissible for the government to carry out the act.

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Intelligent Design's Logical Fallacies

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The many articles on Newsvine regarding creationism and intelligent design have sparked a good deal of comments from proponents of those views, several expressing the same tired arguments for why creationism ought to be afforded time in science classrooms across the country. Primarily, they argue that, because the evidence for evolution isn’t convincing (to them, that is — nearly all scientists find it overwhelming), evolution must be wrong and, because it’s wrong, intelligent design must be right. Clearly, these people haven’t spent much time in an introductory logic course, because they’re snagging themselves on fallacies left and right.

First we have the False Dilemma:

A limited number of options (usually two) is given, while in reality there are more options. A false dilemma is an illegitimate use of the “or” operator.

Either evolution is right or God created life. Those are the options given by the creationist. But, of course, there a good deal more possibilities. Maybe there are physical laws we have yet to discover that cause atoms to arrange themselves into living beings. These laws could be a natural as gravity and would in no way require the presence of a creator. I’m sure anyone with even a little imagination can come up with more scenarios that don’t include God. This is a False Dilemma because it is perfectly reasonable for someone to reject both evolution and intelligent design. They are far from the only two possibilities.

The problem is, this is would mean an end to most creationist arguments. They don’t actually have any evidence for creationism — except the very weak one from complexity I examine below — and so are forced to construct an artificial binary and then proceed to attack one side of it.

And then there’s what I’ll term the Lottery Ticket Fallacy. It goes something like this: Let’s say there’s a huge pile of pieces of paper, each with a one-hundred digit number on it. You reach into the pile and pull one out at random. Looking at it, you exclaim, “Wow, providence must be at work because, out of all these possibilities, I happened to get this number.” It’s a silly reaction, right? There’s nothing special about your number except that it happens to be the one you got. You couldn’ve seen the same providence at work no matter which number you drew.

How is this similar to creationism? Take this comment, posted on one of my other websites:

Well, if our own bodies and the very planet we live on is not evidence enough of a supreme power that created us it should at least be enough to be accepted as a credible theory.

(A note: Here again we have the creationist mixing up the meanings of “theory.” In every day life, it means a guess: “I have a theory that the reason the Patriots lost last week is because…” In science, on the other hand, a theory is considerably more rigorous. Please, if you don’t fully understand the difference, read up on it. This is the single most common creationist argument against evolution and it’s also by far the dumbest.)

What’s going on here? Basically, he’s claiming that because the world exists and because he finds that fact miraculous, there must be an intelligence behind it. How else to explain getting this reality as opposed to some other one? Here’s how:

There is some evidence to support that our universe goes through cycles. It expands and collapses, over and over again. Each time, it is likely that conditions are slightly different. So it is certainly possible that there have been millions (or billions or trillions) of prior universes that didn’t have the capacity for something like us. And now that Universe 1,000,001 comes along and makes humans, it must be God at work. But what about the other beings that probably existed in those other universes? Did they think the same thing? Did they find their universes required a creator because their own existence was miraculous?

To take it a step further, there’s no reason to suppose that ours is the only universe. There could be a trillion-billion others out there that don’t have the conditions for life. The simple fact is that even if you take an enormous number of dice, so long as your roll them a sufficiently enormous number of times, eventually you’ll end up with whatever total or sequence you’re looking for. There just isn’t any evidence that there’s anything particularly special about this universe.

Creationists can’t address either of these questions because they can’t give positive arguments for the existence of God that don’t rest upon similar lines of reasoning. God has to be taken on faith and can, therefore, never be disproved, just as he can never be proved. Evolution, on the other hand, can be easily disproved. All it would take would be finding a skeleton of human or house cat below the KT Boundary.

I’m all for people arguing against evolution. That’s the nature of science. It’s clear that almost every theory (and that’s theory in the scientific sense, kids) we’ve held throughout human history has been shown to be inadequate. There’s no reason to believe our current ones won’t look just as silly or basic a couple hundred years from now. Evolution has more evidence going for it than almost any other theory creationists have little trouble with (such as Newtonian physics, the Theory of Relativity, etc.), but it is singled out because it conflicts with a religious world view. Creationists don’t make up their minds after carefully parsing the available sides, theories, and evidence. They believe what they believe and attack anything that might point to the Bible not being true.

Like flat earthers and anti-Copernicans, we need only wait a few hundred years for their views to be widely derided as nothing more than religious dogma. Until then, though, we can sit back and at least make them learn a little about basic logic.

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