Mr. Stolyarov writes:

“Dr. Murphy seems to think that it is possible for a society to simultaneously hold that both a) every individual has an inalienable right to life and that b) some individuals may be allowed to proceed to violate others' rights to life while theirs remain respected. [emphasis Steele’s] This in itself is a contradiction."

To the contrary, all the rights of all individuals, criminals and non-criminals alike, must always be respected.  One may resist or punish a criminal only because, and to the extent, s/he violates others’ rights.  Since the criminal has no right to violate the rights of others, one does not violate her/his rights by using force – so long as one does not go beyond whatever force the crime justifies.

Mr. Stolyarov continues:

 “How can one consistently assert that these rights are universal and yet may be violated with impunity -- without adequate retribution?”

Fair enough, but what is “adequate?”  In the case of murder and attempted murder, “adequate” first of all must satisfy the condition of stopping further instances of the behavior.  Beyond this, other concerns, e.g. restitution (to the extent it is possible) might be reasonable, but stopping the behavior is primary, if the objective is a society in which all rights are respected.  The implication is that murder and attempted murder should be addressed with very strong punishments – but capital punishment is not a necessary conclusion, and would even possibly undercut auxiliary goals, such as restitution.  Imprisonment, for example, works as well.  So might, in some settings, banishment.  (Note that in cases where the criminal act is in progress, rather than completed, defensive use of deadly force may be called for.

Mr. Stolyarov also argues that a criminal necessarily adopts the principle that no one, including him/herself, holds the fundamental right to one’s own life.  But this is not so.  For example, a criminal might fully believe that certain people have rights and others don’t (many white slave owners seem to have been genuinely convinced that blacks were not properly sovereign individuals).  And individuals differ in what they suppose are legitimate grounds for justifiable homicide; hence A might kill B, believing it is fully justified given B’s behavior, while none of the rest of us would agree.  Yet A might fully agree with us that everyone has the right to his own life.  The issue of what a murderer believes or what belief is implied in her/his behavior is a red herring, anyway, if the purpose is to defend individual rights.  Even if A were a mindless robot, stopping him would be appropriate.  But again, stopping does not necessarily entail capital punishment.

So capital punishment isn’t a necessary implication of individual rights.  Why should an advocate of rights actively oppose capital punishment, as I do?  It has nothing to do with concern for the well-being of egregious murderers.  It has to do, rather, with the very real possibility that innocent individuals are sometimes convicted of capital crimes.  If convicted murderers are not executed, but kept imprisoned, then if subsequent evidence turns up that exonerates them, they may be at least partially restored.  The development of DNA testing has resulted in the release of over 200 wrongfully convicted individuals in the United States alone. (http://www.innocenceproject.org/)  Most were not facing the death penalty, but that point is irrelevant.  Kill a convict, and there’s no chance of undoing errors and injustices should the conviction prove to have been false.

The grave injustice of executing even one innocent person for a crime s/he didn’t commit is, in fact, essentially the same one for which we condemned A earlier.  From the standpoint of our subsequent superior knowledge we see that what appeared, to some, as a justifiable homicide (execution) was in fact not justified at all, but the wrongful taking of innocent life.

In sum, with some egregious crimes, we might all agree that we have no interest in prolonging the life of the actual perpetrator.  But in real life, the uncertainties involved in establishing guilt, to say nothing of the problems of often dysfunctional and corrupt governmental justice systems, mean that we should forswear the death penalty in the interest of protecting individual rights.

Read Mr. Stolyarov's new comprehensive treatise, A Rational Cosmology, explicating such terms as the universe, matter, space, time, sound, light, life, consciousness, and volition, here.

Read Mr. Stolyarov's new four-act play, Implied Consent, a futuristic intellectual drama on the sanctity of human life, here.