The lynching of Saddam Hussein

While I'd agree with many of the criticisms Brian Barder has made of the execution of Saddam Hussein, taken as a whole the piece conflates two separate issues; one's attitude and opinion on the death penalty per se and how it was conducted in this case.

It is perhaps inevitable for opponents of the death penalty to say, in effect, that this form of punishment is heinous and this particular example to be especially so, given its obvious departure for recognised conventions of due process.

But I think we should strive to keep the issues separate. I too oppose the death penalty but a rejection of the utilitarian theory of punishment has left me wondering whether my continued opposition isn't really just a matter of aesthetics and prejudice.

I'm not at all sure, for example, that I could agree with Brian Berber's assertion that "all civilised people in the western world...regard all forms of capital punishment as disgusting and unacceptable".

It might be more accurate to say that most of the European middle classes find the death penalty "disgusting and unacceptable" because opposition to this form of punishment as a hallmark of 'civilisation' is both more recent and more localised than many people tend to assume and certainly was not central to the political culture that grew out of the Enlightenment.

A rejection of utilitarianism should also lead one to repudiate arguments against this execution on the grounds that it makes him look like a 'martyr', or that it made him 'look good'. Whatever the shortcomings of this process, only a moral idiot could form either of these opinions.

Neither is the recognition that the result of this trial was a 'foregone conclusion' a valid objection here. The presumption of innocence is not an act of faith but a procedural disposition, the adoption of which should not be taken to indicate that the outcome of any given trial where the evidence is as copious as it is overwhelming should somehow guarantee uncertainty of outcome.

The point of all this? There was one. It is that regardless of what one's position on the death penalty may be, there is a respectable case to be made for it on the grounds that it imputes both to the perpetrator and to the victim a concept of human worth and responsibility that is lacking in the utilitarian view of the human condition.

But what is central to this view is the notion that the law should be blind - that it should not respect persons but universal principles, and with this end in view it is essential that the institutions of a state should never deprive another human being of their life or their liberty without a due process that pays due deference to these aforementioned principles.

In this narrower sense, I'd have to concur with Brian Barder; anyone who cares about these things should indeed find the lynching of Saddam Hussein, as it has been performed, as has become available to the world in pornographic detail, an atrocious thing.

[Via Chris Dillow]

Crossposted at DSTPFW