Monday, August 10, 2009
Naturalist View on Capital Punishment
One of the comments I heard when presenting Traditional Natural Law was “what is the problem with killing a criminal.” Do quote me on that exactly, but that was the main point of the comment. This comment to me refers back to the highly debated upon topic of capital punishment. Personally I have no take on it, but I wanted to look at it through a naturalist point of view. Murder is one of the more sacred laws that is pretty much a violation throughout the world; however, to use it as a deterrent brings up another question. What is more valuable, breaking the law or preventing crime? Some say capital punishment has not yet proven itself as a valid deterrent, but it has been throughout history somewhat. I doubt this ritual would be in place for this long if it didn’t work. Society applies this consequence to the harshest crimes, but is that enough reason to break our own natural law? Yes, we are doing it to main social order, but to break a law to prevent more laws being broken is not a method I believe as a naturalist should be enacted. It is just a thought, but this action is not a pure naturalist approach to resolving the prevention of crime.
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Personally I don't agree with capital punishment, but that's just because of my own values, not because I would consider myself a Naturalist. However, I do agree that it goes against Natural Law Theory, especially Traditionally Natural Law Theory, to engage in capital punishment. I feel as though we're all given certain rights regardless of the rights granted to us by positive law, and the most basic of those would be the right to life. So in my mind I would say it goes against Natural Law to kill for any reason, even if it is in the name of "justice". I would say it definitely goes against Traditional Natural Law Theory because then divine law plays a role in it; and according to most instances of divine law it is a "sin" to kill another, which capital punishment is always doing. So I would have to say that I agree that the idea of capital punishment goes against Natural Law ideals.
ReplyDeleteThe point that your post brings up for me is—are the judges themselves capable of making the decision to end another life, which would seem to be a knowledge only God has. In my own opinion, the law should only attempt to maintain order and use deterrence with things that it is in fact capable of being sure as to what the right course of action should be. Deciding to kill another person is beyond the scope of legal administration, and doing it for the sake of maintaining order just doesn’t seem enough.
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