lmcamus and his critics on capital punishment

8/17/2019 lmCamus and His Critics on Capital Punishment

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N 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been superseded by a variety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 Court’s 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 th e death penalty remains strong.”Re

flections” was published in France in a

1957 bookceauthored by Arthur Koestler

titled

R ‘exions sur

la

peine cap itale,

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 at tempts 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 th e 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

severalof that novel’s images and themes

concerning the impending execution

of

its narrator Meursault: the story of

Camus’/Meursault’s 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 a s 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.”2Moreover, he argues that t he

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, bu t 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

allof hem 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 o n criminals in execut-

ing them; the cost of

life

imprisonment

should be considered society’s 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 o two world wars, the

threat of nuclear war, totalitarianism,

and the diminishing of individual liber-

ties, even in democracies.

I1

Thomas Molnar’s “OnCamus and Capi-

tal Punishment” appeared in the sum-

mer

1958

issue of

Modern Age.

Walter

Berns’s “For Capital Punishment” was

published in the April 1979

Harper’s,

at

that time predominantly neoconserv-

ative in its politics; the essay was repub-

lished the same year in Berns’s bookFor

Capital Punishment: Crime and the Mo

rality

of

the D eath P e n ~ l t y . ~

erns, a po-

litical scientist, was and still is a resident

scholar at t he American Enterprise Insti-

tute in Washington. In my view, Molnar’s

article, although appearing only a year

after Camus,’ presents a more informed

account than Berns’s later one of Camus’

philosophy and its basic points of opposi-

tion to conservative thought. Neverthe-

less,

will make the case tha t both

es-

says misrepresent Camus’ ideas to t he

point

of

attackinga straw man and evad-

ing the central issues Camus addresses.

Before summarizing Molnar’s and

Berns’s arguments, it

is

necessary to

note that neither critic addresses all of

Camus’s 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 t o 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 shopkeeper’s 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, hat 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:

reply to Camus that responsibility ought

to be kept l imited 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 m a n w h o

would adopt this attitude [is] obliviousto

its abstract and artificial nature ...’

Molnar goes on to reply to Camus’

arguments about the impossibility of

definitively delineating between the

individual’s and society’s responsibility

for crime;equating Camus with the kind

of liberals who “say or imply tha t 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 Molnar’s generally well-

informed view

of

modern moral philoso-

phy and Camus’ thought in general, he

misrepresents “Reflections on th e 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

abstrac t nature

of

his position. To begin

with Molnar’s charge tha t Camus has a

romantically sentimental attitude toward

criminals and exonerates them of all

responsibility, Camus could not be more

clear in his opposition to such attitudes:

There

is no question

of

giving in to some

conventional set of sentimental pictures

and calling to mind Victor Hugo’s good

convicts. The age

of

enlightenment, as

people say, wanted to suppress the death

penalty on the grounds that man was

naturally good.

Of

course he is

not

(he

is

worse or better). After twenty years of

our magnificent history we are well aware

of this.

But precisely because

he

is not

absolutely good, no one among us can

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pose as an absolute judge and pronounce

the definitive elimination of the worst

among the guilty, because no one

of u s

can

lay claim to absolute innocence.Capi-

tal judgment upsets the only indisput-

able human solidarity-our solidarity

against death-and it can be legitimized

only

by

a

truth or

a principle that is

superior to man?

The key word here

is

“absolute.” Like-

wise for Camus’ view of punishment:

“The instinct of preservation

of

societ-

ies, and hence of individuals, requires

hat individual responsibility be pos-

tulated and accepted without dreaming

of an absolute indulgence that would

amount t o the death of all society. But

the same reasoning must lead us to con-

clude that there never exists any total

responsibility or, consequently, any ab-

solute punishment or reward .... The

death penalty, which really neither pro-

vides an example nor assures distribu-

tive justice, simply usurps an exorbitant

privilege b y claiming to punish an al-

ways relative culpability by a definitive

and irreparable punishment.”I0 And,

“Compassion, of course, can in this in-

stance be but an awareness of a common

suffering and not a frivolous indulgence

paying

no

attention to the sufferings and

rights of the victim. Compassion does

not exclude punishment, but it suspends

the final condemnation.”” And finally,

“We should admit at one and th e same

time our hope and our ignorance, we

should refuse absolute law and the ir-

reparable judgment. We know enough to

say that this or that major criminal de-

serves hard labor for life. But we don’t

know enough t o decree that h e be shorn

of his future.”l2

In response to Camus’ citation of t he

high incidence of slum housing and alco-

holism in France as factors contributing

to crime, Molnar claims, “Now Camus

may be hoist by his own statistical pe-

tard,”I3 since France has a lower crime

rate than other countries with better

housing and

less alcoholism. Camus

never a ttempts, however, to make such

a reductive correlation between social

conditions and crime in one country or

another; his point

is

thatany society tha t

fosters, and allows profiteering from,

poverty and vice bears a minimal share

of

responsibility for the criminal conse-

quences.

So

Camus’ case rests not on a denial of

individual responsibility or punishment,

but only

o n

drawing the line at carrying

them to the point of death; in ignoring

this essential distinction, Molnar misses

Camus’ entire point. Ignoring the dis-

tinction likewise misleads Molnar into

an analogy between capital punishment

and a mother slapping her child for dis-

regarding her instructions:

Beyond the mother’s mmediateresponse,

avenging, in some way, the injury against

a visible (or invisible) order, there

is

of

course, the further and inseparable in-

tention of “teaching the child a lesson.”

But again,

this

does

not

amount exactly

to discouraging

him

from repeating the

same thing; it merely informs him that

each time

he

commits act A, he takes risk

R that punishment P

might

follow. The

legal systems of civilized nations express

the same idea.

Thus the law does not

punish

only

in

order to set an exampleand prevent other

misdeeds,

but

also because

our

innate

concept of justice, reinforced by tradi-

tion, demands an immediate reaction

against crime

and

apenalty possibly equal

to the amount of suffering

or

damage

caused.I4

Whether Molnar

is

arguing here for

deterrence or retaliation, the analogy

of

slapping the child, for whatever pur-

pose, is surely incommensurate with

teaching someone a lesson by killing

him. And the notion of “a penalty possi-

bly equal to the amount

of

suffering”

could b e said t o enter into the game of

pragmatism that Molnar eschews, since

it involves what Camus calls a casuistry

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of bloodshed attempting to measure

what degree of imposed suffering justi-

fies execution-murder in various de-

grees, kidnapping, rape, adultery,

etc

and possibly leading

to

justification for

crucifixion, drawing and quartering, or

keeping killers alive to torture them daily.

Molnar makes another dubious anal-

ogy in criticizing Camus’ “cheap rheto-

ric” in his gruesome descriptions

of

a

decapitation, intended to expose the

hypocritical euphemisms in which ex-

ecutions are shrouded. “After all,”

Molnar comments, “few people could

bear witnessing even a minor surgical

intervention, let alone a major

operation.’’’15t is generally agreed, how-

ever, that the gore of an operation

is

justified by its salutary effects, whereas

the salutary effects of executions, on

society

if

not on the patient, are exactly

what abolitionists dispute. Molnar fur-

ther ignores the point of Camus’ use of

emotional appeal-that many people

who approve of capital punishment in

the abstract would not do

so

if they

understood its flesh-and-blood reality.

Molnar’s penchant for analogies that

distract from the visceral specifics of an

individual’s death

is

only one sign of

precisely the abstract modes of thought

Camus’ essay and the rest of his works

are addressed against. When defenders

of

capital punishment dismiss cases

where innocent people may have been

executed, on the grounds that such cases

are “exceptional,” Camus remarks that

all of “our lives are exceptional, too.”16

Molnar, accusing Camus and other liber-

als of abstract moralizing is anomalous

in an essay filled with phrases l ike,

“[Camus]simply fails to see that it is not

the judge-in-person, but the representa-

tive

of

the law who sits in th e chair, and

that th e law-expression of the social

order-possesses certain definite, al-

though imperfectly mirrored, attributes

of the divine order.’’l7 Such phrases in-

evitably bring to mind one of Camus’ most

powerful criticisms of the abstractions

of

legal justice, the passage in The Stranger

where Meursault, having been condemned

to death for a murder committed in a

moment

of

sun-blindness, muses:

Try as

1

might, couldn’t stomach this

brutal certitude. For really,when onecame

to think about it, there was a dispropor-

tion between the judgment on which it

was based and the unalterable sequence

of events starting from the moment when

that judgment was delivered. The fact

that the verdict was read out at eight p.m.

rather than at five, the fact that it might

have been quitedifferent, that it was given

by men who change their underclothes,

and was credited to

so

vague an entity as

the “French people”-for that matter, why

not to the Chinese or the German

people?-all these facts seemed to de-

prive the court’s decision of much of its

gravity.’*

Criticizing Camus, along with other

existentialists

l ike

Sartre and Malraux

who assert the factitiousness of society’s

claim to power over individual lives and

deaths, Molnar says, “Never for a mo-

ment do they seriously consider theview

that the defects of institutions and of

society as a whole have their roots in

human nature, or as the Christian and

Jewish religions put it, in original sin;

that we are not justified to transfer man’s

own failings

to

the community and its

defective organi~ation.”’~amus does

indeed consider such views, for more

than a minute, and thoroughly refutes

them. H e argues that modern societies

are essentially secular or ecumenical,

and therefore have no right to legislate

on the basis

of

the

beliefs

of specific

religions. Particularly in legislating mat-

ters of life or death, they cannot legiti-

mately assume the existence of a God or

an afterlife in which the errors of human

justice might

be

redeemed. How can a

society

l ike

the United States, for ex-

ample, whose present gods are the pur-

suit of wealth and consumption of com-

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modities, rock music stars and protes-

sional athletes, suddenly lay claim to

being the steward of divine order when

it comes to executions?

In Molnar’s statement about original

sin cited above, the phrase after the

semicolon seems

a

o sequitur Even

if

one accepts Molnar’s belief in original

sin (as Camus does not), the logical con-

sequence of that doctrine, as Camus

suggests, would seem to be that the

postlapsarian state

of

all societies as

well as individuals should be a warrant

against the assumption that any such

fallen society should have the godlike

power to judge who shall

live

and who

shall die. Thus Camus does not attempt,

as Molnar claims, to “transfer man’s own

failings to th e community,” but only to

assert (an assertion that would seem to

be equally valid for either believers or

agnostics), “There is a solidarity

of

all

men in error and aberration. Must that

solidarity operate for the tribunal and

ine Camus’bemused reaction to Molnar’s

reference to “imperfectly mirrored at-

tributes of the divine order.” Which soci-

ety is nearly enough perfect to mirror

divinity, and which isn’t? Nazi Germany?

Communist Russia? The United States?

One would think that Molnar, as an

Hungarian survivor of Nazism and Com-

munism, should be as skeptical

as

Camus

of the claims to omnipotence by modern

states, including Nazi Germany, which

claimed the religious mandate,

ott

mit

Uns specially in exterminating politi-

cal “criminals.” Molnar claims that

Camus’ arguments against capital pun-

ishment (which Molnar sees as a plea for

mercy toward victims

of

political perse-

cution during the Algerian War, at its

height in 1957 , “may serve, in the eyes

of a nondiscriminating public opinion,

the much more dubious cause of exoner-

ating common criminals, murderers, and

Gestapo-torturers.”2’This last claim ig-

nores Camus’ record as a leading

Resis-

be denied the accused?”20One can

imag-

tance journalist and his extensive post-

war deliberations on moral dilemmas

such as executing Nazi war criminals in

“Reflections on the Guillotine” and else-

where, including his account

of

his

change

of

att itude from favoring capital

punishment a s the result of a debate

with the Catholic author Franqois

Mauriac, who argued persuasively

against executing Nazi collaborators in

France following World War 11

Molnar glosses over Camus’ central

argument that fascist and communist

totalitarianism arose largely out of the

modern deification

of

state power and

ideological absolutism epitomized in the

death penalty:

Those who cause the most blood to flow

are the same ones who believe they have

right, logic, and history [and, he might

have added, God]

on

their side Blood-

thirsty laws, it has been said, make blood-

thirsty customs. But any society eventu-

ally reaches a stateof ignominy in which,

despite every disorder, the customs never

manage to beas bloodthirstyas thelaws....

How can European society of the mid-

century survive unless it decides to de-

fend individuals by every means against

the State’s oppression? Forbidding a

man’s execution would amount to pro

claiming publicly that society and the

State are not absolute values, that noth-

ing authorizes them to legislate defini-

tively

or

to bring about the irreparable.22

Molnar’s position against Camus de-

rives from

a

classic conservatism justi-

fying state power in the tradition of Euro-

pean church-states and the divine right

of kings. But such a position seems anach-

ronistic not only in light of twentieth-

century totalitarianism but also of the

degeneration of democratic sta tes into

corporate plutocracy, corrupt parties,

and bureaucratic ineptitude. The main-

stream

of

conservative ideology, at least

in the United States, has been libertarian

and othe r varieties of anti-statism. The

fact that Molnar himself cites Friedrich

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Hayek

as

an authority makes it all the

more puzzling that he fails to acknowl-

edge what would seem to be the strong

appeal in Camus’ arguments for anti-

statist conservatives. From my own

so

cialdemocrat ic viewpoint, this appears

to be one of countless contradictions

between absolutistic, judicial-moral stat-

ism and economic laissez-faire in con-

temporary conservatives (other than

lib-

ertarians), whether the intellectual

variety of Molnar and Modern

Age

or the

vulgar variety of Nixon-Reagan-Bush

Republicanism-though, to be sure, left-

ists

can be accused

of

the reverse

set

of

self-contradictions.

Walter Berns’s “For Capital Punishment”

follows many

of

the same lines of argu-

ment as Molnar; Berns falls into the same

misrepresentations or misunderstand-

ings

of

Camus’ “Reflections” and is even

more fallacious in his reasoning, adding

some flights of literary fancy to confuse

things. H e begins by explaining that he

has come around to rejecting the con-

ventional liberal wisdom that capital

punishment represents an unjustifiable

principle of revenge against criminals,

and now believes “we punish criminals

principally in order to pay them back,

and we execute the worst of them out of

mora l neces~ i ty .”~~

e

reiterates this

point several times over, and yet, like

Molnar, he never explains how accept-

ing the principle of punishment logically

dictates capitalpunishment, as opposed,

say,to life imprisonment without parole

as advocated by Camus.

Berns cites as authority for the prin-

ciple of retribution Simon Wiesenthal’s

writings about his motives for bringing

Nazi war criminals to justice, but he

presents no supporting quotations from

Wiesenthal. The fact is that in

Wiesenthal’s memoirs and interviews

with Joseph Wechsberg he advocates

neither retaliation nor execution:

“ am not motivated by a sense of re-

venge.’Iz4

[Wiesenthal] was approached by several

groups who wanted to create gangs that

would capture and kill their former tor-

mentors; he opposed this idea violently.

The Jews must not fight the Nazis with the

Nazis’ depraved methods, he said.25

Wiesenthal knew that the Nazi crimes

could never be ‘avenged.’ Obviously,

strict accountability for the crimes was

impossible The important thing was to

prevent the commission of mass murder

in the future.26

Wiesenthal explained that the Jews have

always had

a

high regard for the sanctity

of human life and didn’t think that murder

would expiate murder.27

About Camus, Berns claims, “The most

powerful attack on capital punishment

was written by a man, Albert Camus,

who denied the legitimacy

of

anger and

moral indignation by denying the very

possibility of

a

moral community in our

time. The anger expressed in our world,

he said, is nothing but hypocrisy.”28This

grotesque distortion of Camus’ ideas is

based, not on “Reflections” but on The

Stranger,

a

novel which Berns views as

expressing unequivocally thesame ideas

as Camus’ essay published fifteen years

later. To be sure, the novel and essay

express some

of

the same ideas, but

Berns either d oes not know or chooses

to ignore that Camus ViewedTheStranger

as a very limited and even anomalous

part

of

his total work-a study

of

one

distinctive character ,his distinctive sen-

sibility and reactions to an accidental

series

of

events pulling him into crime

and punishment. Others of Camus’s

works, including “Reflections,”explictly

or implicitly repudiated the nihilistic

implications of his early novel.

Berns

is

especially equivocal in using

TheStrangerto gloss th e following quotes

from “Reflections”:

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“Our civilization has lost the only values

that, in a certain way,

can

justify that

penalty

[

the existenceof] a truth or prin-

ciple that is superior to man.” [Berns’

ellipsis and brackets.] There is n o basis

for friendship and

no

moral law; there-

fore, n o one, not even a murderer, can

violate the terms of friendship or break

that law; a n d there is no basis for the

anger that we express when someone

breaks that law. The only thing we share

as men,

t h e

only thing that connects us

one to another, is a “solidarity against

death,”

and a

judgment of capital

punish-

ment “upsets” that solidarity. The pur-

pose

of

human life is to stay alive.29

The preceding words may

be

an accu-

rate enough account of The Stranger, but

surely not of “Reflections” or of Camus’

work as a whole. (Even The Stranger

does not imply that staying alive at an y

cost is all-important; Meursault could

avoid execution by lying about the cir-

cumstances of th e murder he commit-

ted, but he refuses to.) On the contrary,

friendship and fraternal solidarity are

among the most positivevalues through-

out Camus. He sees this precious soli-

darity constantly menaced both by th e

absurdity of life’s physical constraints

and t he absurdity of society’s arbitrary

conventions-preeminently the power

of the s ta te to suppress individual lives

through war and capital punishment. By

temperament a solitary individual and

political anarchist, Camus nevertheless

emphasized the paradox that t he meta-

physical and social isolation of each in-

dividual creates

a

bond between her or

him and everyother individual;as he put

it in Lyrical and Critical Essays, “Soli-

tudes unite those society

separate^. ^'

This bond in turn should lead individu-

als

to unite in struggling against social

forces encroaching on individual liberty,

and for the establishment

of

social con-

ditions and political policies maximizing

that liberty. Hence Camus’ own lifelong

political commitments, including risk-

ing his life in the Resistance, and his

writings (such as The Plague, The Rebel,

and The Just

Assassins)

delineating situ-

ations where sacrificing one’s life

takes

moral precedence over staying alive at

any cost-details that Berns inexcus-

ably ignores. Finally, in “Reflections”

Camus makes it clear that murderers

must be deplored and punished for u p

setting our “solidarity against death,”

but that by executing them societydrags

itself down to the same level a nd -e ve n

worse-institutionalizes their personal

failure t o sanctify life.

Berns’ literary penchant leads him

even farther astray when he compares

The Stranger unfavorably with Macbeth,

prefacing his praise of t he latter with an

endorsement by Abraham Lincoln,

“‘NothingequalsMac6efh I t is wonder-

ful.’

Macbeth is wonderful because, to

say nothing more here,

it

teaches us the

awesomeness

of

the commandment

‘Thou shalt not Berns, however,

does say more:

Canwe imagine aworld that does not take

its revenge

on

the man who kills Macduff’s

wife and children? (Can we imagine the

play in which Macbeth does not die?) Can

we imagine a people that does not

hate

murderers? (Can

w e

imagine a world

where Meursault is an outsider only be-

cause he does not

pretend

to be outraged

by murder?) Shakespeare’s

poetry

could

not have been written out of the moral

sense that the death penalty’s opponents

insist we ought

to

have. Indeed, the issue

of capital punishment can be said

to

turn

o n whether Shakespeare’s or Camus’ is

the more telling account of murder

In Macbefh he majesty of the moral law is

demonstrated to us... In a similar fash-

ion,

the punishments imposed

by

the 1e-

gal order remind us of the reign of

the

moral order;

not

only do they remind

u s

of it,

but by

enforcing its prescriptions,

they enhance the dignity

of

the legal or-

der in the eyes of moral men, in the eyes

of

those decent citizens who cry out for

”gods who will avenge in ju~t ice. ”~~

378

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9/12

Now, even if we grant it to Berns that

Macbeth

presents a more cathartic a p

peal to our sense of justice than The

Stranger,

we must also note the ways he

has stacked the deck in this comparison.

To begin with, Macbeth is a butcherous

political tyrant, whereas Meursault is an

ordinary man who stumbles inadvert-

ently into committing a single act of

manslaughter. (Granted, he fails to ex-

press remorse or compassion for his

victim, and in this respect, the book’s

morality is indeed open to being criti-

cized, as Camus himself later acknowl-

edged.)

A

much fairer and more obvious

point of comparison could have been

made with two of Camus’ plays, Caligula,

in which a Macbeth-like tyrant is like-

wise struck down by his oppressed sub-

jects, or The Jus t Assassins n which a

Russian revolutionary of 1905 voluntar-

ily gives up his

life

as compensation for

his assassination of the Grand Duke.

Berns’s comparison cavalierly disre-

gards several major differences in the

teleological and aesthet ic beliefs of

Shakespeare’s time versus Camus’. Mod-

ernliteraryrealism and naturalism, from

which The Stranger derives, were pre-

cisely reactions against earlier ages of

belief in “gods who will avenge injus-

tice.” We may still thrill today to the

poetic justice in Macbeth, but we know

that in real

life,

Macbeth would be just as

likely to kill Macduff as the reverse.

Berns’s appeal t o “the reign of the moral

order,” ike Molnar’s, seems quite plain-

tive in a wholly pragmatic, materialistic

modern moral order engineered largely

by and in the interests of the multina-

tional corporations, their governmental

agents, and assorted lobbyists, law firms,

and public relations agents who are cur-

rently defined as conservatives.

nd

that

“awesome” legal or de r invoked by

Berns-administered in America largely

through patronage and disabled ever

further through Reaganomic budget

cuts-is the same one denounced as

“big government” by Berns’s supply-side

economist colleagues at the American

Enterprise Institute.

On a more mundane level, in Macbeth

justiceis administeredneither bythegods

nor by the state,but by Macduff. Is Berns

advocating that we deal with criminals by

giving them over to hand-tehand com-

bat, perhaps with the survivors of their

victims? Vigilante justice may seem a p

pealingin oursafeaesthetic distance from

the Shakespearean stage (or from the

films of a Charles Bronson and a Clint

Eastwood), but is Berns, or Molnar, really

prepared to turn over today’s legal pro-

cess toanyonewho declares himself judge,

jury, and executioner? Berns’s and

Molnar’s unqualified appeals to anger and

moral indignation against criminals disre-

gard an elementary point agreed on by

most political philosophers in modern

constitutional democracies; as Camus

puts

it

in “Reflections,” f murder is in the

nature of man, the law is not intended to

imitate or reproduce that nature. It is

intended to correct it. Now, retaliation

does no more than ratify and confer the

status of alaw on apure impulse of nature.

We have all known that impulse, often to

our shame, and we know its power, for it

comes down to us from the primitive

Once again in this passage, as through-

out his essay, Camus

is

not categorically

opposing the impulse to retaliation, but

he is emphasizing the need for limiting

that principle at the point where it be-

comes morally and socially

d6rnesur6

or

counterproductive, as in the example he

gives of Arab countries cutting off the

hands of robbers. Neither Molnar nor

Berns really comes to terms with Camus,

because their absolutistic arguments

assume tha t his are equally absolutistic

(or absolutely relativistic), without ever

recognizing that t he core

of

his philoso-

phy in “Reflections”and elsewhere is its

classical opposition of measure and lim-

its to both absolutism and relativism.

Modem Age

3

79


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1. Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, translated by

Justin O’Brien New York, 1960).

2.

Ibid., 171.3. For

Capital Punishment: Crime and the Morality of the

Death Penalty New York, 1979). 4. “On Camus and

Capital Punishment,” 301.5.

Ibid.

99. 6. Ibid., 300.

7 . d em . 8 Ibid., 302. 9 “Reflections on th e Guillo-

tine,”

222 .

IO

Ib id ., 210.11. Ibid. , 217.12.Ibid., 230.13.

“CamusandCapitalPunishment ”302.14.Ibid. 01-

302.15.Ibid.,304-305.16. “Reflectionson the Guillo-

tine,” 212.17.“Camusandcapital Punishment,”301.

18. The Stranger, translated by Stuart Gilbert [New

York, 1946), 137-138.19.“Camus andcapi tal Punish-

ment,”305 .20 . “Reflections on the Guillotine,”217.

21 . “Camus and Capital Punishment,” 299 .22 .

“Re-

flections on the Guillotine,”227-228.23.“For Capital

Punishment,”15 .24 . The MurderersAm ong Us: The

Simon Wiesenthal Memoirs, ed. and with introduc-

toryprofile by Joseph Wechsberg NewYork, 1 9 6 9 ,

8.25.Ibid . .9.26.Idem. 27. Ibid.. 261 .28.“ForCapital

Punishment,”16.29. Ibid., 17.30. Lyrical an d Critical

Essays, trans. by Ellen Conroy Kennedy New York,

1968), 12.31.“For Capital Punishment,” 17.32. Idem .

33. “Reflections on the Guillotine.”198.

A

Reply

to

“Camus

and

His Critics on Capital Pun ishment”

IN THE INTERVENING

YEARS thirty-eight, to be

exact, an entire generation, the issue

discussed inModemAge Summer 1958)

has remained as valid and alive

as

it was

then-and so will it remain as long

as

there are communities with a sense of

identity, on the one hand, and breakers

of law, on the other. History s not an

evolutionary science; the problems tha t

the passage of time raises are, while

different in style and anecdotal illustra-

tion, identical across civilizational peri-

ods. Crime invites punishment, and irre-

versible crime invites what the French

call

le chBtiment supreme.

Albert Camus, and in his wake Profes-

sor Donald Lazere, discuss the issue

from the wrong angle. Although in Camus’

time Western opinion had not yet plunged

into the mire of a tear-jerking humani-

tarianism, his American commentator’s

thesis benefits by the currently raging

universal hypocrisy: capital punishment

s

declared an absolute evil. But the

butchering of innocents in abortion clin-

ics has become a woman’s right; Pol

Pot’s massacres ar e said t o be redeemed

by pure intentions; and for certain Meth-

odist churches every illegal immigrant

is

Jesus Christ in person. No wonder we

are confused. This confusion s also at

th e root of the Camus/Lazere thesis. The

matter in question is not whether, as

Camus claims, a human being can

be

an

“absolute judge” because he

s

“abso-

lutely innocent”; nor

is

it an issue of

“human solidarity against death” ill-fit-

ting Camusian phrases quoted by

Lazere).At issue isa society’s anation’s,

a

state’s, a tribe’s) duty to restore a

certain moral balance when it is su-

premely upset. It is necessary to restore

th is equilibrium against external aggres-

sion when the community

s

attacked in

its vital identity and interests-the case

of Bosnia serves as a classic example-

and to restore it internally when in the

protected domestic area a

life

is taken.

So far, then, the justification of just wars

and capital punishment.

The difficulty of arguing against

Camus/Lazere

s

that they absolutize

man, not to say divinize him, aided as

they are in this endeavor by the contem-

porary humanitarian verbiage. Thus they

come to decide the issue of capital pun-

ishment according to two opposing a p

plications of the same standard: the vic-

38

all 1996


11/12

tim of assassination no longer benefits

by his sacrednessas a person, yet Camus

insists on the continued sacredness

of

the assassin. Former ages knew nothing

of

this strange and obscene phenom-

enon; they sentenced a sacrilegious per-

son to death, whether he killed a person

or de-sacralized a holy object. The no-

tion still survives in the re-sacralization

of churches after the misuse of their

premises, for example, by communist

regimes which used churches for stables,

athletic clubs, or atheistic exhibits.

The transfer of th e victim’s sacred-

ness

as

a person to the murderer-the

Camusian logic-protects th e la tter

against the former’s fate. According to

this view, the judge

is

not permitted to

impose capital punishment to de-

sacralize the criminal); the judge, that is,

the society which he represents, and the

killer become equal parties. More: as a

spokesman for “institutionalized vio-

lence,” the judge

is

regarded

as a

greater

criminal than the taker

of

life. In this

perspective, the modern one, light sen-

tencing becomes a branch of socia l

therapy administered by the udge/thera-

pist to the assassin/patient.

Let us note, however, that society

is

neither achurch nor a hospital. The task

of these two institutions s to help save

souls and to help cure bodies. Society

s

a

network of reciprocal actions wherein

those who break the rules must pay the

penalty; but society also participates in

the moral order, and is ennobled in pro-

portion as it defends that order. Thus

capital punishment

is

not merely a de-

terrent against the highest law-break-

ing, it

is

more importantly a restorative

act of the moral order. It is a misplaced

argument to say that sentencing one to

life

imprisonment or hard labor would

be an adequate alternative. citizen not

only fears the killer, he

s

also aware that

society’s moral identity and integrity

suffer when the supreme crime is not

irrevocably compensated for.

What does it mean, then, that “com-

passion does not exclude punishment,

but it suspends the final condemnation”?

Either society punishes according to the

gravity and monstrosity of the crime, or

it hides behind judicial agnosticism,

claiming it does not know how to distin-

guish between one crime and another.

With this step, however, society muti-

lates itself, cutting off one of its func-

tions. Judicial agnosticism, by the way,

is

again manifest when the courts pre-

tend ignorance as to whether a foetus is

alive or not a t conception.

There

s

no question that Camus was

an eminently decent individual, “a good

man,” and that his plea against capital

punishment was motivated by a sense

of-here misplaced-charity.

I

still re-

tain a letter from him, dated October

1952

in which he severely criticizes Jean-

Pau Sa r t r

e’s

“merc 1es

s

rigor

s

m”

jans6nisrne impitoyable)

and asks for

th e recognition

of

“immediately obvious

values” in our life. Yet, as also seen in his

novel,

TheStranger,

Camus confuses pri-

vatevir tues and public imperatives; thus

he justified in advance the demagogues

who use the first when t he criminal

be-

longs to their own camp, and the second

when he

s

an adversary. This was illus-

trated by Simone de Beauvoir when she

not only wanted t o pardon the common-

law criminal his misdeeds are bour-

geois society’s responsibility), but also

called for the destruction of the political

opponent.

While in our time the concept

of

pun-

ishment yields to that of therapy, we

should not be surprised that criminol-

ogy and the practice of tribunals also

undergo vast changes. The foundation

of law used to be God and nature, both

demoted by modern philosophy. To

make a long legal story short, let us

observe that in the Kantian-Fichtean

universe, underlined both by the French

Revolution and, less blatantly, by the

American Revolution, the foundation of

Modern

ge

38


12/12

law became man himself. Building on the

Kantian precedent, Hans Kelsen in this

century eliminated natural law, arguing

that it is based on fictional norms, and

that positive law alone

s

valid because

it is founded on ad-hocsociological cur-

rents and interests. In this view, Soviet

law was as valid because internally co-

herent) as any other legal system

founded on circumstances and prece-

dents.

In recent years, however, the concept

of man as the subject of law has been

changing. Human rights have become

exclusive

of all

others: family, nation,

God. But more was to come. The horizon

of human rights is no longer circum-

scribed bythe individual’s concretesitu-

ation-his membership in a nation, a

religion, a class, a profession-since the

human person himself is held to

be

inde-

terminate and tending to transcend all

limits. In present legal thinking, man’s

humanity consists in his capacity to tear

himself out

of

any definition. Denying

him his right to turn into anything to

choose his lifestyle or his sexual orienta-

tion) s condemning him to remain what

he is and forbidding him to become what

his potentialityand choices suggest. The

unjust law is the one which confines the

individual within a nation, a race, a sex,

or a social function. In contrast , just law

assigns no limits to free growth.

We find in this recent evolution the

influence of philosophy from Kant to

Nietzsche to Sartre: the human being

builds himself independently of other

factors tradition, law, moral norms) and

chooses an existence which should by

no means rigidify as a destiny. There

s

no human nature, no divine guidance, no

social limitation. Man

s

free, and as

noted earlier, auto-divinized. Obviously

the law is subordinate to him, and he

owes it nothing. It is not murder but

capital punishment that has become the

absolute criminal act.

Thomas Molnar

lmcamus and his critics on capital punishment

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