Madeline the Edifying (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
zdashamber) wrote2006-02-23 07:16 pm
zdashamber) wrote2006-02-23 07:16 pm
War is hell / Hell is other people
In California currently the death penalty has run into trouble; a judge ruled that there has to be a physician in attendance to make sure the condemned isn't conscious during the lethal injection. The American Medical Association is like, "Fuck that, aiding in killing isn't our business." Impasse!
Both positions are fine so far as I'm concerned, and I only mention it at all because I happened to browse past a completely ridiculous column on the subject by one of the liberal columnists in the SF Chronicle. Joan Ryan says, "I really don't care if Michael Morales suffers when he is put to death" blah blah blah he tortured a girl he deserves torture. "Isn't the death itself a bit more critical, ethically speaking, than the manner in which the death is brought about?"
The death penalty is about what kinds of things a society says are over the line. There's no other reason for it but to mark out the bounds of "what we do" versus "what is so anathema to us that we will remove the perpetrator irrevocably." Societies set those bounds differently. In democracies, the bounds are set roughly where people think they ought to be.
Ryan asks, "Why is killing a fellow human being not beyond the bounds of our own ethical behavior?" Let's not be hypocritical, here. Say there was a country that sneaked over a bunch of bombers and destroyed an American port. Should we go to war with that country? And kill very nice people serving that country, people who never did anyone any harm, who have dogs and girlfriends and plans to get an engineering degree?
Complete pacifism is a rigorous ideal. For the rest of us, though, there are plenty of reasons to condone our society killing people.
Deciding that we'll kill people for X, Y, Z, and being in a foreign country when we go to war on it, however, says nothing at all about how we're going to do it. That's another sort of boundary entirely. Will we melt them alive with white phosphorous? Will we crush them under stacks of naked prisoners? Will we put them just far enough under anaesthesia that their deaths will be like having their blood replaced with pain while trapped in a sensory deprivation chamber?
The answers to either of these questions aren't about who the dying people are at all. They're about who we are.
Both positions are fine so far as I'm concerned, and I only mention it at all because I happened to browse past a completely ridiculous column on the subject by one of the liberal columnists in the SF Chronicle. Joan Ryan says, "I really don't care if Michael Morales suffers when he is put to death" blah blah blah he tortured a girl he deserves torture. "Isn't the death itself a bit more critical, ethically speaking, than the manner in which the death is brought about?"
The death penalty is about what kinds of things a society says are over the line. There's no other reason for it but to mark out the bounds of "what we do" versus "what is so anathema to us that we will remove the perpetrator irrevocably." Societies set those bounds differently. In democracies, the bounds are set roughly where people think they ought to be.
Ryan asks, "Why is killing a fellow human being not beyond the bounds of our own ethical behavior?" Let's not be hypocritical, here. Say there was a country that sneaked over a bunch of bombers and destroyed an American port. Should we go to war with that country? And kill very nice people serving that country, people who never did anyone any harm, who have dogs and girlfriends and plans to get an engineering degree?
Complete pacifism is a rigorous ideal. For the rest of us, though, there are plenty of reasons to condone our society killing people.
Deciding that we'll kill people for X, Y, Z, and being in a foreign country when we go to war on it, however, says nothing at all about how we're going to do it. That's another sort of boundary entirely. Will we melt them alive with white phosphorous? Will we crush them under stacks of naked prisoners? Will we put them just far enough under anaesthesia that their deaths will be like having their blood replaced with pain while trapped in a sensory deprivation chamber?
The answers to either of these questions aren't about who the dying people are at all. They're about who we are.