When opponents and supporters of the death penalty meet, they exchange the usual load of arguments for and against institutionalized killing that both sides have been collecting over the years. Pragmatic, religious, organizational, political, humanitarian, juridical even economic - the list of disciplines the debate is fed upon is long. I have heard many good, some well-meant and even some upright viscous or stupid arguments and brought many of them forth myself. But I know only one definitely striking argument against the death penalty.
Moral Values
Sometime during childhood most of us inevitably come across the subject. I assume in my childhood in Germany, it must have been as the result of a pedagogically motivated interruption of some gangster-game, in which a surveillant adult kept me from offing my opponent as a draconian measurement. In the time that followed I simply knew that one just doesn't do that, or at least shouldn't. We, however, still killed with pleasure and died with devotion on the playgrounds and school-yards. But that was playing. In reality, one must not kill.
A little later I met other kids, who didn't see it like that, simply because their daddies hadn't only told them that you must not kill in reality, but also that you would get what you deserve. And when you happened to have killed, the same should happen to you. Just like you would get beat up by the older brother of an age companion, if you had kicked the little one's behind.
Apart from the few - at least in Germany - deeply convinced promoters of the death penalty and the not much more numerous firm opponents that I have met, I know many who are actually, and that means principally and often intuitively, against it but find the logic of "an eye for an eye" never the less appealing. When they were kids, they used to secretly envy those of their friends in whose families moral was adapted in such simple and apparent ways, where house arrest and beatings were still less appealing then pocket money for good grades but only together constituted the pillars of a very comforting system of good and bad, right and wrong. The death penalty fits well in that system. The own moral values in comparison seemed irritatingly diffuse and became more so when the children became adults and had to defend the Christian and humanitarian values of their home in their adult environment.
Many people's attitude towards the death penalty therefore is for the most part a matter of their upbringing. It is morally founded and moral is relative - not for ourselves, because we feel our morals to be self-explanatory and most profound - but in our society. Moral arguments must always bounce off at those who do not share the underlying moral. And since they, as moral arguments, are based on morals, they lose their effect in the face of amorality, no matter how condemnable that may appear to us.
All those technical peculiarities of the death penalty apparatus that can be brought into argument besides morality however greatly miss the core of the matter. Every mistake in the juridical proceedings, every formal error, every unintentional cruelty caused by the well-oiled death machinery remains always just that: a mistake, an error, unintentional. They don't endanger the concept of state appointed execution in the least. Just the opposite, the disclosure only helps to refine the system, to eliminate errors that only make it more vulnerable against its moral attacks. The one argument that in my opinion is neither based on moral values nor can be invalidated by improved procedure, is that our knowledge is never absolute.
Judgment and Knowledge
We can never know everything. In the case of justice and punishment, this means that our judgment towards other people's deeds is merely an approximation to the truth. In general that does not have to be so bad since all of us, the state with its juridical apparatus as well as each of us, is subject to that profound imperfection. As long as we try to adapt our actions to that condition, we can try to keep damage as little as possible. We can look at the drive to seek truth as a moral duty - but we don't have to. There is no logical coercion for honesty, no superior law against lie or ignorance. However, we have to design our actions towards others according to the conditions our judgment is subject to, if these actions are meant to be appropriate and therefore just. And justice is what the advocates of the death penalty want. So let's take their word seriously.
Thanks to physics and philosophy we have come to know that no piece of a whole can perceive the whole. In other words, we as a part of the world, as inhabitants of this earth, as members of society can never pass a judgment on the world, the earth or society as a whole. Our perception must always remain limited, must always miss a part, because we can not view our selves from the outside. Furthermore will a piece of the world that we look at always block another piece out of our perception, as long as we remain in the world, between the things, between the recognitions. So it is impossible to come to an all-inclusive judgment on any given occurrence. That is even more so since as humans, we are not only in the world, we are also caught in time. We do not know what will happen tomorrow, or at least the vast majority of us assumes that we do not have any tool of predicting the future. The most we can do is make assumptions, very precise assumptions, but assumptions nevertheless. Only a being that stands beyond space and time - God possibly - would be able to pass definite judgment.
The one argument against the death penalty
Some may consider these arguments unessential to the problem. After all we don't have to chase after the wonders of the universe for the conviction of a murderer. It is however necessary to realize these conditions when aiming to judge the death penalty in front of its social - and therefore essentially human - background. Because one thing we can say with great certainty: the Dead don't live. This seems to be the one assumption that opponents and supporters of the death penalty agree on. It is precisely what makes the death penalty so attractive for past as well as for today's politics, its archaic absoluteness, the divine once-for-all-time action that supplies the one who performs or delegates it with a unique aura of superiority. So let's take their word serious once more: the sentence of death shall be an absolute one.
So how than can the limitation of our knowledge justify a deed that we define as absolute, as final? How can we base an irreversible deed on a necessarily imperfect judgment? If our knowledge on anything and therefore our judgment on others can never claim to be absolute and truthful in the true sense of the word, how can we claim to perform a final punishment? Misjudgments, errors can be corrected - lethal actions can not. That goes for murderers as well as executioners, for governments as well as civilians. And in this, it is really of no importance how thoroughly and fair the process of establishment of the truth, how objective and uncorrupted a judge, a jury or even a blood sample and a DNA-test is - there is no absolute certainty. Yet there is absolute judgment passed.
Our lives are rich with actions that can be called irreversible or that produce irreversible results, like a once-in-a-lifetime chance we let pass. It would certainly be very unpragmatic to avoid all actions that may produce irreversible results, just because we have to assume that we can not know anything for certain. It is not necessary either, because our judgments concerning the near future and our close surroundings tend to be good enough to enable us to act fairly sensible. But these actions do not affect another person's live in such a fundamental manner. When it comes to actions that we put our lives on the line with, we are a lot more reluctant. The same should apply to other people's lives.
We may not always be able to ideally design our actions according to our knowledge. Human live would not be livable without risks, especially in our complex societies. But we must put our actions in relation to our knowledge as much as possible, if the fundamental quality of appropriateness is to be kept. That is especially when other people's destiny falls into our hands for one reason or the other. Killing, whether institutionalized or not, is in every case an action beyond the realm of justice. Simply because there is no judgment that can claim to be absolute, that could back an absolute punishment. If we make that nature of judgment the core of our idea of justice, we have to denounce every punishment that denies by its very nature an end, withdrawal or even correction of the sentence or the rehabilitation of its subject. The reality of death is definite and absolute. And that is why we must not kill in reality. We must not kill.
