Anti-Climacus

WELL: Will Baude produces a post on capital punishment which I happen to pretty much agree with:

'If the problem is that innocent people languish for 24 years at a time in "a ghastly place," well then that's a problem. But the marginal harm of also inflicting the death penalty on such people isn't what gets my blood going.

As of yet, we haven't executed anybody we now know to be innocent since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty. Of course, once people are dead, we often stop looking. Still, Delma Banks' story will be almost as tragic to me if he "merely" spends 24 years wrongfully imprisoned and uncompensated than if wrongful killing is added to the state's list of wrongdoing.

So replacing a bunch of wrongful death penalties with a bunch of wrongful life sentences does little, to my mind, (especially given the small fraction of people on death row who eventually meet execution) to solve the actual evil of wrongful conviction. Sure it's an improvement, but is it enough of an improvement?"

And then he loses me:

"[Incidentally, why, other than the possibility of bad press, do we stop long-term prisoners from killing themselves?]"

Presumably, we undertake a great and serious bit of moral responsibility when we decide someone should be executed for a crime. We don't kill to make the person dead, but because there's a certain moral quality to the death that we find to be valuable. Being indifferent to prisoner suicide is only possible if you consider the death alone to be the important thing. But if death alone is important, why not just take them out behind the courthouse after their sentence and get it over with? Sure, a lot of the features around capital punishment can be ridiculed (especially if you look at it from a purely utilitarian perspective*), but they're there for a reason.

*Incidentally, if you are taking it from a purely utilitarian perspective, I have an argument I was introduced to recently that I'd like to test out, if any of my utilitarian friends or readers would like to take me up on it.