Andrew Sullivan brought this to my attention the other day, under the suitable headline “Time and Punishment,” and I’m just getting around to sharing it. Ross Anderson interviewed philosopher Rebecca Roache on the moral implications of life-extending technologies. An excerpt:
Suppose we eventually learn to put off death indefinitely, and that we extend this treatment to prisoners. Is there any crime that would justify eternal imprisonment? Take Hitler as a test case. Say the Soviets had gotten to the bunker before he killed himself, and say capital punishment was out of the question – would we have put him behind bars forever?
Roache: It’s tough to say. If you start out with the premise that a punishment should be proportional to the crime, it’s difficult to think of a crime that could justify eternal imprisonment. You could imagine giving Hitler one term of life imprisonment for every person killed in the Second World War. That would make for quite a long sentence, but it would still be finite. The endangerment of mankind as a whole might qualify as a sufficiently serious crime to warrant it. As you know, a great deal of the research we do here at the Oxford Martin School concerns existential risk. Suppose there was some physics experiment that stood a decent chance of generating a black hole that could destroy the planet and all future generations. If someone deliberately set up an experiment like that, I could see that being the kind of supercrime that would justify an eternal sentence.
So, just to carry the absurdity a bit farther… Would the rest of us be around when he got out, having had our own lives extended? Would any of us be Holocaust survivors? Would we have to watch him walk out, a free man? After millions of lifetimes, would anyone care, or would we have been changed over time in ways we can’t even imagine. If one of us shot him as he walked out, what would our sentence be?
Bottom line, only God gets to hand out eternal sentences. It’s probably a good thing that we lack the ability to usurp that authority…
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You know, like we don’t have enough problem paying to lock up people as long as we do already…
Maybe we should go back to Private Jackson’s solution, from “Saving Private Ryan:”
Maybe by then, we’ll have learned to rehabilitate people rather than just lock them away. At any rate, I imagine that such treatment would be available to the wealthy mostly. I sincerely doubt it would be available to those in prison.
I don’t know. We already demonstrate an irrational impulse to waste millions locking up people who don’t need to be locked up, and for absurd lengths of time…
“Community stalking torture is the new, low-cost holocaust.”
~Mark Veil [ March 18, 2014 at 4:29 am]
http://nowfact.com/is-gang-stalking-real/#comment-3018
If you don’t want to kill Hitler, there are plenty of people who will save you the moral dilemma. Capital punishment is punishment for the worst crimes. Don’t do the crime if you don’t want to die.
Assuming arguendo that capital punishment is fitting for a set of crimes, the extreme variability in whether it is imposed detracts from any deterrent effect. In fact, few potential defendants actually receive it, and of those who do, many are exonerated: they would not take the plea bargain because they were innocent, nor would they feign remorse.
I don’t care about deterrent effects. I think people who kill should be killed. Not killing killers doesn’t have a deterrent effect either. Illinois, New York, and D.C. are great examples. Plenty of resources wasted on keeping killers alive for decades. They’re going to die anyway.
Ah, but we too often condemn the innocent. Doesn’t that make us all killers?
Nope. We didn’t condemn the killers. How many innocent people have been killed? There are cases where there is no doubt of a killer’s innocence. The Boston Marathon bombers come to mind. Do we really need to keep that young guy alive for 50+ years?
Are we talking about eternal life or eternal youth? Big difference. (See, Tithonus). He was given eternal life, but not eternal youth. So, he continued to age but never died. I’ll let the ancient Homeric hymn tell you how that ends up:
“But when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, this seemed to her in her heart the best counsel: she laid him in a room and put to the shining doors. There he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs.”
After a lengthy discussion with myself, we arrived at a consensus opinion. Hell NO!