Theological Territories by David Bentley Hart

Author:David Bentley Hart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2020-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

IV

All, therefore, that really remains intact among the wreckage left behind by this book’s collision with the catechism is the one practical argument the magisterium still permits—that perhaps, but for the imposition of the death penalty in certain cases, innocent lives will be endangered. Alas, what Feser and Bessette cannot establish is that, even were that true, the number of the innocent imperiled by the abolition of the death penalty would be greater than the number imperiled by its exercise. Needless to say, they make all the standard arguments for how the death penalty discourages violent crime, and they offer the usual sorts of statistics and “commonsensical” arguments used to support this claim. Unfortunately, anyone who has followed debates on this issue over the years knows that there are statistics and commonsensical arguments for exactly the opposite position that are at least as convincing and plausible. It might help Feser and Bessette’s case if, say, murder rates in Stockholm were to exceed those in Dallas; but as yet that has not happened, and none of the evidence they do have at their disposal is especially compelling. That leaves only the concern that violent criminals, if left alive, might escape confinement. This has occasionally happened, they argue, and so concern for public safety dictates that the dangerous murderers be put down. Since, however, it is endlessly possible to improve methods of incarceration and the transport of prisoners, a less sanguinary solution is always within reach.

The most disturbing aspect of this part of Feser and Bessette’s argument, as it happens, is their response to the issue of false convictions. They acknowledge that mistaken verdicts will on occasion be handed down in capital cases but think the margin of error slight enough to be acceptable; after all, they reason, we drive motor cars and vaccinate our children, even though both practices inevitably claim a negligible quantity of innocent victims. Needless to say, these are ridiculous analogies, for any number of reasons—the vastly differing statistical orders of magnitude, for instance, or the variable element of human intentionality involved in each situation, or the practicability of available alternatives. Ideally, though, the reader will intuitively recoil from the simple brutality of Feser and Bessette’s argument before ever having to take any of that into account. And then too there is the inconvenient proof amassed in recent years of just how high the rate of jurisprudential error tends to be. DNA testing has repeatedly proved that a great many cases in which the evidence had appeared irrefutable (some involving numerous eyewitness testimonies) have resulted in convictions of the innocent—which means that we may anticipate that in future, especially in cases where no DNA evidence is collected, there will continue to be miscarriages of justice in quantities far greater than the vanishingly small number of violent criminals who might escape confinement (especially as penal technology continues to evolve). Yet, once again, this scarcely matters. One can drag these debates out interminably, but all of them remain largely irrelevant to the essential question.

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