Capital Punishment: An Ethical Analysis and Position Statement

Historical Overview of Capital Punishment

The practice of capital punishment is often known by other names such as the death penalty or execution, but the basic concept is that someone convicted of a crime deemed worthy of the ultimate sanction — a capital crime — is put to death following their conviction by some form of authorized authority. There are many different methods that have been employed to take a convicted person's life throughout history, and it is striking to read about the creativity with which brutal forms of execution have been designed over the millennia. Even the Old Testament contains a plethora of different crimes considered worthy of capital punishment, and millions of people around the world undoubtedly believe that the practice is somehow divinely inspired and acceptable, if not required. Furthermore, followers of the Christian religion believe that Jesus Christ himself was subjected to the death penalty. Throughout the entire duration of human history, people have been put to death in many different ways — burned at the stake, beheaded, impaled, drawn and quartered, shot, given a lethal injection, and more. Yet these could actually be considered relatively mild compared to some of the practices that arguably twisted minds created in antiquity.

For example, one practice in China involved placing a pottery bowl filled with rats upside down on a convicted person's bare chest, then heating the top of the bowl with red-hot charcoal to panic the rats, which would claw their way out through the only available exit. In Ancient Athens, authorities used a large hollow bull made entirely of bronze, placing the convicted person inside and building a fire beneath it until the person burned to death; their bones were then sold in the marketplace as souvenirs. Perhaps one of the cruelest methods ever practiced involved placing an individual into a floating wooden tub — with head and extremities protruding — after feeding them large amounts of food known to cause diarrhea, setting the tub afloat on a pond, and allowing them to slowly rot while flies and insects attracted to the feces began to breed inside the tub and eventually inside the body of the individual until they died. Some perpetrators would even continue feeding the person to extend the process (Vargic).

Issues and Relevant Facts

As time has passed, humanity and civilizations have abandoned many of the creative, albeit horrific, gruesome, and violent practices used in capital punishment across virtually all known societies. The present generation of execution practices is comparatively mild relative to those of the past. In fact, most of the more democratic and developed countries in the world have done away with capital punishment entirely, and only a handful of nations still retain this form of punishment at all. The methods of capital punishment have slowly evolved to be less brutal over the years, and contemporary forms typically aim to be relatively humane in their process.

The countries that have resisted banning capital punishment include the United States, Sudan, China, Egypt, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan, all of which still execute prisoners regularly to a greater or lesser extent. Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia have led the world in recent years in total executions, with the United States retaining the next position. Within the United States itself, there is also mixed usage of the practice, and many individual states have banned the death penalty through legislative measures. Some states have done so for ethical or moral reasons, while others cite more pragmatic justifications.

For example, the death penalty can actually be more expensive than a life-in-prison sentence due to the extensive legal fees involved. Some have argued that many people are wrongly convicted for a variety of reasons, pointing to a number of exonerations that have emerged in the legal system in recent years as evidence. Many people who were convicted of crimes before the development of DNA testing have later been freed after modern tests applied to original evidence verified a wrongful conviction. Still other states have encountered difficulty actually carrying out capital punishment in practice because Europe has banned the sale of drugs used in lethal injections for moral reasons, and Europe is one of the world's primary producers of those substances (Preston).

Yet, despite growing opposition, many states continue to regularly sentence people convicted of serious crimes to death. The state of Texas has become the leading advocate and practitioner of the death penalty, treating it as a legitimate form of punishment. Between 1976 — when the Supreme Court lifted its prohibition on the death penalty — and 1998, Texas executed 167 people in total. Many legal and cultural arguments have been presented to explain why Texas executes far more people than any other state, at a pace that has no parallel in the modern era of the death penalty in the United States (Walpin). Texas commonly cites evidence that capital punishment works as a deterrent to prevent individuals from committing future crimes. However, the legitimacy of this evidence is often challenged, and many sources argue that there is no measurable deterrent effect produced by the administration of the death penalty.

Application of Ethical Theories

One of the more common ethical frameworks used to design public policies and legal systems is the principle of utilitarianism. This principle argues that the most ethical actions are those that produce the greatest benefit for the entire population while eliminating the most harm. This can be contrasted with ethical egoism, the view that an individual should seek their own self-interest as an ethical course of action. However, it is difficult to apply either of these principles to the practice of capital punishment because there is a wide range of opinions regarding the benefits and harms — collective or individual — attributed to this type of sentencing. Without being able to assign some measurable value to an outcome with reasonable certainty, arguments based on costs and benefits are difficult to substantiate.

For example, there is disagreement about the expenses related to carrying out a capital punishment sentence as opposed to housing a person in prison for the rest of their life. Some sources indicate that capital punishment saves the public money, while others argue it is actually more expensive. There is similarly disagreement about deterrent effects. Some sources claim that capital punishment functions as a deterrent to crime, while others argue it has the opposite effect — that capital punishment is essentially a violent act that further promotes other forms of violence in society.

Other ethical frameworks take different approaches to the question. The deontological perspective, for instance, can be used to justify capital punishment as a necessary form of retribution for intentional actions that harm others. Immanuel Kant himself argued for the ethical use of capital punishment on the grounds that it is the appropriate response to guilt, and that the guilty must be punished so that justice and equality — the proper foundations of law — can exist. This theory focuses more on the individual's intentions in committing a capital crime than on the outcome, although the severity of the outcome would be the criterion by which capital punishment is selected over another form of punishment.

Conclusion

Public policy decision makers who hold values-based belief systems not grounded in some level of objectivity can produce horrific policies. The overall trend in the world since the Enlightenment has been to pursue a more humane, civil, and ethical treatment of all of humanity. This trend has resulted in the declining popularity of practices such as capital punishment and has even contributed to the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations. Furthermore, these trends will likely continue to develop, despite the persistence of groups with extreme ideologies who cling to antiquated, ethically indefensible public policies still found in places such as Texas and Iran.