From: ncostello@vms.eurokom.ie
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american
Subject: Re: Death Penalty, for or against?
Date: 7 Oct 92 11:28:58 CET
Organization: EuroKom Conferencing Service

price@convex.csd.uwm.edu (Gregory Neil Price) writes:
>The sentiments expressed by hans@iesd.auc.dk in regard to the death
>penalty appear sentimental, and besides the point. The fact that the
>death penalty disproportionately, and unjustly affects Black Americans
>is not a sufficient reason to reconsider, or abolish it. From a
>contractarian viewpoint, allowing the state to execute criminals
>can be rationalized, regardless of disparities in its application
>across race, gender, and class. In a state of nature, the physically
>strong can dominate the physically weak. Men in general, can in
>a state of nature, distribute hammurabian justice without sanction.
>Clearly, if a civil contract is to be drawn up, no strong man would
>surrender his right to mete out death as justice in order to join
>civil society,  unless  of   course  the   contrived   state     can
>do it by proxy.
[stuff deleted]

Two reactions:

You can take this at face value and answer it logically, and that gets
you somewhere but not very far. For instance, you can do a reductio ad
absurdem - substitute "slowly pull out the  fingernails" for "mete out
death" and gnp's argument could be used to justify the state pulling out
fingernails (presumably "strongmen" can pull out fingernails in a "state
of nature") and carrying out any kind of torture, just as much as you could
use it for to justify capital punishment "from a contractarian viewpoint"
whatever that is.

But I don't think that logical argument I just made is really the point.
What I really want to react to in this posting is the pedestal of
"unsentimental rationality" that the tone implies. You have a sentence
that starts "Clearly, ..." and statements like "The sentiments expressed by
... appear sentimental [sic], and besides the point." I think it's meant to
suggest that at last we are hearing the voice of passionless rationality.
And appeals to stuff like "hammurabian justice" sound really scientific, or
at least they're meant to.

I get the feeling that the posting is trying to speak with
the voice of scientific authority, whereas really we're all exploring and
nobody has any certainty in these areas. It's like the flat assertion that
someone else made in this thread, that there *was* doubt about the guilt of
the Birmingham 6 - not at the time there wasn't, except from people who
could easily be dismissed as terrorists and extremists. It seems to fit
together, that someone who is so sure of the scientific correctness of
their own analysis is not particularly bothered by the idea that people
might be wrongly executed, and dismisses this concern as sentimentality. And
I find this self-assured tone of unjustified certainty of the correctness of
one's own world-view and analysis really worrying. Something tells me I've
heard it someplace else.

I don't know, count me as a "sentimental European" in this discussion!

(I've tried to use American English so that you don't have to waste time
thinking about language - English English is what comes naturally to me)
Organization: Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA