Ending the Death Penalty and the Mindset Behind It

I’ve been very fortunate to write a monthly column for the Daily Nebraskan this year in which I’ve been able to make arguments and try out ideas that relate to politics, social justice, and human rights.

I began, back in August, with a long piece about my personal experience of getting to know Ronnie Frye, an inmate on North Carolina’s death row who was executed ten years ago. I want to close out the academic year with another column that considers the human face and the human cost of our death penalty system.

I write at a pivotal moment: Connecticut has repealed its death penalty statute, becoming the seventeenth state to do so and, in November, California will consider a ballot initiative to do the same. With five states abolishing the death penalty in five years and several more states seemingly poised to do the same, the dominoes have clearly started to fall. Opponents of the death penalty have found ways to persuade legislators — if not the general public — that the system is expensive, biased, and horribly flawed.

But this is as good a time as any to begin a difficult conversation.

In particular, I want to suggest that we need to think critically about the trade-off we’re making when we do away with the death penalty and condemn people to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. We should make no mistake that this too is a death sentence and it’s one actually considered to be worse by some of the people who currently sit on death row.

This isn’t to diminish the difficult and important work done by death penalty abolitionists or to discourage anyone in the work that remains to be done. It is only to note that, in our desire to end the death penalty and save lives, we have allowed our opponents to continue to shape the conversation about crime, justice, and human rights. I’m not convinced we need to yield this ground.

In writing about the ballot initiative in California, death row inmate Kevin Cooper argues:

We who are on death row will also lose our legal habeas and habeas appeal process that we have and are currently entitled to under the law. So we are in fact taking a step backwards in our ability to challenge our convictions. We are also having to take our fight for our collective human rights to another level. What I mean by this is, Level IV prisons within the State of California are some of the worst prisons in the world! They are worse than death row in the violence that takes place, in the lack of programs, including educational programs, they stay on lockdown, and many families cannot get to these isolated prisons to visit their loved ones.

Interestingly, many death penalty supporters will see this as a good sign. If we have to do away with the death penalty, then at least we can be consoled by the knowledge that we’re replacing it with a punishment that’s also terrible. This is something death penalty opponents, who often make forceful moral arguments about the dignity and human rights of death row inmates, need to consider carefully.

Indeed, at the heart of the idea of both the death penalty and life imprisonment without parole is the notion that the offender is completely and utterly devoid of humanity. With this in mind, prison isn’t about correction and rehabilitation; it’s about punishment and revenge. If the death penalty is too expensive, if it risks the execution of an occasional innocent, and if it doesn’t cause all that much suffering, then it can be jettisoned in favor of a punishment that’s cheaper, that we can correct when we err, and that — if done properly — might be even worse for offenders.

Why are we committed to making life as terrible as possible for some people? Why isn’t it sufficient to remove someone from society, to restrict his or her liberty, and to keep ourselves safe while continuing to respect the inherent human dignity of the person in question? In large part, it’s because we’ve convinced ourselves that these people — those we say deserve to die — are not like us in the most decisive respect.

When we say someone deserves to die, what we’re saying is that an offense has been committed that is so far beyond the range of normal behavior that we can’t even begin to imagine the worldview of the offender and we can’t imagine continuing to occupy the same plane of existence.

I don’t want to be read as saying these feelings are abnormal. Indeed, it’s quite normal to want to express our solidarity with the families of murder victims, make clear our outrage at the terrible crime that has been committed, ensure our safety, and punish these offenders for what they’ve done. But I think there’s a disconnect between these normal feelings and the desire to punish in a manner that causes the most suffering and that strips the offender of his human dignity.

I’m also not arguing against life imprisonment without the possibility of parole; I’m simply suggesting that the way in which so many people are currently thinking about it — as an opportunity to for society to inflict a lifetime of brutality on offenders — is both troubling and a missed opportunity. Why not, instead, think about life imprisonment as an ongoing opportunity for rehabilitation in an environment that protects the public and restricts liberty as a consequence of bad actions? Changing our outlook in this way would likely mean changing the way we think about prison more generally, and it would cause us to take a long, hard look at prison conditions in this country. But this is long overdue.

In the end, I want to suggest that there’s a middle ground to walk … if only we can begin to look for it. This is a line between toughness and softness on crime, which allows us to stand with victims and co-victims of violence without jettisoning the idea that all human beings are the bearers of dignity. It ultimately recognizes the humanity of even those whose actions have made them the objects of our hate and fear. After all, it’s in treating decently those who have harmed us that we most distinguish ourselves from them.

This will be difficult for us, to be sure, but that’s why we need to begin the conversation now. As we recognize that the death penalty is cruel, unusual, and simply doesn’t work, we ought to also start thinking about what prison terms can and should mean for offenders, for victims, and for society at large.[1]

Ethical Intervention

Whenever I write about intervention, people who identify as pacifists assume I’m advocating for hundreds of thousands of American soldiers invading a foreign country and brutalizing those they were purportedly sent to save. Another group, who generally seem to be isolationists in disguise rather than actual pacifists, accuse me of wanting to kill Muslims and steal their oil.

I can’t say much to these people, except that they are wrong. To the first group, there are all sorts of options that count as intervention in my book but don’t necessitate sending in ground troops for a decade-long occupation. I invite the second group to pick a non-Muslim, resource-poor country whose government is murdering its citizens en masse; I’ll very happily recommend intervention there too.

It’s not that I’m always in favor of foreign intervention, that I don’t care at all about the idea of state sovereignty, or that I’m unconcerned about the consequences of meddling in the affairs of others. Indeed, in the wake of the mess made by Invisible Children with their viral video, a lot of compelling things have been written about Westerners getting involved in the affairs of non-Western countries — Teju Cole’s piece in the Atlantic about the White Savior Industrial Complex is likely the best of these — so I’m mindful of the pitfalls.

At bottom, though, I want to argue that there’s a time for intervention and that intervening in another country’s affairs isn’t necessarily an immoral thing to advocate. My reasoning is based on a position that holds human rights to be universal and sacrosanct, and thus that the alleviation of human suffering is such a very great good that its accomplishment can rightly trump state sovereignty.

Now, if you think there’s no such thing as human rights, or that they don’t matter, I probably need to work harder in my role as Director of UNL’s Forsythe Family Program on Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. I’ll assume instead that we have the same basic desire to minimize human suffering and move on to the interesting argument I have with a third group of pacifists. This group is the most thoughtful one and its members essentially agree with me about human rights and the alleviation of suffering. But, they argue, intervention — which generally seems to involve weapons and which generally seems to lead to further destabilization — clearly isn’t going to alleviate any suffering.

So, if you’re keeping score, non-intervention means that people will suffer and so does intervention. And so these pacifists tell me to donate money to a charity that will help people who are suffering if I really must do something. Or, in the extreme, I can go over there myself and, like Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, fight alongside the rebels.

The trouble, of course, is that most humanitarian aid organizations help people after the worst of the atrocities have been committed; they don’t prevent governments from murdering citizens. And, of course, we all know that the side supported by Hemingway and Orwell lost, and Spaniards suffered under a fascist dictatorship for decades.

In the end, I come down on the side of intervention because it’s something we can control. It isn’t necessarily the case that an intervening force will cause more suffering. Even if it’s happened that way every single time in the past, even if the costs have never once outweighed the benefits (and we know, of course, that this isn’t the case), we can still argue that the past is no predictor of the future. We can work harder to make the next intervention a good one, one that assists people who are suffering and imposes no additional suffering on them. We can look, for example, to the Responsibility to Protect doctrine and model a multilateral intervention on its tenets. And, importantly, we can think of each time I’ve used “we” above in a more inclusive sense than simply “We Westerners” so everything is done to support and assist the humanitarian efforts that are being done locally.

But let me make it more difficult on myself. Let’s presume that our intervention will put an end to one kind of suffering — the violence perpetrated by the government — but will also cause another kind of suffering, namely violence that accompanies an armed intervention. Whenever we discuss intervening, after all, there’s a very good chance weapons will be involved. And whenever weapons are involved, there’s a very good chance people will suffer (even if it’s unintentional). Could it still be ethical to intervene in this case? I think so.

If we stay home, feeling good about ourselves for not having imposed ourselves on others or caused any possible additional suffering by our actions, we know for certain that the suffering that is taking place is unlikely to come to an end.

What we have to remember is that we’re not making a choice between war and peace, as pacifists would like for us to make. There’s already a war going on and the vast majority of the casualties are civilians. The choice is between people being killed and people being killed, which is something I don’t want to sugarcoat. In both instances, people die and it’s violent and awful. But in one instance — when we eschew intervention — the people who generally die violently are those who are attempting (and failing, due to inferior military capabilities) to throw off a tyrant.

Would a foreign government or governments have been morally blameworthy for assisting the Algerians against the French? How about helping Mandela defeat the apartheid government of South Africa or stepping in to prevent the slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda? What if the Egyptians hadn’t succeeded in ousting Mubarak, as the Iranians did not succeed in their revolution? Do we simply say “Shucks!” and watch the pictures of their executions come flooding in via Twitter?

In those instances, it’s my position that to fall back on pacifism because war is awful amounts to something of a moral failing insofar as it amounts to siding with the tyrant. We should do better than we’ve done; we should be more thoughtful about what we do, more inclusive and respectful of those who are already working on the issue locally, more cautious with military options, more willing to try other options first, and generally just less imperialistic. But we shouldn’t decide that doing nothing is somehow the best or only option, or fool ourselves into thinking that the people we fail to assist will somehow thank us later.[1]

The Multi-Touch Chinese Finger Trap

I wrote this piece on my MacBook Air and I proofread it on my iPad, devices which are dear to me and which power much of my work and recreation. Like many happy Apple customers, though, I’ve been forced to consider the very unhappy conditions under which these gadgets – and others like them – are produced. How should those of us who love and depend upon our electronics feel about the suffering of the factory workers who are laboring and even dying for us?

While information about worker suicides and unsafe conditions has been making the rounds for some time, the latest and loudest critique began with a recent stirring piece in the New York Times on the operations of Foxconn, the manufacturing partner that operates electronics factories in China. Foxconn seemingly holds the health and safety of workers in outright contempt:

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

In addition, there have been numerous reports of injuries arising from the use of harmful chemicals and from explosions in some of the factories. And, of course, there have been several instances of worker suicides, which have rightfully drawn a great deal of attention.

On the one hand, these terrible conditions gnaw at us because we know it’s our demand for high-tech products at low prices that drives corporations to pay workers less and spend less on safety, not to mention move their manufacturing into countries with little to no regulation. On the other hand, workers freely choose to take these jobs; in fact, Foxconn regularly turns away fully informed job seekers since the pay and the conditions they offer are better than many other options available, particularly for young rural workers. Without the demand and thus the factories, many of the people who are being exploited would be struggling to feed their families and would end up exploited in some other way. Indeed, this is the position on sweatshops taken by Nicholas Kristof and by Paul Krugman.

With those two poles of the debate in mind, I still feel comfortable asserting that the exploitation of poor workers is a moral wrong. We ought to prevent others from exploiting disadvantaged people. In order to end the exploitation, neither market forces nor an organized boycott will suffice. We need government regulation requiring sufficient wages and safe conditions. Regulation will almost surely lead to higher prices, but it’s time we priced human dignity into the feature checklists of our immorally inexpensive electronics.

I rely on regulation of corporations for three reasons. First, I don’t think that the corporations can adequately police themselves when they face competitors who refuse to improve their manufacturing standards by raising prices and lowering profit margins. The reality (or at least the perception among corporate leaders) is that many customers and stockholders wouldn’t find much value in improved working conditions.

Second, I disagree with those — like Forbes’ Tim Worstall — who argue that these might be bad working conditions for us but not for the Chinese. The notion that there should be different cultural standards for human flourishing or for what brings human beings to grief is one I reject and, I suspect, the workers in question reject it as well. Even if we agree that a sufficient wage for Chinese workers falls far below a sufficient wage for American workers, it’s quite clear that the same simply isn’t true of working conditions. What is dangerous for me in America is also dangerous for someone in China, and arguments to the contrary can’t get around the problem of valuing some human lives over others.

Finally, I don’t think it’s sufficient or helpful to point the finger at consumers. “If you care so much about the Chinese workers, then don’t buy an iPad” reveals a misunderstanding pointed out by tech writer MG Siegler: “The real key here is that this story could have been written about any number of technology companies that have to deal with hardware manufacturing. This sad state of affairs is the way the world works in this space. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive.”

Siegler — an Apple enthusiast — isn’t writing as an apologist; indeed, the New York Times article itself makes the same point: “The company has plants throughout China, and assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics, including for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nintendo, Nokia and Samsung.”

In short, you’re not doing yourself or the Chinese workers any favors by buying the Galaxy Tab instead. Importantly, we can no longer completely disengage from computing and simply abstain from the purchase of electronic devices altogether. While this point is philosophically troubling for some and simply ignored by others, it raises a critical question: What is our moral obligation to workers who are being exploited in the making of our devices if we actually need those devices?

I’m not thinking here of someone like my grandmother, who likes to see pictures of her family on her cellphone or as a desktop background, or even someone like my mother, who owns an iPhone but predominately uses it along with her laptop for Facebook and email. They could get by using less technology and perhaps replacing their devices less often. Some might very well welcome a return to film cameras, landline telephones, and the U.S. Postal Service.

But many of us couldn’t turn back the clock even if we wanted to. Today, even a college professor who spends his days poring over dusty tomes of ancient political philosophy has a job predicated on computing in ways that were unimaginable not too many years ago.

I suppose that I could write my books and articles by hand or with a typewriter, conduct classes without my iPad, head back to the library’s stacks rather than use web-based versions of books and journals, rely on paper copies of everything that my department, college, and university require me to read and/or comment upon, and give a phone number rather than an email address to my students and colleagues. But it’s so much quicker and so much easier to do these things with the devices of I own and, more to the point, it’s becoming increasingly less of an option to communicate and operate in analog ways.

And that’s for someone who teaches and conducts research in the field of political philosophy. I suspect it would be much more difficult for my political science colleagues to disengage from their computers since they often use them as tools for the statistical analysis of ever-growing piles of data. And of course many professions and whole industries are simply based on the existence of personal computing devices. A quick visit to any hospital or a peek inside a squad car will show you that computers are ubiquitous outside the realm of the academy or the internet.

At bottom, the difficulty is that I can’t simply choose to disengage in order to do what I might consider my moral duty. It’s not the same as reading The Jungle and deciding not to eat meat. If I feel morally responsible for the way that animals or workers are treated, I can act in such a way that I’m not part of the problem. But with the gadgets that so dominate our lives, we face an externality: The choices being made by others affect our own. We each can disengage from all of this technology only if everyone else agrees to either do the same or make a great many allowances for technological abstainers.

Society’s technological web doesn’t excuse me or give me a moral free pass to collect a stack of iPads whenever a new one is developed. But it does suggest that consumers who want to do the right thing can’t go it alone. Such moral-minded consumers need help because each one can’t unilaterally disengage from all the products that are being produced under poor working conditions. Government intervention is routinely the best and often the only way to deal with large-scale coordination problems concerning human rights and human well-being. We need regulation because it’s the right thing for the workers; we need it because it’s the right thing for the corporations; and we need it because it’s the right thing for us.

Of course, regulation presents its own set of challenges. If all products sold in the United States suddenly had to be manufactured under standards congruent with U.S. labor laws, the Chinese government would be incensed and might well have a case to present to the World Trade Organization. Nor can the U.S. simply slap some sort of regulation on American-based multinationals and call it a day. In the Apple case, Foxconn is a Chinese corporation employing Chinese workers; in some instances, they are working through Chinese subsidiaries as well. The manufactured goods are eventually sold to an American corporation, but the issue of working conditions is often once or twice removed from any Americans.

The best case scenario relies on governmental regulation by the Chinese themselves, perhaps as a result of pressure from the West or from international organizations. No one can implement labor laws in China except the Chinese, of course, and the West hasn’t been particularly successful in making inroads in China with regard to human rights more broadly.

I’m something of a pessimist, then, at least in the short term, though perhaps that’s because meaningful change usually requires a long view. Until our leaders — both political and corporate — decide to make human rights an integral part of their agenda overseas, putting pressure on countries like China to make meaningful changes to their labor standards, there might not be a perfectly moral choice for consumers today.[1]

Occupation and Revolution

The Occupy Wall Street protest movement has succeeded in capturing a significant amount of our collective attention over the past month or two. Personally, I find its premises to be very compelling.

I’ve taught Marx for many years and it’s not at all difficult to explain his ideas about justice and economic inequality to my students or to find examples from our daily lives that highlight points raised in, for example, the Communist Manifesto. I’m very sympathetic to those who want to shrink the gap between rich and poor, reduce the influence of corporations on democratic politics, and limit the ability of those at the top to generally run roughshod over everyone else. In short, the Marxist diagnosis of conditions in an unregulated capitalist society should rally people to the Occupy Wall Street banner.

Or, that diagnosis should rally people if the Occupy movement could separate Marxist premises from Marxist conclusions. This is difficult, though, because of the revolutionary spirit of some of the organizers of the OWS movement. While not all of the organizers are Marxists — and while most of the protesters don’t have revolution as their motivation at all — it seems fairly clear that a number of key organizers have in mind some sort of revolution as an ultimate end goal of the movement.[1]

A recent lecture by political theorist Jodi Dean made clear the relationship between OWS and Marxism. Her lecture was well-attended, including by a fair number of the protesters who have set up their tents on the Lincoln Mall.

Mostly, Dean was interested in discussing the Occupy movement and what she understood to be its philosophical underpinnings, which was also what the audience really wanted to hear about. Along the way, she repeatedly referenced the work of Hardt and Negri, Lenin, and Žižek, the theorists whose work she clearly believes is speaking to the concerns of OWS.

What Dean wants — what she deeply believes will happen — is for capitalism to be brought to its knees by this protest movement; she intimated that we will thereafter live in a Marxist-Leninist paradise. To that end, she specifically discussed her opposition to the idea that the OWS movement should put forward goals or demands. Indeed, as a member of the committee tasked with creating just such a list, she was particularly pleased to convey to the audience that she opposed the idea of demanding job creation until the proposed number of jobs was set at 25,000,000. She liked this number, she said, because it was impossible to achieve.

The problem for Dean — and other revolutionaries who see the OWS movement as their vehicle — is that the 99% they claim to represent don’t share their revolutionary fervor. A great many of the OWS protesters likely have pretty clear ideas of concrete changes to the system that they’d like to see: a college education should be more affordable, student loans shouldn’t absolutely cripple people’s future choices, and one should leave college with the feeling that it’s possible to find gainful employment; preventative health care should be available to everyone; homelessness is a problem we can solve; we need better and smarter regulation of banks and corporations because we’ve seen pretty clearly what happens when regulation gets stripped away by politicians who take a lot of money from banks and corporations.

We can surely add things to this list, but I think it’s a pretty safe starting point. The problem, of course, is that the movement continues to adhere to the notion that its lack of goals is a virtue so these ideas remain ones that are simply floated by individual protesters. The arguments that have been floated for the lack of a single, coherent list of demands or ends are wide-ranging: it’s too soon to demand that the young movement develop a set of goals; the non-hierarchical nature of the movement purposely resists a single, coherent list; any set of goals might allow for the movement to be co-opted; that one set of goals would violate the spirit of openness that pervades the protest; or that the real (and obvious) goal of the occupation is to be seen and heard.

But these aren’t Dean’s arguments. For her, the very idea of a set of goals would negatively impact the OWS movement because there is only one goal: the overthrow of capitalism and the sham democracy supporting the system of exploitation of the 99% by the 1%.

At an expensive dinner I attended after the event, I specifically asked her about goals that might bring me around to support the movement; Dean’s response was instructive: I’m just not someone who will ever support the movement because I like capitalism. This struck me as odd, as I’m someone who recognizes the problems identified by the OWS movement as critically important and who sympathizes with the sort of actionable goals that I mentioned above. 

I’m guessing that not everyone involved in the Occupy movement feels the way that she does, that this is a pretty extreme position not espoused by the vast majority of occupiers. But if the other people who are very involved don’t believe in Marxist-Leninist revolution, why not move beyond the idea of raising awareness of the problems, especially since this has — by all accounts — been accomplished already?

If it’s a Marxist revolution you have in mind, just tell me that’s your goal. Don’t tell me you don’t have goals or you resist the idea of goals at all. I’m trying to figure out if what we’re talking about here is the (likely violent) overthrow of the current order and its replacement with a socialist paradise.

If so, I’m just not going to be able to get on board with this movement, no matter how much I agree with its premises — and with Marx’s too — about inequality and justice. And neither, I think, will the vast majority of the 99%.

But since I’m guessing that only a tiny handful want what Dean wants, I would argue that a whole lot more people would be ready to put their shoulders to the wheel if there are other goals, ones that attempt to work within the current system, that maintain all of our human rights, and that have policy proposals attached to them.[2]

“Look, you damned wretches, take your fill of the fair sight”

If there’s one thing on which most Americans seem to agree, it’s that a celebration is in order when people are killed. Of course, it’s not just any killing that we like; it’s executions. Since May, in person, in print, and online, we have come together to publicly rejoice at the deaths of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki, and now Muammar Gaddafi. But we’re not only interested in the executions of terrorists and tyrants overseas; a crowd also vigorously cheered the hundreds of executions over which Rick Perry has presided in Texas. There’s just something about death that makes us stand up and applaud … or worse. 

I should begin by noting that I’m not really going to be writing here about the people I just mentioned; this won’t be a reflection on the lives of the terrorists, tyrants, and murderers and so you won’t find a list of the reasons that I’m not spending a lot of time mourning their passing. What I want to consider, instead, is the way in which Americans think about justice.

When I think about justice, I tend to reflect back on something Socrates said in Plato’s Republic:

[I]f someone asserts that it’s just to give what is owed to each man—and he understands by this that harm is owed to enemies by the just man and help to friends—the man who said it was not wise. For he wasn’t telling the truth. For it has become apparent to us that it is never just to harm anyone (335e).

I recognize that this makes me somewhat unusual, both because I turn to a text written circa 380 BCE even when thinking about contemporary issues and because the vast majority of people seem to think exactly the opposite about justice. For most people, justice involves some sort of gut feeling rather than the sort of reasoned argument that Socrates uses to arrive at his position. It tends to involve someone getting what (s)he deserves and so, in the context of the people I mentioned above, this means exacting vengeance. And so, when Americans see someone getting what (s)he deserves, being paid back in kind for the harm (s)he has done, they rejoice.

But, of course, I think it’s a mistake to simply equate justice with vengeance, both because I have yet to hear a persuasive argument against Socrates’ claim and because vengeance elevates the worst in us at the expense of what is best.

Instead, I am reminded of Portia’s speech to Shylock in The Merchant of Venice:

The quality of mercy is not strain’d, / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest; / It blesseth him that gives and him that takes: / ’Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes / The throned monarch better than his crown; / His sceptre shows the force of temporal power [….] It is an attribute to God himself; / And earthly power doth then show likest God’s / When mercy seasons justice (IV.1).

Even though Shylock believes that harming his enemy accords with both justice and his own best interest, Portia argues that any understanding of justice that is bereft of mercy or compassion can never, ultimately, be in one’s best interest: 

Though justice be thy plea, consider this, / That, in the course of justice, none of us / Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy; / And that same prayer doth teach us all to render / The deeds of mercy (IV.1).

At bottom, then, it’s the distinct lack of compassion that’s bothering me when I see our increasingly ghoulish displays of glee at the deaths of others (even those who have done the most terrible things). They highlight either an inability or an unwillingness to see the humanity in others and, consequently, yield a diminution of our own humanity.

When people ran into the streets and cheered bin Laden’s death as if their hometown team had won the World Series, I wrote that the singing and flag-waving demeaned us by highlighting the extent to which the culture of vengeance pervades our society. When a crowd of people cheered about the deaths of more than two hundred of their fellow citizens, I wrote that the justice they were cheering could only be the kind that was done to someone else: “Never to them, never to anyone they care about or have even met.”

And now, when so many people positively raced to Facebook, Twitter, email, and blogs to share pictures and video of Gaddafi’s bloody visage –- either dead or dying -– I was reminded once again how far removed we are from a time when we might conceive of justice as more than simply the paying back of violence with violence. When we gloat over the dead bodies we’ve managed to pile up — regardless of the reason that led to those deaths —  we’re really celebrating the basest part of our nature. As Socrates reminds us:

Leontius, the son of Aglaion, was going up from the Piraeus under the outside of the North Wall when he noticed corpses lying by the public executioner. He desired to look, but at the same time he was disgusted and made himself turn away; and for a while he struggled and covered his face. But finally, overpowered by the desire, he opened his eyes wide, ran toward the corpses and said: “Look, you damned wretches, take your fill of the fair sight” (439e-440a).

The problem for Americans today, of course, is that we’re not even having this struggle with ourselves. We immediately lamented the fact that we weren’t given any pictures of bin Laden’s body, we relish information about murderers’ last meals, and we pass around pictures of Gaddafi’s corpse like they’re actually pictures of last weekend’s dinner party.

Personally, I’d like to imagine what our country might look like if it was populated by a citizenry that approached the deaths of others with a certain solemnity rather than one that celebrates the corpses produced by our government, to paraphrase Salon’s Glenn Greenwald.

Personally, I’d like to see Americans reflecting on the idea of justice and the proper role of compassion, on why corpses are the only possible validation for so many of us, on what a society that applauds a body count is ultimately missing, on the prejudices and privilege that allow us to cheer and sing when others die … but we’re so very far away from doing any of those things right now that all of our major newspapers ran full-color, close-up photographs of a dead or dying man on their front pages this week. They know what we want.[1]

[1] An edited version of this blog post appears as the third in a monthly series of columns on the problem of justice in contemporary politics and pop culture that I will be writing for the Daily Nebraskan this semester.

Are Libertarians Small-D Democrats?

The GOP primary debates have provided me with a whole lot of material on contemporary American politics, but I keep coming back to the Tea Party and libertarianism, in no small part because there’s a political philosophy element to be explored there. What I wonder about is whether or not libertarians even hold the same view as most of us regarding the American political system, namely that the result of a democratic vote is not tyranny?

Now, it doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to understand the current level of enthusiasm for libertarianism, especially those aspects of the philosophy that call for an end to taking the hard-earned money of some people to pay for services that benefit other people. This is quite appealing to people with a certain level of education and a certain amount of money in the bank. What’s more, the terrible economy makes us want to clutch ever tighter those things for which we feel we’ve worked so hard. The prospect of the government taking anything from us in times like these feels like the most dangerous sort of tyranny.

I get it. Like everyone else, I don’t like paying taxes … and, what’s more, I have the good sense to know that I’d like paying them a whole lot less if my job was any less cushy than it is. As it stands, I get paid to do something I love and so parting with some of my money doesn’t seem so desperately terrible, especially when I consider that some of it is used for services I strongly believe should be guaranteed to everyone.

But here’s where the rubber meets the road, I think, and here’s where all of this gets controversial. As I mentioned in a recent blog post (which drew quite a lot of commentary, thanks in large part to Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog), “At first I thought we were just talking past each other, that we had fundamentally different values and beliefs, but perhaps I should be wondering instead if these people (who prize individual choice so highly) simply don’t respect my choices. Maybe the choices in which they’re seemingly so invested are only the choices they make.”

Now I want to push on this idea a little bit more. The issue is that they have a policy preference and I have a policy preference. Then we vote. My preference is the winning one, insofar as the majority of citizens elect politicians who hold the same preference that I have and do not hold the policy preference that libertarians have.

What we get, then, is a system that taxes people and provides services to people. It is this system for which the majority of people are voting each time they vote; they have the option to cast their vote for politicians for favor a different system, but they choose not to vote for those politicians.

The libertarian response to this outcome is that my policy preference –- which is also held by a majority of voters -– is tyrannical and, therefore, illegitimate. My response is that this is how democracy works: We have a range of candidates who hold a variety of positions, we all get to vote, and then the winners put into practice the positions behind which we’ve thrown our support.

If my position -– the one by which people are taxed and services are provided –- was the losing position in the next election, I have the sense I would be unhappy about that. I might say that the outcome we selected was an unjust one, given my position that justice requires us to provide some level of care for the least well-off in our society.

As my good friend Michael Tofias argues, “People don’t care about institutions. People care about outcomes.” In other words, I’m more than willing to go on and on about the virtues of democracy when my side is winning, but perhaps I won’t be crowing as loudly when my side loses. Thus, I shouldn’t pretend to be so surprised when the losing side doesn’t feel the same way that I do about particular congressional or presidential elections.

And indeed, I’m more than a little unhappy that we spend money on the death penalty in this country. I would rather elect politicians who would do away with what I regard as a terrible injustice that also wastes an incredible amount of my money. So I try to find politicians who take the same view on the death penalty, though they are very difficult to find, and I try to convince others that they ought to hold my policy preferences as their own.

But here is a key difference, I think: If I fail to convince a majority to vote with me, insofar as I am a committed small-d democrat, I wouldn’t refer to the resulting policy (or policy shift, in the case of libertarians hoping to do away with most taxes and social safety nets) as a tyranny. Unless, of course, I’m committed to the idea that all government is tyrannical and that democracy is just a tyranny of the majority over the minority. I don’t hold that position; a tyranny, by my lights, is a government in which I have no say.

Instead, if everyone can vote in a free and fair election, and if there is a full range of options available on which we can vote, I think the result of an election that doesn’t go my way is simply a bad result, one that I’ll hope to fix in the next election. But this doesn’t seem to be the way that libertarians view elections.

From their perspective, the choices made by a majority of the society –- choices that emphasize a willingness to be taxed in order to ensure some services for themselves and others -– are not simply bad choices but unjust ones. They regard the result as tyrannical for themselves as citizens who did not agree to it. But, insofar as they are small-d democrats, haven’t they agreed to be bound by the results of these election, just as I agree to be bound by the results of an election in which their candidate is elected and from which their policies become law?

Looking at things from this angle, am I right to conclude that libertarians simply don’t have the same central democratic value that most of us have? And, if they don’t, how can we even begin to have a conversation about what we ought to do as a society?[1]

[1] An edited version of this blog post appears as the second in a monthly series of columns on the problem of justice in contemporary politics and pop culture that I will be writing for the Daily Nebraskan this semester.