Publication Date
2005
Publication Title
Stanford Law Review
Abstract
Many people believe that the death penalty should be abolished even if as recent evidence seems to suggest, it has a significant deterrent effect. But if such an effect can be established, capital punishment requires a life-life tradeoff, and a serious commitment to the sanctity of human life may well compel, rather than forbid, that form of punishment. The familiar problems with capital punishment potential error, irreversibility, arbitrariness, and racial skew-do not require abolition because the realm of homicide suffers from those same problems in even more acute form. Moral objections to the death penalty frequently depend on a sharp distinction between acts and omissions, but that distinction is misleading in this context because government is a special kind of moral agent. The widespread failure to appreciate the life-life tradeoffs potentially involved in capital punishment may depend in part on cognitive processes that fail to treat "statistical lives" with the seriousness that they deserve. The objection to the act/omission distinction, as applied to government, has implications for many questions in civil and criminal law.
Recommended Citation
Cass R. Sunstein & Adrian Vermeule, "Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? - Acts, Omissions, and Life-Life Tradeoffs Ethics and Empirics of Capital Punishment," 58 Stanford Law Review 703 (2005).
