Comment by lloeki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lloeki | Hacker News Reader

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There is not much in France that I cherish more than the ideal and fight behind abolition of death penalty (useless trivia: it happened to be voted the year of my birth). Countless philosophers and thinkers through the course of the 20th century have written about it, culminating in the speech of Robert Badinter who fiercely defended this bill to be passed. Sadly, I have a hard time finding any of this material translated into English.

Here are a few, though, for the curious:

Those who believe in the dissuasive value of death penalty are unaware of the human truth. The criminal passion is not the more stopped by the fear of death than other passions which are themselves noble.

— Robert Badinter, extrait d'un discours à l’Assemblée nationale - 17 Septembre 1981

So what is capital punishment but the most deliberate of murders, to which no infamy, however calculated, could be compared to?

— Albert Camus

Death penalty is an immoral punishment, or at the very least useless, because it make us used to the performance of torments, and because it repairs nothing; as, sadly, the death of the murderer does not give back life to the victim.

— François Eugène Vidocq.

What does Law says? Thou shalt not kill! How does she says it? By Killing!

— Victor Hugo, Les misérables

I looked into death penalty by both of its sides, direct action, indirect action. What remains of it? Only a horrible and useless thing, only a bloody assault called crime when the individual carries it, and called justice (oh pain!) when society perpetrates it. Know this, whoever you are, lawmakers or judges, to the eyes of God, to the eyes of conscience, what is crime for the individual is crime for society.

— Victor Hugo, discours devant l’Assemblée constituante, 1848

As long as death penalty exists, we will feel cold when stepping into a Court of Appeal, enshrouded in night.

— Victor Hugo

Death penalty is opposite to what mankind, since two thousand years, has thought of higher and dreams of more noble.

— Jean Jaurès

To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, not justice.

— Desmond Tutu

Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination because there it is invested with the approval of the society. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

— George Bernard Shaw

All these quotes basically amount to "I'm against killing people" usually with a reason amounting to one of the following:

- Killing is bad

- Killing constitutes revenge

- Killing is unbecoming of society

- Killing is disturbing

Yes, they're from great thinkers, but on their own they don't constitute much of an argument, nor are they particularly elucidating.

The devils advocate might respond:

- pleasant dissuasion is oxymoronic

- what is justice without revenge?

- there's value in symbolism (a hornets nest of an argument, I willingly admit, but one that I think is nonetheless undervalued)

- the disturbing nature of killing has little to do with anything

- we recognize that lethal force is legitimate in self-defense, so clearly some intentional killing is acceptable. This is at odds with the sweeping condemnation of killing in the selected quotes.

- the comparison of capital punishment to murder is fallacious since the former is done with careful attention to impartiality (in principle, anyway)

- the state is founded on the monopoly of violence

I'm as French as you are, cher ami, but there are few things I cherish less about our country than our penchant for empty grandiloquence (exhibit A: Bernard Henri Levi). Appeal to authority does not a strong argument make; just because Victor Hugo said it doesn't make it true. It also pays to remember that many of the individuals you cite are reacting to a very different brand of capital punishment: the kind in which people were tortured in the public square.

To be clear, these intellecutals do have interesting things to say on the subject, but a handful of quotes does little to advance the debate. What we have here are just pretty words, I'm afraid.

> what is justice without revenge?

Justice. Sentencing is here to take criminals away from the rest of society, in order to protect the latter rather than punish the former.

I'm glad you were able to close the case on one of the oldest philosophical problems in existence. I'm glad it was that simple.

I was hoping a Frenchman would recognize that I was merely paraphrasing one of Hugo's main arguments against capital punishment, developed in his preface of Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné, rather than "close the case on one of the oldest philosophical problems in existence".

And? Presumably you're paraphrasing him to imply that his argument is correct.

> To be clear, these intellecutals do have interesting things to say on the subject, but a handful of quotes does little to advance the debate

Obviously, but I could not translate a whole body of work on the spot, therefore I had to take shortcuts so as to give a few pointers for the interested audience. The whole process was a saga in and of itself, and Badinder's eloquent discourse on 17 sept 1981 goes more in depth, interestingly counterpointed by Maurice Barrès's one in 1908 in a paperback[0]. Again, the tip of the iceberg, but hey, we got to start somewhere before digging deeper.

[0] ISBN 978-2757815021, seems available on amazon.com for a couple of bucks, apparently also in English

Bernard Henri Levi is a simpler case as you just have to think and do the opposite of what he professes.

To be honest I included it just as a clin d'oeil

But he is emblematic of the cultural trait in question, I think.

You can add Pope Francis to that list too,

"For the rule of law, the death penalty represents a failure, as it obliges the state to kill in the name of justice. … Justice can never be wrought by killing a human being. … With the application of the death penalty, the convict is denied the possibility of to repent or make amends for the harm caused; the possibility of confession, by which a man expresses his inner conversion, and contrition, the gateway to atonement and expiation, to reach an encounter with God's merciful and healing justice. It is furthermore frequently used by totalitarian regimes and groups of fanatics for the extermination of political dissidents, minorities, and any subject labeled as 'dangerous' or who may be perceived as a threat to its power or to the achievement of its ends."

https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/pope-francis-death...

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