Trying to be thoughtful on a sick day
Jul. 26th, 2013 02:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kingtycoonI went to see the men and women argue about executions in Ohio and I listened close and had opinions and then really considered my opinions and then thought hard about how I could express them – and now I'm going to. So there.
Execution is one of those signal things that the state does that tends to reinforce its authority and which demonstrates that it operates on the behalf of the majority. There's a very small minority of people that get executed and as the ritualistic expiation of persona-non-grata is a method whereby the state can offer a demonstrable service to the ruled classes. There is that.
Execution offers communal revenge against the proven adversary of the state and its constituents, Nemesis and the Furies – the manifest hostility of the polity falls upon one target in a ritualized perforrmance in which the condemned is an actor but with a deflated agency, this de-fanging of the capital offender serves as well to strip away power through the phased demolition of the prisoner's options until a single avenue is left open and the convict is murdered in a ritual performance. This particular performance is only the final act of the larger theatre – in which the condemned descends through stages – beginning with the ultimate act of defiance and demonstration of agency which is the murder of another. There is an amount of freedom to act that everyone in the state has, but transgressions beyond the native level of freedom has its pinnacle moment in the destruction of another member of the polity. This is an expression of freedom that cannot be tolerated. So the murderer is in turn transformed into a defendant, a prisoner, a convict, appellant, an inmate of death row and finally a corpse, in successive acts the murderer's power is stripped away until there is only a single act of compliance that the murderer follow when he or she submits to being murdered in turn.
Execution has the civic virtue of removing from the polity those members who are considerably more dangerous than the others and who pose a mortal danger to others. In this way the execution acts as the stark hand, not merely ritualistically or performatively removing someone – but actually eliminating a dangerous element. Mad Dogs, after all, get put down.
Finally, we can say that Execution provides the penalty for murdering. That's simply stated, but it means considerably more – considering that the principle of proportional justice is meted out, and rather than an ongoing feud or grudge being allowed to fester and produce more murdering, the proportional justice answers like with like and puts an end to what might otherwise develop into increasingly assymetrical punitive actions between the alternating victim and victimizers. The Law sets a limit on the amount of retribution allowed to be carried out and has as its final and most punitive act, the execution. There is no allowance for any escalation beyond murder within the law, wheras in extralegal applications of justice, certainly escalation could excede the one-for-one murder that the law allows for.
So that's it – these are the justifications that I see for the carrying out of exectuions. I had to stretch, a little, to wring this into four discrete causes, but the number is significant for the idea that I had that followed out of the debate.
We sat in the basement of a bar, listening to increasingly buzzed friends commenting on the rationale behind executing murderers and not executing them. The opposition, in my opinion, took the day – saying, with persuasive authority that the state shouldn't execute people for persuasive and compelling reasons. I came away not thinking about how both parties relied on arguments, intermittently spread through their debates, that commented on the inherent fallibility of the human species. These kinds of arguments though, leave me with a wince, a question and a goal. Fallibility of the human species smacks of a kind of deistic axiom, a surrendering of responsibility and a wholesale abandonment of agency. Certainly if a thing is imperfect that is something that ought be addressed, and if we take it as axiomatic that people are insufficient to carry out any task reliably owing to a failure – then it begs the question: Why put trust in any institution? I'm, effectively, a fan of the Human Species, so far as I'm concerned we set all the records and establish all the benchmarks – that is to say, if we're not perfect, then nothing is, we're as good as the universe gets and I, for myself, really like that. Human civilization is rather considerably more just and compassionate and admirable than the behavior of any other creature, and heck, any other natural phenomenon that has so far been described.
So I wanted to really think about this and I ended up going in some directions, I feel like I've solved this matter, for myself at least, I thought about it.
To me, the argument for exectuion is simply stated as: A Solution For Murder is Another Murder. You might notice that this simplification of the logic present tends toward a reductio-ad-absurdum, where the last person left cannot be punished because that person has no-one left to in turn murder him. I've already stated my four rationales that the state must employ in order to countenance exectuion (though I've not presented any other arguments: e.g.: It is the law; It has popular democratic support and etc... essentially because these are not persuasive to me) – and since I've presented the gun on the mantlepiece - you can expect that I will use it. Also, from here on out, I'm going to use Murder and Execution interchangeably as terms.
Coniser the Paradox of the Barber – everyone in town must shave themselves or be shaved by the barber and so who shaves the barber? Right, a paradox in logic that took some doing and needed a lot of thinking to overcome. It was in turn, solved by the introduction of Sets. Since sets require that there be an atomistic approach to definitions into smaller and smaller types there is a level of abstraction that suggests hierarchy (even if hierarchy is not strictly stated or established, for me – it is enough that it is suggested.)
Something there is that doesn't love a hierarchy. Equality is one of the triune virtues of all liberal societies. We don't like to have or establish hierarchies within our polity and expression of hierarchies is a kind of offense against acceptable contribution, nevertheless, there are clear hierarchies established that are based most obviously on economic status and civic function. Exemplars who have a higher status are spared some of the law's severity while the meek and powerless are allowed to take on the full weight of the law's vindictiveness. So we can look at that and notice that there is an allowable level of abstraction that can be used to help us make a logical argument.
The President, for example, holds a lot of prestige and sits in a hierarchical position above virtually everyone else in the polity. First among equals and so on. So we imagine a state in which the president carries out a murder (in my mind this is a simple thing to imagine since I make a very grudging distinction between legal & extralegal murdering – e.g.: Commiting armed forces to combat is not more valid than shooting your enemy or executing a convict – they're all murders to me). So let's look at that though- because of the president's ordinal prestige – he carries out any number of murders and is not judged under the law for these comissions – why? I go back to my 4 rationales – Execution projectst the authority of the state – very good, the murdering in this case is justified by that correspondence. The Execution/Murder, likewise tends to be excused because it has some suggestion of a penumbra of the second rationale – that the State is able to murder in reciprocity for transgressing against the state's authroity. Since in a war, the opponent is by needs, outside the polity – this is a simple punishment for an opponent – who is, by needs again, not a member of the polity. So there.
Let's look at another layer of the hierarchy – someone wealthy and famous but without any of the state's authority to weild. Let us say that a wealthy and famous football player murders his former wife and her boyfriend. In this case we're looking at Rationale #2 again – here because the performative nature of the trial will in turn strip authority (and wealth) from the accused effectively moving them down the hierarchy into a position of disgrace – proportionally this disgrace may even be more punitive than the carrying out of the performative preliminary acts of execution. Should the famous football player not even become convicted, the reversal of fame and destruction of personal fortune might even satisfy the 4th rationale – depending on how deeply we allow ourselves to accept the hierarchies present in our culture. The ensuing loss of prestige that the football player endures might be equivalent to the loss of life he has administered – again, this is based specifically on the priorities of our culture and not strictly to the simpler and more straightforward binary of life and death that the law seems to refer back to.
But now let's think about murdering someone ourselves. Here the rationales for execution come into some kind of focus, essentially because this is how I began to think about this in the first place. I thought to myself of Dukakis – remember how he fumbled incoherently when he was made to imagine the rape and murder of his wife? Remember when his particular wave-form of options collapsed into fumbling nonsense? We can't excuse the bad faith used in putting him in that position, but it's worthwhile to look back at the failures of others to shore up our own rhetorical responses. Anyway I think so. So what do you do? What do you do when your people are raped and murdered? The paradoxical logic we apply is that the solution to murder is to murder the murderer. We accept that – but then we're in a situation of executioners all executing one another in sequence forever, unless we make the slight distinction between killing under the law and killing outside the law – a distinction that I refuse to make (all killings are murders) – so if that's where I am – then how do I come around and think about this logically?
So for me the way Dukakis gets out of this is to talk about the hierarchies in his situation. Hierarchically your wife falls somewhere high on the scale, possibly at the top of the scale – so now the rationales in favor of the Exectuion/Murder favor your position – why should you in turn murder the person who's murdered your wife? Well – there's the first argument – in which you establish your own authority to reciprocate against offenses – this is a weak argument in this case – it tends to move you into the hyper-agentic area of thte murderer and allow for a feud to come about. So look at the second argument - revenge against the adversary – that's solid right there – you're able to have a rationale that logically follows and creates the performative act that expiates anger and guilt. Third rationale? Check – you remove the antagonist and then there's no antagonist – except, of course that you're the antagonist for someone else – now you're in the wrong to someone else and so someone has cause #2 to pursue against you, and cause #3 as well – shoot, you're going back to the logical problem of there being just one murderer left in the world!
What about #4 – does that help you at all? Ah, well yes – somewhat, there's a penalty and the penalty doesn't excede the transgression – there's the quid-pro-quo because the primary actor, the murderer of your wife – is now dead in resposne to the primary act of aggression.
So what if the murderer of your wife was not acting out of aggression, not innately – what if it's an accident? Well?
I guess that I'll revist this kind of thinking later – this is... half formed, but it's something that started being compelling to me.
Execution is one of those signal things that the state does that tends to reinforce its authority and which demonstrates that it operates on the behalf of the majority. There's a very small minority of people that get executed and as the ritualistic expiation of persona-non-grata is a method whereby the state can offer a demonstrable service to the ruled classes. There is that.
Execution offers communal revenge against the proven adversary of the state and its constituents, Nemesis and the Furies – the manifest hostility of the polity falls upon one target in a ritualized perforrmance in which the condemned is an actor but with a deflated agency, this de-fanging of the capital offender serves as well to strip away power through the phased demolition of the prisoner's options until a single avenue is left open and the convict is murdered in a ritual performance. This particular performance is only the final act of the larger theatre – in which the condemned descends through stages – beginning with the ultimate act of defiance and demonstration of agency which is the murder of another. There is an amount of freedom to act that everyone in the state has, but transgressions beyond the native level of freedom has its pinnacle moment in the destruction of another member of the polity. This is an expression of freedom that cannot be tolerated. So the murderer is in turn transformed into a defendant, a prisoner, a convict, appellant, an inmate of death row and finally a corpse, in successive acts the murderer's power is stripped away until there is only a single act of compliance that the murderer follow when he or she submits to being murdered in turn.
Execution has the civic virtue of removing from the polity those members who are considerably more dangerous than the others and who pose a mortal danger to others. In this way the execution acts as the stark hand, not merely ritualistically or performatively removing someone – but actually eliminating a dangerous element. Mad Dogs, after all, get put down.
Finally, we can say that Execution provides the penalty for murdering. That's simply stated, but it means considerably more – considering that the principle of proportional justice is meted out, and rather than an ongoing feud or grudge being allowed to fester and produce more murdering, the proportional justice answers like with like and puts an end to what might otherwise develop into increasingly assymetrical punitive actions between the alternating victim and victimizers. The Law sets a limit on the amount of retribution allowed to be carried out and has as its final and most punitive act, the execution. There is no allowance for any escalation beyond murder within the law, wheras in extralegal applications of justice, certainly escalation could excede the one-for-one murder that the law allows for.
So that's it – these are the justifications that I see for the carrying out of exectuions. I had to stretch, a little, to wring this into four discrete causes, but the number is significant for the idea that I had that followed out of the debate.
We sat in the basement of a bar, listening to increasingly buzzed friends commenting on the rationale behind executing murderers and not executing them. The opposition, in my opinion, took the day – saying, with persuasive authority that the state shouldn't execute people for persuasive and compelling reasons. I came away not thinking about how both parties relied on arguments, intermittently spread through their debates, that commented on the inherent fallibility of the human species. These kinds of arguments though, leave me with a wince, a question and a goal. Fallibility of the human species smacks of a kind of deistic axiom, a surrendering of responsibility and a wholesale abandonment of agency. Certainly if a thing is imperfect that is something that ought be addressed, and if we take it as axiomatic that people are insufficient to carry out any task reliably owing to a failure – then it begs the question: Why put trust in any institution? I'm, effectively, a fan of the Human Species, so far as I'm concerned we set all the records and establish all the benchmarks – that is to say, if we're not perfect, then nothing is, we're as good as the universe gets and I, for myself, really like that. Human civilization is rather considerably more just and compassionate and admirable than the behavior of any other creature, and heck, any other natural phenomenon that has so far been described.
So I wanted to really think about this and I ended up going in some directions, I feel like I've solved this matter, for myself at least, I thought about it.
To me, the argument for exectuion is simply stated as: A Solution For Murder is Another Murder. You might notice that this simplification of the logic present tends toward a reductio-ad-absurdum, where the last person left cannot be punished because that person has no-one left to in turn murder him. I've already stated my four rationales that the state must employ in order to countenance exectuion (though I've not presented any other arguments: e.g.: It is the law; It has popular democratic support and etc... essentially because these are not persuasive to me) – and since I've presented the gun on the mantlepiece - you can expect that I will use it. Also, from here on out, I'm going to use Murder and Execution interchangeably as terms.
Coniser the Paradox of the Barber – everyone in town must shave themselves or be shaved by the barber and so who shaves the barber? Right, a paradox in logic that took some doing and needed a lot of thinking to overcome. It was in turn, solved by the introduction of Sets. Since sets require that there be an atomistic approach to definitions into smaller and smaller types there is a level of abstraction that suggests hierarchy (even if hierarchy is not strictly stated or established, for me – it is enough that it is suggested.)
Something there is that doesn't love a hierarchy. Equality is one of the triune virtues of all liberal societies. We don't like to have or establish hierarchies within our polity and expression of hierarchies is a kind of offense against acceptable contribution, nevertheless, there are clear hierarchies established that are based most obviously on economic status and civic function. Exemplars who have a higher status are spared some of the law's severity while the meek and powerless are allowed to take on the full weight of the law's vindictiveness. So we can look at that and notice that there is an allowable level of abstraction that can be used to help us make a logical argument.
The President, for example, holds a lot of prestige and sits in a hierarchical position above virtually everyone else in the polity. First among equals and so on. So we imagine a state in which the president carries out a murder (in my mind this is a simple thing to imagine since I make a very grudging distinction between legal & extralegal murdering – e.g.: Commiting armed forces to combat is not more valid than shooting your enemy or executing a convict – they're all murders to me). So let's look at that though- because of the president's ordinal prestige – he carries out any number of murders and is not judged under the law for these comissions – why? I go back to my 4 rationales – Execution projectst the authority of the state – very good, the murdering in this case is justified by that correspondence. The Execution/Murder, likewise tends to be excused because it has some suggestion of a penumbra of the second rationale – that the State is able to murder in reciprocity for transgressing against the state's authroity. Since in a war, the opponent is by needs, outside the polity – this is a simple punishment for an opponent – who is, by needs again, not a member of the polity. So there.
Let's look at another layer of the hierarchy – someone wealthy and famous but without any of the state's authority to weild. Let us say that a wealthy and famous football player murders his former wife and her boyfriend. In this case we're looking at Rationale #2 again – here because the performative nature of the trial will in turn strip authority (and wealth) from the accused effectively moving them down the hierarchy into a position of disgrace – proportionally this disgrace may even be more punitive than the carrying out of the performative preliminary acts of execution. Should the famous football player not even become convicted, the reversal of fame and destruction of personal fortune might even satisfy the 4th rationale – depending on how deeply we allow ourselves to accept the hierarchies present in our culture. The ensuing loss of prestige that the football player endures might be equivalent to the loss of life he has administered – again, this is based specifically on the priorities of our culture and not strictly to the simpler and more straightforward binary of life and death that the law seems to refer back to.
But now let's think about murdering someone ourselves. Here the rationales for execution come into some kind of focus, essentially because this is how I began to think about this in the first place. I thought to myself of Dukakis – remember how he fumbled incoherently when he was made to imagine the rape and murder of his wife? Remember when his particular wave-form of options collapsed into fumbling nonsense? We can't excuse the bad faith used in putting him in that position, but it's worthwhile to look back at the failures of others to shore up our own rhetorical responses. Anyway I think so. So what do you do? What do you do when your people are raped and murdered? The paradoxical logic we apply is that the solution to murder is to murder the murderer. We accept that – but then we're in a situation of executioners all executing one another in sequence forever, unless we make the slight distinction between killing under the law and killing outside the law – a distinction that I refuse to make (all killings are murders) – so if that's where I am – then how do I come around and think about this logically?
So for me the way Dukakis gets out of this is to talk about the hierarchies in his situation. Hierarchically your wife falls somewhere high on the scale, possibly at the top of the scale – so now the rationales in favor of the Exectuion/Murder favor your position – why should you in turn murder the person who's murdered your wife? Well – there's the first argument – in which you establish your own authority to reciprocate against offenses – this is a weak argument in this case – it tends to move you into the hyper-agentic area of thte murderer and allow for a feud to come about. So look at the second argument - revenge against the adversary – that's solid right there – you're able to have a rationale that logically follows and creates the performative act that expiates anger and guilt. Third rationale? Check – you remove the antagonist and then there's no antagonist – except, of course that you're the antagonist for someone else – now you're in the wrong to someone else and so someone has cause #2 to pursue against you, and cause #3 as well – shoot, you're going back to the logical problem of there being just one murderer left in the world!
What about #4 – does that help you at all? Ah, well yes – somewhat, there's a penalty and the penalty doesn't excede the transgression – there's the quid-pro-quo because the primary actor, the murderer of your wife – is now dead in resposne to the primary act of aggression.
So what if the murderer of your wife was not acting out of aggression, not innately – what if it's an accident? Well?
I guess that I'll revist this kind of thinking later – this is... half formed, but it's something that started being compelling to me.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2013-07-26 08:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-26 09:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-28 04:35 pm (UTC)(* not enough of an interest, though, to do something about it, if say, you are rich & famous**.)
(** which is to say, remember how Roman Polanski raped a little kid & got away with it, scott free?)
no subject
Date: 2013-07-28 05:33 pm (UTC)It's not that I am stating a position of agreement or disagreement here either - I'm looking at the actuality and trying to describe what I am seeing and understand what is going on. More or less.
no subject
Date: 2013-07-28 05:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-28 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-26 11:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-27 12:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-28 04:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-28 05:35 pm (UTC)