I was in Tuguegarao when Church people and other equally convinced Filipinos joined the Walk for Life that the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines initiated. This piece is my walk in solidarity with all who were there. Given the way things presently—and dangerously—are, I foresee that it is going to be a long walk, and every step matters.
People fear death. On that point, there is no debating. And so, does it follow therefrom that when criminal acts are punished with the sentence of death, those contemplating them are thereby deterred? In the first place, good researchers look for good statistics, and we just do not have the statistics to show that where the death penalty is still carried out, crime rates are lower. And that is not enough. It must equally be established that the difference— if any there should be—must be attributable to the death penalty. But there is a refutation of the deterrent argument that needs no statistics. AIDS is a dreadful thing, and the end of an AIDS sufferer is far from pretty. Has that deterred the reckless from engaging in unsafe sex? Has the fear of death had any verifiable effect at all on promiscuity? Imbibing prodigious amounts of alcohol almost inevitably results in cirrhosis—once more, a dreadful, ultimately fatal prospect. Has this fact deterred the worshippers of the bottle? If they fall from “bottle fatigue,” it is not too long before they rise once more to pick up where they left off.
The deterrence argument apparently rests on a very Socratic assumption: People do wrong because they do not know better. Criminals indulge in lawlessness because they are not aware of the severity of its consequences. But Socrates also dozes off, and this is one point that he was certainly too optimistic about. People know many things to be wrong and people are aware of the dreadful consequences of what they do—but that knowledge alone does not deter them from doing what they please.
More primitive penal theories certainly went by one or the other version of the argument from deterrence. Anyone who commits theft loses his hand. Anyone who commits adultery is stoned to death. Anyone who betrays his people is impaled. Most certainly, people dreaded these punishments. Foucault opens his book “Discipline and Punish” with a blow-by-blow narration of the terrible ordeal that a condemned man had to suffer for attempting on the life of nobility. Did the barbarity of quartering a man, hanging him then disemboweling him and finally burning him strike fear and terror in the spectators? Without a doubt—and in that sense, it may have been a deterrent. So if it is deterrence we are after, why do we not return every hideous practice that at some time in mankind’s brutal history might have been effective, indeed? The answer is that we evolve in our understanding of what it is that humanizes us, of what is worthy of us. Visiting barbarity on those we mark out as unfit for life may indeed punish them, but it also dehumanizes us—and that is a price we must never be willing to pay!
Immediately, a point brilliantly made by Alasdair MacIntyre on the revolutionary character of Aristotelian thought comes to mind. MacIntyre insists that we must be asking Aristotelian questions—like “What is it to live a good life.” Otherwise, all our striving for a “better Philippines” and our excitement about “change is coming” would be all so vacuous. One of the reasons we cannot raise Aristotelian questions, MacIntyre maintains, is because we have cut off every reference to natural law—to identifiable standards, to objective criteria, to determinate points of orientation. Obviously, if anyone’s standards are as good as any other’s, then there is really no debate, and deliberative rationality simply ceases to have any function. It reduces itself to de gustibus non est disputandum.
One last point: There was a rule of Thomistic ethics—and not only Thomistic ethics but many reasonable ethical theories as well. When in doubt, do not act. When you see movement of leaves while on a hunt, you do not shoot first, and then later check whether it is game you have in fact shot or your own grandfather, your hunting companion! Now, there is no disputing that the judicial system may be as good as we can put it together in our best lights—but it certainly is not infallible, and will never be. So, there is always the possibility that we may convict and send to the gallows someone who is innocent. It need not be shown that this has happened—although it has in fact happened in the world’s judicial past. All that is needed is the mere possibility that an innocent man is sentenced to die, and that would be reason enough—for those who continue to believe in being reasonable—not to return the terrible gamble of the death penalty.
I stand for life. I stand against the return of the death penalty.
rannie_aquino@csu.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@sanbeda.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@outlook.com
