AN EXCHANGE

Camus and His Critics on Capital Punishment

Donald Lazere

A LARGE MAJORITY of the American public continues to favor the death penalty, and a 1972 Supreme Court decision virtu- ally abolishing capital punishment on constitutional grounds has gradually been superseded by a variety of legisla- tion within individual states circumvent- ing the Courts constitutional objections and resulting in a new cycle of execu- tions during recent years. For this rea- son, Albert Camus classic essay against capital punishment, Reflections on the Guillotine, retains all of its timeliness and power as a challenge to Americans and citizens of other countries where support for the death penalty remains strong. Re- flections was published in France in a 1957 bookceauthored by Arthur Koestler titled R&exions sur la peine capitale, and the English version appeared in a 1960 collection of Camus journalism, Resis- tance, Rebellion, and Death.

For the purpose of reconfirming the viability of Camus arguments on capital punishment and the larger philosophi- cal, political, and literary issues the es- say raises, I will briefly review his lines of argument and then evaluate two ma- jor attempts in the United States to re- fute them, On Camus and Capital Pun- ishment by Thomas Molnar and For Capital Punishment by Walter Berns. This exchange retains additional con- temporary significance because Molnar

and Berns represent the movement of intellectual conservatism that has gained increasing influence in the United States in the past few decades, so that the debate provides an exemplary case of the nature and quality of conservative versus liberal ideology-though Camus was more inclined toward nonviolent anarchism and communitarian social- ism than liberalism.

Published fifteen years after Camus The Stranger, Reflections recapitulates several of that novels images and themes concerning the impending execution of its narrator Meursault: the story of Camus/Meursaults father self-righ- teously going to watch an execution but coming home vomiting; the agonies of the condemned man in the death cell, the theatricality of courtroom rhetoric and arbitrariness of the verdict, etc. Camus continues beyond The Stranger, which ends before Meursault is guillo- tined, to describe actual executions, jux- taposing their barbaric reality to the euphemisms in which society inconsis- tently shrouds this purportedly exem- plary ritual. (Camus argues that execu- tions should be televised rather than taking place in private if society truly believes they serve as a deterrent to potential criminals.)

After beginning with these gruesomely visceral physical descriptions of decapi-

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tation, Camus reviews criminological data refuting defenses of capital punish- ment based on its alleged deterrent value and citing the high incidence of judicial errors and variability in verdicts from one time and place to another. These data provide the basis for arguing against capital punishment on the grounds of its irreversibility; on these grounds alone, Camus argues for life imprisonment with- out parole as an alternative. H e goes on, however, to philosophical, religious, and political levels of argument. H e does not wholly reject conservative defenses of punishment as revenge or retribution, but draws the line at death, not only because of the dangers of erroneous executions but because society drags itself down to the level of its most irratio- nal members in indulging the impulse to bloodshed, and indeed may incite more of those members to murder through emulation than it deters.

On the metaphysical level, Camus at- tacks capital punishment as blasphemy against Christian mercy and repentance: There could be read on the sword of the Fribourg executioner the words: Lord Jesus, thou art the judge. ... And, to be sure, whoever clings to the teaching of Jesus will look upon that handsome sword as one more outrage to the person of Christ.2 Moreover, he argues that the religious faith undergirding earlier church-states can no longer justify mod- ern secular states assumption of God- like power over life and death.

On the political plane, Camus argues as a leftist that bourgeois society breeds and profits from anti-social conditions like poverty and alcoholism, but totally absolves itself of responsibility for the criminal consequences of these condi- tions. (This argument has been sup- ported by recent studies of atrocity kill- ers in the United States showing nearly all of them to have been poor and abused as children.) His argument is not that individuals bear no responsibility for

crime or that society is not entitled to defend itself, but that as long as society bears the smallest fraction of responsi- bility, it is unwarranted in placing 100% of responsibility on criminals in execut- ing them; the cost of life imprisonment should be considered societys minimal share of responsibility. Finally, and most compellingly, he argues that capital pun- ishment is the ultimate weapon of exces- sive state power over the individual, and should be abolished as a first step to- ward reversal of the deification of the state and nationalism that has led in the twentieth century to two world wars, the threat of nuclear war, totalitarianism, and the diminishing of individual liber- ties, even in democracies.

I1

Thomas Molnars On Camus and Capi- tal Punishment appeared in the sum- mer 1958 issue of Modern Age. Walter Bernss For Capital Punishment was published in the April 1979 Harpers, at that time predominantly neoconserv- ative in its politics; the essay was repub- lished the same year in Bernss bookFor Capital Punishment: Crime and the Mo- rality of the Death P e n ~ l t y . ~ Berns, a po- litical scientist, was and still is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Insti- tute in Washington. In my view, Molnars article, although appearing only a year after Camus, presents a more informed account than Bernss later one of Camus philosophy and its basic points of opposi- tion to conservative thought. Neverthe- less, I will make the case that both es- says misrepresent Camus ideas to the point of attacking a straw man and evad- ing the central issues Camus addresses.

Before summarizing Molnars and Bernss arguments, it is necessary to note that neither critic addresses all of Camuss main lines of argument, includ- ing the issues of judicial error and vari- ability-an omission that presents prob- lems for the moral position they defend,

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which assumes a high degree of recti- tude in the judiciary system. Both do raise the traditional conservative argu- ment for deterrence, only to acknowl- edge its weakness as a defense of capital punishment; they reject it not so much because empirical evidence does not support it (which neither denies), but because any empirical argument, as Molnar says, enters into the game of pragmatism and statistic^,"^ as opposed to the moral dimensions they both em- phasize.

Molnar begins his essay with the case of an elderly, white New Yorkshopkeeper who, having been held up twice, finally shot to death athird blackrobber, whose gun, as it turned out, was a toy. Molnar defends t h e shopkeepers action against predictable liberal criticisms, moving from this individual execution of justice to the death penalty. In both cases, Molnar asserts, man has a moral duty to react with indignation when his com- mon sense, uncorrupted by psychologi- cal and sociological sophistication, tells him that evil is evil, ... that every action is projected against the walls of the social order and of the divine order, and rever- berates from there.j

Molnar opposes this definition of jus- tice to the alleged moral relativism of modern liberals, including Camus. After a fairminded summary of Camus vari- ous works expressing his social and metaphysical skepticism, particularly regarding the frailties of legal justice and the role of the judge who assumes divine prerogatives in an agnostic soci- ety, Molnar charges that Camus idea of justice is tinged with sentimentality, and it fails to distinguish between a gen- eralized and hazy guilt-feeling (made fas h- ionable by the novels of Dostoevsky and Kafka) and the moral and legal concept of individual responsibility.6 Molnar continues:

I reply to Camus that responsibility ought

to be kept limited if we want it to have a meaning .... It is human nature to feel in- terested in, concerned with, and, hence, responsible for a relatively small number of people and issues. This is contrary to the prevailing liberal, humanitarian phi- losophy which wants to impress upon us a universal concern for all mankind, and responsibility for events distant from US, outside of our possible sphere of influ- ence and effectiveness. The man who would adopt this attitude [is] oblivious to its abstract and artificial nature ....

Molnar goes on to reply to Camus arguments about the impossibility of definitively delineating between the individuals and societys responsibility for crime;equating Camus with the kind of liberals who say or imply that man is good, but society corrupts him .... We know these Rousseauistic laments, but we may be surprised t o find them under Camus pen.8

In spite of Molnars generally well- informed view of modern moral philoso- phy and Camus thought in general, he misrepresents Reflections on the Guil- lotine on three major points: Camus alleged denial of the responsibility of criminals and the legitimacy of punish- ing them, his displacement of responsi- bility for crime onto society, and the abstract nature of his position. To begin with Molnars charge that Camus has a romantically senti