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!

Garry: Still failing to defend the death penalty

Over at the curiously named Politics on Toast, James Garry takes exception to one of my posts on the death penalty. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is this post that provokes his article; the one that takes him to task. There is a lot in his article, and the vast majority of it I do not care about. However, there are some points that demand rebuttal and clarification. This first is Garry’s attempt to overcome my objection that some criminals commit their crimes without really considering the potential consequences on the grounds that they do not expect to be caught. He writes in response to this assertion:

Nonsense. TNL seems to suggest that criminals can only know the consequences of their actions after they are caught.

Nope. I suggest that criminals are not thinking about the consequences of their actions because they do not expect to be caught – a position that is intuitively plausible given how many people commit crimes that carry hefty sentences.

I think very few criminals are so boundlessly optimistic or boundlessly stupid not to impute the legal consequences of their illegal actions. We are all potential criminals. I am a potential criminal.

Yes, Garry, you are a potential criminal. We all are. But there are degrees of potential criminality, aren’t there? And there are degrees of the potentiality of all of us to actually commit crimes. Just as there are differences in the extent to which any one of us believe we will be caught for any crime that we might commit, and there are varying degrees to which we all understand the consequences of any potential crime. To argue otherwise is to deny the nature of the individual. Which, surely, Garry does not wish to do. Oh, wait:

I know the possible consequences of any given criminal action. I don’t see how actual criminals are any different.

Yeah, Garry. You are representative of all actual criminals. They all think in the same way you do. They all know the consequences of their actions. Except there is no-one quite like James Garry, and different individuals will have different motivations and perceptions.

For TNL’s argument to have a kernel of credibility then every single murderer would have to be completely blank about the consequences of his actions. If that were the case then we could agree that capital punishment is worthless because the criminal is impervious to its threat. Plainly this isn’t so. Some murderers may be so far removed from reality that they are oblivious to the promise of the noose, but most murderers are rational and aware of the law and of the consequences of their actions.

Nope, this is toss, I'm afraid. For my argument to “have a kernel of credibility” there has to be just one killer who does not take into account the potential consequences of their actions. Which, as the example of Ian Brady in my original post, demonstrates is possible. But Garry sort of acknowledges in his article, before going on to write:

There are no doubt others still who would not be deterred by the death penalty from murdering. I am not a Utopian. I do not believe in a perfect world of perfect solutions. If we did not use human systems because they were imperfect, we’d never use any of them. TNL, and people like him, do not understand this point:
We do not use deterrents against people who cannot be deterred. We use deterrents against those who can be deterred. To abandon the use of capital punishment because it does not deter the Ian Bradys of this world is as bit like not fitting your car with airbags because airbags are not 100% effective. I wonder, with the use of this easy-to-understand analogy, TNL might grasp this very simple point.

Oh, how I do love to be condescended and patronised by someone who thinks that they know better than me with no real evidence as to why they might actually do so bar their own stridently expressed opinions. I do understand that we have to use imperfect systems – not being a total fucking idiot makes understanding this point really rather easy. But it is one thing not to use an imperfect system and quite another to endow an imperfect political system with the right to take the lives of innocent citizens after going through the imperfect system of a jury trial. I’ll try to resist the cheap jibe that this sort of simple argument seems to be beyond Garry and his ilk.

Unfortunately, the analogy does not work as there is no real connection between airbags and an innocent person being hanged. It is a classic straw man argument, and deserves to be treated largely with contempt.

I don’t see how it is nonsense. It does make me angry when people say that capital punishment is wrong because it involves the State murdering its own citizens. It makes me angry because TNL – probably without much thought – gives parity to the murderer and the murderer’s victim.

No I don’t. This completely misrepresents my opinion and what I have repeatedly said. I give parity to the innocent killed by a murderer and an innocent killed by the state on the grounds that both are, well, innocent. The central point is the innocence, and until someone can provide a system whereby innocent people won’t face the noose, then this remains an essential point and a highly convincing rebuttal to those who favour the return of the death penalty.
And, for the record, I have given a lot of fucking thought to all aspects of the death penalty while researching and debating it across decades. This sort of cheap gibe from Garry really pisses me off. It is exactly the same as when he says that people have not read what he has written or not understood it. It is the fascinating arrogance of a man who assumes that he is right and that others cannot have an equally valid position. It runs the risk of making debating with him compellingly pointless.

The Nameless Libertarian’s ultimate objection to State execution is a libertarian one – that the State should not be vested with the power to murder.

No, my ultimate objection to state murder is a moral one – as explained here. But as an add-on, yeah, I don’t think we should give the state the right to murder their citizens.

I do not understand libertarians. They automatically think the powers of the State must be limited.

Nope. We argue that the state should be limited based on the fact that it has been historically shown that the state is more often than not inept, bureaucratic and inhuman.

Well, I believe that the State should be limited but I also accept that the State must have some power to do certain things some of the time. As much as I hated nannying New Labour, I think the only good thing they did was to implement the smoking ban. Of course, this is a State intrusion and many, including Claire Porthouse, think it is a horrendous act of State intrusion. Maybe it is. But I wonder if the ban extends into the future, that we might realise the goodness of this act of State intrusion in a hundred year’s time or so.

Of course, it is completely inappropriate to compare the potential state murder of an innocent person with the smoking ban. As for that ban itself, it is possible that in the future people do look back on the smoking ban as a great step forward, especially if biased history books present it as such. That won’t change the reality of the situation – that people are told that they cannot choose, despite being responsible adults, to smoke in certain places. It won’t change the fact that this policy seems to be almost intentionally trying to make the people of this country more bovine than ever. And there is a terrible irony in someone advocating the potential prolonging of the lives of some through the smoking ban at the same time as embracing the concept of the noose for some innocent people is good.

Giving the State the power to execute criminals who ruin the lives of innocent people is good.

But that is not the point, as surely Garry knows. The point is that innocent people as well as criminals will be executed. Is that OK? Of course it isn’t. But it is a fundamental point that Garry's sweeping statement ignores.

Why assume that all State power is bad?

State power is, for most libertarians, a necessary evil. Therefore, as an evil, it needs to be restricted as much as possible. And it certainly does not need to be extended to give the state the right to potentially kill innocent people if the right legal loopholes have been jumped through.

If that is so, why bother voting?

Err, to support the party offering the least state intervention in our lives?

Why bother supporting the political parties who become and organise the State.

I don’t support any party, but I’d imagine it is for the reason mentioned immediately above.

Why even bother pretending to be a “libertarian”? Just become an anarchist instead.

Because being a libertarian is different to being an anarchist. In fact, I’ve written about this in detail here. But put simply a libertarian sees minimal state intervention as a necessary evil. An anarchist sees the state as an unnecessary evil. This really is basic political theory. And to conflate a refusal to support the right of the state to execute innocent people with anarchism is a crude and ultimately unconvincing rhetorical position.

But that’s enough on Garry and the death penalty. It should be clear where Garry and I stand with regard to this issue, and I personally have better things to do moving forward than rehashing the arguments in my posts on the death penalty thus far. The death penalty is wrong and any attempts to bring it back should be rigorously fought.