Death Is Not Exile

I am currently in the deeply unfortunate position of having to read yet another piece of writing by Ernest Van Den Haag, prominent twentieth-century death penalty advocate and adversary of my grandfather, Charles L. Black Jr., in that debate. Now, there's a lot to dislike about the article, starting with the fact that every single moral claim he makes is vicious and wrong. But I find this an interesting passage:

"Capital punishment, a deliberate expulsion from human society, is meant to add deserved moral ignominy to death. This irks some abolitionists, who feel that nobody should be blamed for whatever he does. But murder deserves blame."

He goes on to argue that death is inevitable, while torture is not, so while we (justly in his view) have stopped torturing people as punishment, the mere act of changing the circumstances of their death to be more emphatically ignoble is perfectly okay. But, see what he does there? "A deliberate expulsion from human society." That's an awfully genteel way to describe killing, isn't it?

Of course, I assume that by using the phrase "human society" he means to imply that, when we kill these evildoers, they depart human society and arrive in the supernatural world, presumably in hell. And if you adopt a worldview with an afterlife, or even a judgmental afterlife with a heaven/hell distinction, then Van Den Haag's "exile" frame makes perfect sense. When you execute someone, after all, the only thing that happens is that they shift from one form of existence to another. That's not so different from exile from, say, Athens, or exile to the Australian penal colony. And it does make a lot of sense to suggest that, if you violate the moral laws of human society badly enough, that society is justified in exiling you. Given that there isn't any substantial portion of the earth that's used as a penal colony these days, and also no other planets we can send people to, the only method of exile would be death.

But if, instead, you assume that what probably happens when you die is that you simply vanish, that your consciousness and your personality and your everything are just snuffed out of existence, then we're not talking about some kind of metaphysical exile. Death is still inevitable, but if the only thing waiting on the other side of death is a vast gaping nothingness, then anything which hastens death by even the tiniest little bit becomes too severe a punishment to comprehend. Now, that statement by itself doesn't establish that such a punishment might not be deserved in some cases, although I also think that. But I can't help feeling like this rhetoric of treating death as exile, rather than as total extinguishing of every facet of existence, contributes to the willingness, nay, eagerness of the religious element of our society in particular for state-sponsored killing.



As an aside, I also have a hunch that this view of death as merely transitioning from one form of existence to another informs a lot of the preference for quick death that you see espoused in society. Now, among other things I hope that my death comes in the twenty-second century, so it's not exactly the most pressing of issues for me, but as best I can tell I don't want one of those deaths where you're never aware of the fact that you're dying. Because if I'm about to be extinguished from existence, I want to hang on as long as possible. If, on the other hand, I was just popping over to the other side, it would make perfect sense to want to do it as painlessly and as inconspicuously as possible. After all, I'd get to wake up in the afterlife and notice that I had died, and that I still existed, and so on. But the thought of spending one moment assuming I was going to keep on going for the foreseeable future and then, with no warning, just stopping absolutely terrifies me.