James Garry: Failing Yet Again to Defend the Death Penalty

In a post that manages to be simultaneously a bit petulant and utterly insipid, James Garry has responded to my deconstruction of his argument on the death penalty. I've only just come across it and I've no desire to go through Garry's response* to my post in any real detail - life is too short to start the world's most boring flame war - but I did just want to respond to some of the more blatant misrepresentations of my arguments. First up:

I had meant to respond earlier to “The Nameless Libertarian’s” latest submission in our exchange on the death penalty but this is the first opportunity I have had since its publication. He’s one of the less better-mannered opponents as he can’t keep up an exchange without resorting to abuse (often a sign that my interlocutor is running out of rope, if that’s not too appropriate an analogy). And where there isn’t abuse there is poorly constructed argument.

I have to say that I am mildly amused to be accused here of being "less better-mannered" and of "abuse". While regular readers will know that I do use fruity language on occasion and will give abuse to deserving targets, I've actually been quite polite to Garry in my exchanges with him. And while it is tempting to give him both barrels now in terms of abuse, I really can't be bothered. So instead I'll say that the delicate flower probably needs to develop a thicker skin.

Take the title of his latest instalment, for instance. “Garry: Still failing to defend the death penalty”. I do not “fail” to defend the death penalty, I just don’t convert “The Nameless Libertarian” to my way of thinking. Which was never my intention. Even if I presented a treatise that “The Nameless Libertarian” found successful, it wouldn’t change his opinion. What he really means is that I fail to defend the death penalty because I do not agree with him.

Nope. What I mean when I say Garry has failed to defend the death penalty is, well, that he's failed to defend the death penalty. His case is so weak as to be largely useless. Sorry, Garry, but you do fail. But that's window-dressing. The biggest way in which Garry, wilfully or otherwise, misrepresents me and my argument is here:

I’ll repeat what he wrote: “[C]riminals are not thinking about the consequences of their actions because they do not expect to be caught”. Note the two verbs in this sentence – to think and to expect. In this context, they mean pretty much the same thing. The verb “to expect” implies some sort of thought process. In other words, “Criminals are not thinking about the consequences of their actions because they do not think they will be caught.” I would like to be able to ascribe this paradoxical construction to the author’s craft, though I suspect this grammatical fallacy was an accident. If criminals think (i.e., “expect”) that they will not be caught for committing a crime then they must know that there is punishment associated with being caught. In which case, criminals must be thinking about the consequences of their actions.

There is only one other way that “The Nameless Libertarian’s” sentence can be rendered: “Criminals are not thinking about the consequences of their actions because they cannot expect to be caught.” (That is, they lack the faculty that causes them to expect punishment). This is an even more precarious piece of reasoning. If this is the argument that “The Nameless Libertarian” intends to submit, then it is an example of petitio principii, also known as ”begging the question”.

We can dismiss the second argument as it is weak and simply incorrect. As for the first one, the words "think" and "expect" clearly have different meanings, even in this context. Don't believe me? Well, an expectation is different to a thought; if in doubt, consult a dictionary. But let's look at the context here and what I am actually saying. I am saying that criminals do not expect to be caught, and consequently they are not thinking about it when they commit their crimes. That does not mean they have never thought about the potential consequences of their actions; just that their expectations of not being caught mean they do not need to think about those consequences when perpetrating their actions. To use an analogy; I do not expect to be hit by a car when I dart across the road before the green man come on at the pedestrian crossing. That does not mean that I have never thought at all about one possible consequence of my action; rather, that I am not thinking about it when I carry out that action - perhaps because other thoughts are more pressing in my mind.

Garry asserts that I am begging the question; I'd argue that he is creating a straw man argument.

“The Nameless Libertarian” proceeds to cite Ian Brady as a reason for abolishing the death penalty because Ian Brady did not “take into account the potential consequences of [his] actions.” Really? Is he on record as saying he didn’t know the consequences of his actions? Have any credible experts said that Ian Brady did not know the consequences of his actions?

Why not assume equally that Brady did know the consequences of his actions and decided that the risk of prison was worth less than the pleasure of satisfying his murderous lusts?

Here, Garry seems to be missing the point of the work Brady is doing in my argument. The point is not that Brady may have thought that prison was worth the risk of child rape and murder; it is that he committed child rape and murder when the threat was not just of prison, but of prison and the noose. This is what is fatal to Garry's argument that the death penalty is a deterrent; Brady committed those crimes when he was running the risk of the death penalty. It would be good if Garry was actually engaging with the argument rather than another straw man representation of it. Again.

And let me respond to Garry's turgid attempts at pedantry with a turgid example of my own. Garry asserts that I cite Brady as "a reason for abolishing the death penalty". Now, there are two ways to interpret this - either that Garry thinks that I believe Brady to be a reason why the death penalty was abolished, which is just blatantly untrue, or that he forms part of my case for abolishing the death penalty. Of course, I don't need to make a case for the death penalty to be abolished as, well, it has been abolished. Rather, I am using Brady as an example to refute the essential predicate of Garry's case; that the fear of the noose will stop the likes of Brady. Put simply, it didn't.

But let's pretend for the moment that we are dealing with an eloquent, reasonable and persuasive person, and that Garry's post is 100% spot on. Yeah, I know, we're heading into the realms for fantasy here, but bear with me. Even if this had happened, it misses a salient point. Early on in his "argument", Garry writes that the extent to which murderers think about the potential consequences of their crime is central to my argument. This is not true. It may be important for the point I was trying to make about Garry's deterrence argument, but it is not my central point against the death penalty. And that point is the moral argument against state-sanctioned murder - a point which Garry, for all of his semantic pedantry, has spectacularly failed to address. No doubt Garry's response, should he make one, would centre on how the moral argument was not necessarily the point he wished to pursue. And that's fine. But it is also why, alongside his faulty logic and his straw man arguments, he is still failing to make the case for the death penalty.

*I'm linking to his post despite the fact, in breach of much blogging etiquette, he did not link to mind. What an ill-mannered young man!