Capital Punishment and Deterrence

Bill Keezer e-mails:

With respect to capital punishment: When I was a lab-tech at Ball State University, one of the professors was telling me about a demonstration of static electricity he did at the state prison in Pendleton, IN. He was using a Van de Graaff generator to create long, spectacular sparks and light neon tubes off the fingers of volunteers. The key thing in what he told me was a con asked him, “Can you fix the chair?” meaning of course could he prevent the electric chair from killing a person.

If the death penalty is not a deterrent, then the question is meaningless.

Right.  Of course the death penalty is a deterrent.  The only interesting question is why liberals don't or won't admit it.  Part of the explanation is that liberals won't admit that criminals are for the most part rational, not insane, and that there is such a thing as evil, and what it presupposes, freedom of the will.  It is characteristic of liberals to speak of murders as senseless, as in the case of the mother of one of the Long Island pharmacy shooting victims.

But the murders made all the sense in the world.  Dead men tell no tales.  That piece of folk wisdom supplies an excellent reason to kill witnesses in the absence of any strong incentive not to do so.   In one sense of 'rational,' a rational agent is one who chooses means conducive to the end in view.  If the end in view is to score some swag and not get caught, then it is perfectly reasonable to kill all witnesses to the crime especially given the laxity of a criminal justice system in which the likelihood of severe punishment is low. 

Liberals are  promiscuous in their use of the 'disease model.'  For example, they typically believe that alcoholism is a disease, a view refuted by Herbert Fingarette in Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease (University of California Press, 1988).  They also misuse the word 'addiction' in connection with nictoine use, as if one could be addicted to smoking.  Suppose you smoke a couple packs a day and I offer you a million dollars if you go one month without smoking.  Will you be able to do it?  Of course.  End of discussion. For more on the noble weed, see Alcohol,Tobacco, and Firearms.  It is the same on Planet Liberal with criminals: they must be 'sick,' or 'insane.' Nonsense.  Most are eminently sane, just evil. 

And because criminals are most of them sane and love life, the death penalty is a deterrent.  That is just common sense and there is a strong, albeit defeasible, presumption in favor of common sense views, a presumption that places the burden of proof on those who would deny it.  I will be told that we need empirical studies.  Supposing I grant that, who will undertake them?  Liberal sociologists and criminologists?  Do you think there just might be a good reason to suspect their objectivity?   In any case, here are references to studies which show that CP is a deterrent.

But whether CP is a deterrent is not the logically prior question, which is:  what does justice demand?  Deterrent or not, certain crimes demand the death penalty.  Fiat justitia, ruat caelum.

The Drawn Game in Chess with Special Attention to Three-Fold Repetition of Position

(Written November 2002 for the sake of some local  patzers who proved to be largely unteachable.)

"How shall I draw thee? Let me count the ways."  (Anon.)

There are exactly seven ways to draw a chess game.

1. STALEMATE. "The game is drawn when the king of the player who has the move is not in check and the player cannot make any legal move." (USCF Official Rules of Chess, 1987, p. 12.)

2. AGREEMENT. If the players agree to a draw during the game, then it is a draw. (p. 12)

3. SUDDEN DEATH FLAG FALL. In a game played according to a ‘sudden death’ time control, if both flags are down before a win is claimed, then the game is a draw. (p. 103)

4. THREE-FOLD REPETITION OF POSITION (TFRP). "The game is drawn upon a claim by the player having the move, when the same position (a) is about to appear, or (b) has just appeared for the third time, the same player having the move each time. The position is considered the same if pieces of the same kind and color occupy the same squares and if the possible moves of all the pieces are the same, including the right to castle or to take a pawn en passant." (p. 13)

This is the rule that a great many players do not understand. By my count, there are five typical mistakes that players make with respect to this rule.

Continue reading “The Drawn Game in Chess with Special Attention to Three-Fold Repetition of Position”

The Absurdity of Gender Feminism

Christina Hoff Sommers usefully distinguishes between equity feminism and gender feminism.  I am all for the former, but I find the the latter preposterous.  In his chapter on gender in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Penguin 2002, Steven Pinker explains the distinction:

Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology.  Gender feminism is an empirical doctrine committed to three claims about human nature.  The first is that the differences between men and women have nothing to do with biology but are socially constructed in their entirety.  The second is that humans possess a single social motive — power — and that social life can be understood only in terms of how it is exercised.  The third is that human interactions arise not from the motives of people dealing with each other as individuals but from the motives of groups dealing with other groups — in this case, the male gender dominating the female gender. (p. 341, bolding added)

Do these risible claims need refutation, or are they beneath refutation?  I say the latter, but if you think they are worth refuting, Pinker does the job in detail.

Nonsense, if believed by policy makers, has dire consequences some of which are in evidence in The End of Gender?  (HT: Spencer Case)  Loons, agitating for their 'reforms,' exercise the tyranny of the minority. 

Addendum (6/26):  The dark and ugly side of feminism is revealed by Rebecca Walker in How My Mother's Fanatical Views Tore Us Apart. ( HT: Horace Jeffery Hodges. )

You Touch It, You Move It

One should always insist on the touch-move  rule with every opponent in every (non-blitz) chess game whether serious or casual, rated or unrated. You will save yourself a lot of unnecessary vexation if you do. Now you might  think you knew all there was to know about the touch-move rule; but if you are like me, you would have been wrong.

The rule no doubt applies to pieces on the board, but what about those off the board?

Suppose you have just promoted a pawn to the eighth rank. Some people wrongly refer to this as 'queening' a pawn thereby confusing the species with the genus. Promotion to queen is only one way to promote: there is also underpromotion to either a rook, bishop, or knight. There is no promotion to king since the 'dignity' of his majesty assures his uniqueness, and the 'ambition' of the pawn prevents his remaining in the lower orders.

Suppose you are in a position in which promotion to a knight will enforce immediate mate. But the time pressure is befuddling you and  you reflexively grab a queen by the side of the board and replace the pawn with it. You do not, however, punch your clock. So technically,  the move has not been completed.

Here is the question: Having touched the queen, and moved it onto the board, while leaving your clock running, may you change your mind and substitute a knight? Grandmaster Larry Evans, asked a similar question by Jude Acers, he of the red beret and the N.O. French Quarter, answers, "White must play 1 e8 = Q, since he touched the queen first, even if it was off the board." (Chess Life, November 2005, p. 45)

So here is a case in which touch-move applies to a piece that is OFF the board. Or at least that is the judgment of GM Evans.

The position described by Acers was one in which promotion to queen would have led to a draw, while promotion to a rook would have won.  

Such are Caissa's charming subtleties.

Farrell, “Tookie,” Hannity and Colmes, and Bad Arguments

My last post ended with a reference to "Tookie" Williams.  Here is a post from the old Powerblogs site dated 29 November 2005:

I just viewed the Stanley "Tookie" Williams segment on Hannity and Colmes. Williams, co-founder of the L.A. Crips gang, and convicted of four brutal murders, faces execution on December 13th in   California.  Here is a description of one of his crimes. 

What struck me was the low level of the debate. Actor Mike Farrell, as part of his defense of Williams, and in opposition to the death  penalty in general, remarked that "we shouldn't lower ourselves to the level of the perpetrators of violent crime." The implied argument, endlessly repeated by death penalty opponents, is something like this: Since killing people is wrong, the state's killing of people is also wrong; so when the state executes people, it lowers itself to the level of the perpetrators of violent crime.

Now this argument is quite worthless. If it were any good, then, since incarcerating people is also wrong, the state's incarceration of people is wrong. And so on for any penalty the state inflicts as
punishment for crime.

The trouble with the argument is that it proves too much.  If the argument were sound, it would show that every type of punishment is impermissible, since every type of punishment involves doing to a person what otherwise would be deemed morally wrong. For example, if I, an ordinary citizen, demand money from you under threat of dire consequences if you fail to pay, then I am committing extortion; but  there are situations in which the state can do this legitimately as when a state agency such as the Internal Revenue Service assesses a fine for late payment of taxes. (Of course, I am assuming the moral  legitimacy of the state, something anarchists deny; but the people who give the sort of argument I am criticizing are typically liberals who believe in a much larger state than I do.)

So the 'argument' Farrell gave is quite worthless. But Hannity let him escape, apparently not discerning the fallacy involved. Farrell and Hannity reminded me of a couple of chess patzers. One guy blunders, and the other fails to exploit it.

But that's not all. Alan Colmes jumped in with the canard that people who are pro-life should also be opposed to the death penalty, as if there is some logical inconsistency in being pro-life (on the abortion issue)  and in favor of capital punishment for some crimes. I refute this silly 'argument' here.

Even more surprising, however, is that Sean Hannity then committed the same mistake in reverse, in effect charging Farrell with being inconsistent for being pro-choice (which he grudgingly admitted to being after some initial prevarication) and anti-capital punishment.

What people need to understand is that the two issues are logically independent. There is nothing inconsistent in Farrell's position. He could argue that the fetus simply lacks the right to life while   "Tookie" and his ilk possess the right to life regardless of what they have done. Nor is there anything inconsistent in Hannity's position. He could argue that the fetus has the right to life while a miscreant like "Tookie" has forfeited his right to life by his commission of heinous crimes.

So the logical level is low out there in the Land of Talk and I repeat my call for logico-philosophical umpires for the shout shows. But I  suspect I am fated to remain a vox clamantis in deserto.

Capital Punishment Again

Philoponus e-mails:
  
On this issue, we are on the same page–I think we should celebrate our agreements! In fact, I probably support a broader use of CP than you do. I think CP a condign punishment for things like aggravated sexual assault on a minor, aggravated assault with torture, etc.
 
I know people who are Amnesty International members. When they start on this stuff about wrongful executions, I stop them and demand a list of the people whom they think wrongfully executed in the U.S. in the last 20 years. Some facts please! They come up with NO credible cases. They talk about a somewhat mentally impaired killer executed in Texas and another in Florida, but these people admitted their killings and juries considered their impairment at trial. It is clear that  in the cases they point to what they disagree with is law which allows CP rather than a flawed trial process. The verdicts were good verdicts. I personally see absolutely no reason to consider lower than normal IQ an excuse or mitigation for egregious crimes.
  
Some people are just opposed to CP whatever the facts and arguments. Fortunately they are minority in most US states. The argument that CP in the US is killing the wrongfully convicted is getting very hard to sustain. 30 years ago when I took my first course in criminalistics, it was a much more persuasive argument, but the advances in the last 30 years have been huge. The scientific evidence that can be extracted from a crime scene is amazing. O. J. Simpson was very lucky!
  
The average U.S. Death Row innate gets 14 years to appeal his sentence. Project Innocence helps prisoners with any sort of reasonable appeal, and appellate courts even in TX, VA and FL are very generous in considering credible appeals. The standard in these courts is really "above and beyond a resonable doubt" if there is any grounds for doubt. No human institution can be perfect. Nothing can guarantee that a wrongfully convicted person won't be executed, but I think this result is VERY unlikely in the US these days. When someone tells me no one deserves to be executed, I feel obliged to treat them to a graphic murder-by-murder tour of the careers of Bundy, Gacy, and Mike Ross. People need to know exactly what these murderers did to women and boys. This inevitably ends the debate–they have no stomach for the facts.
 
Clarity will be served if we distinguish two claims that the CP-opponent could be making:
 
1. Even if there were no actual or possible cases of a wrongfully convicted person being executed, CP would still be an unjust penalty and should be banned.
 
2. Because there is the possibility of wrongful convictions, CP should be banned.
 
Like you, I cannot fathom how any rational and morally percipient person could embrace (1).  But I find (2) less objectionable, though I reject it as well.  I think the conservative must simply accept the possibility of wrongful executions and then argue that this possibility does not by a long shot outweigh the gross injustice of allowing the most vicious murderers to live on in comfort at tax payer expense for years. 
 
But I now want to point out that you seem to be contradicting something implied by what you were maintaining earlier.  Earlier, you denied that there is a difference between being found guilty and being guilty, even when all the procedural rules in a trial have been scrupulously followed.  That implies, however, that there cannot be a wrongful conviction.  But above you speak as if there can be wrongful convictions for capital crimes, adding that this is very unlikely. 
 
If you maintain against the CP-opponents that wrongful convictions are nowadays extremely rare, then by maintaining that you concede that wrongful convictions are possible (and not just in an anemic logical sense) and that therefore the property of being found guilty in a properly conducted trial of such-and-such charge is not identical to the property of being guilty of said charge. 
 
As for the broadened use of CP mentioned in your opening paragraph, consider arson.  A  man deliberately and maliciously sets a forest ablaze.  In the course of combating it, several firefighters lose their lives.  In addition, countless animals are either killed or deprived of habitat.  And there is property damage in the millions.  Doesn't CP at some point become a condign punishment?  I say yes.  What rational objection could one have to that?
 
It is indeed a strange world.  We in the West coddle the most vicious criminals.  In the Islamic lands hands are cut off for theft.  Both sides have lost their collective minds, though they are far, far worse.   They stone to death the woman caught in adultery and we wring our hands over the execution of a scumbag like 'Tookie' Williams.

Three Arguments Against Capital Punishment Rebuilt?

A  reader e-mails:

I wondered whether I could rebuild the three arguments against capital punishment that you claimed to have demolished in your post:

In 1), you say:

If the wrong person has been executed, that person cannot be restored to life. Quite true. It is equally true, however, that if a person has been wrongly imprisoned for ten years, then those years cannot be restored to him. So the cases are exactly parallel.

I want to examine the nature of this idea that in both cases above the punishment cannot be reversed or restored in some sense. Some punishments can be reversed or restored in a reasonable sense: if the state wrongly fines me for a parking infringement, that fine can be refunded to me (plus interest/compensation as appropriate) in the event that I prove there was no parking infringement. The cases above are not like that: in the case of imprisonment, the punishment cannot be reversed because there is no sense in which someone can have ten years of their life restored; in the case of execution, the punishment cannot be reversed because there is no way in which the executed can be restored to life. But here's the crucial difference between these two cases and why you are wrong to say that the cases are 'exactly parallel'. In the case of imprisonment, reversal/restoration is impossible because of the nature of the punishment. In the case of execution, reversal/restoration is impossible in principle (because there is no longer any person and therefore no way in which their punishment can be reversed). Us liberals take issue with this a priori rejection of punishment reversal.

I don't think you are making your point as clearly as you might.  What you want to say is that, in the case of the unjust imprisonment, some compensation is possible whereas in the case of an unjust execution, no compensation is possible.  That is a good point, and I accept it.  The parallel is that in both cases something is taken away from the unjustly punished individual, something that cannot be restored: ten years of freedom in the one case, life itself in the other.  So there is an exact parallel with respect to what was taken from the individual by the punishment.  For in both cases what was taken away cannot be restored.  So if you say that the capital penalty is irreversible, and that that is your reason for opposing capital punishment, then I will say that, by parity of reasoning, imprisonment should also be opposed since it too is irreversible.  And then you have 'proven too much.'

To be found guilty is not to be guilty. So a reasonable justice system must have built into it mechanisms by which miscarriages of justice (which might be established in the light of new evidence, for example) can be compensated. Capital punishment removes such mechanisms which is partly why I reject it.

An interesting argument.  Perhaps it could put as follows:

a. Every just punishment allows for the possibility of rectification in the case of a false conviction.
b. No instance of capital punishment allows for the possibility of rectification in the case of a false conviction.
Ergo
c. No instance of capital punishment is just.

The argument is valid, and we both accept (b).  But this is equally valid:

b. No instance of capital punishment allows for the possibility of rectification in the case of a false conviction.
~c. Some instances of capital punishment are just .
Ergo
~a. Some just punishments do not allow for the possibility of  rectification in the case of a false conviction.

I support (~c) by invoking the principle that the punishment must fit the crime and that therefore some crimes deserve capital punishment.  If this doesn't convince you then I say that that the two arguments just given neutralize each other, in which case we have a stand-off.

Argument 2) I think probably boils down to an impasse. There are clearly punishments which, though they involve the state acting in a way that in other circumstances would be impermissible, society feels are acceptable: imprisonment (which under other circumstances would be kidnap), fines (which under other circumstances would be extortion). But there are other possible punishments which, though (because?) they would involve the state acting in a way that in other circumstances would be impermissible, society feels are unacceptable: the rapist is not raped, the arsonist does not have his house burnt down, the drunk-driver who kills a child does not have his own child killed by state-sanctioned drunk driver. You say capital punishment fits with the first class of punishments. I say the second.

That too is an interesting point.  We don't subscribe to the principle of 'an eye for an eye.'  Thus we don't gouge out the eye of the eye-gouger; we don't sodomize the sodomizer; set afire the bum-igniter, etc.  Your point, I take it, is that if we don't do these things, then we ought not kill the killer. But 'killing' is a generic term that covers a multitude of ways of killing:  one can kill by stabbing, poisoning, drowning, choking, dismembering, burying alive, detonating, etc.  So, while agreeing that we ought not stab the stabber, dismember the dismemberer, etc., it does not follow that we ought not kill the killer if the killing is done in a humane way.

I've heard it said that lethal injection is "cruel and unusual punishment," but that's risible.  Say that, and you've drained the phrase (which occurs in the U. S. Constitution) of all definite meaning.

I'd like to pick up on the deterrence point in argument 3). In order for capital punishment to be an effective deterrent I would argue that would-be criminals must a) fear death and b) be cognizant of the fact that some crimes are capital crimes. I don't mean that they must 'know' that some crimes are capital crimes in some vague, non-immediate sense, like the sense in which I know that three of Wittgenstein's brothers committed suicide – a fact I had not recalled for some time until a moment ago. No, I mean that would-be criminals must be aware of the fact that some crimes are capital crimes in strong sense: a sense in which a fact affects your actions. I would wager that a) is at least contestable: drug lords live under the distinct possiblity of execution, without due process or lethal injection, by rival drug lords but it doesn't seem to affect their actions. And b) is debatable in the sense that some crimes are crimes of passion, crimes committed whilst drunk or high or otherwise in a mentally-altered state ('So we should let them off?!' you say. No, of course not. But capital punishment is unlikely to deter them).

When I said that swift and sure execution  would have a deterrent effect I didn't mean for all. The examples you give are plausible.  How much deterrent effect?  Who knows.  But it would be a substantial one.

I love the blog.

Thank you for reading and for the response!

One Man, One Vote: A Dubious Principle

It is a highly dubious principle if you think about it.  But is there a better one?

Suppose you have two people, A and B. A is intelligent, well-informed, and serious. He does his level best to form correct opinions about the issues of the day. He is an independent thinker, and his thinking is based in broad experience of life. B, however, makes no attempt to become informed, or to think for himself. He votes as his union boss tells him to vote. Why should B's vote have the same weight as A's? Is it not self-evident that B's vote should not count as much as A's?

I think it is well-nigh self-evident.  The right to vote cannot derive simply from the fact that one exists or has interests.  Dogs and cats have interests, and so do children.  But we don't grant children the right to vote.  Why not? Presumbaly because they lack the maturity and good judgment necessary for casting an informed vote.  Nor do we grant felons the right to vote despite their interests.

The problem, however, is that there is no obvious criterion that one could employ to segregate those who are worthy of voting from those who are not. A friend of mine once proposed that only Ph.D.s should be allowed to vote. That is a hopeless proposal for several reasons. First of all, specialized expertise is no guarantee of even minimal competence outside of one's specialty. Second, there are Ph.D.s who are not even competent in their own disciplines. Third, there are plenty of non-Ph.D's who are more worthy of voting than many Ph.D.s. There are Ph.D.s I wouldn't hire to run a peanut stand let alone cast an intelligent vote.

The same holds for any other academic credential. Would you want to exclude the likes of [2]Eric Hoffer from voting on the ground that he  had no formal schooling whatsoever?

Sex and race are obvious non-starters as criteria for separating the worthy from the unworthy.

What about owning property? Should owning property, or once having  owned property, be a necessary condition for voting? No, for the simple reason that people eminently qualified to vote may for various good reasons remain renters all their lives. It is obvious that, generally speaking, property owners have a better and more balanced  understanding of taxation and cognate issues than non-owners do; but if we follow out this line of reasoning, then only property owning married persons with children should be allowed to vote.

There are people whose experience of life is very rich but who are too conceptually impoverished to extract any useful principles from their experience that they could bring to bear in the voting booth. And then there are people who have deliberately restricted their range of experience (by not having children, say) precisely in order to be in a position to develop fully their conceptual powers. Now to adjudicate between cases of these two sorts with an eye to determining fitness for voting would require the wisdom of Solomon. So forget about it.

We live in a culture in which adolescent immaturity often extends through the twenties and into the thirties and beyond. So one might think to exclude the unfit by allowing only people of age 30 or above the right to vote. But just as being 30 years old is no guarantee of maturity, being 18 is no guarantee of the opposite. In general, older people, being more experienced, are more judicious and thus more likely to vote intelligently. But the counterexamples to this are legion.

I'll insert an historical aside here. The right of 18-year-olds to vote is guaranteed by the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  Before that, one had to be 21 years old. The 26th Amendment was ratified on July 1st, 1971 during the Vietnam war, a fact which is of course relevant to the Amendment's proposal and ratification. Some of us remember the words of Barry McGuire's Eve of Destruction (1965):  "…you're old enough to kill, but not for votin'…."

Once we exclude educational credentials, sex, race, property-ownership, and age as criteria, what do we have left? Nothing  that I can see apart from the standard criteria of voter eligibility. One man, one vote though certainly a flawed principle, may be the best we can do.

We would make it worse, however, if we went the way of the Aussies and made voting mandatory. As it is here in the USA, roughly only half of the eligible voters actually vote, though this is changing with the exacerbation of political polarization. This is good inasmuch as voters filter themselves similarly as lottery players (quite stupidly) tax themselves. What I mean is that, generally speaking, the people who can vote but do not are precisely the people one would not want voting in the first place. To vote takes time, energy, and a bit of commitment. Careless, stupid, and uniformed people are not likely to do it. And that is good. Of course, many refuse to vote out of disgust at their choices. My advice for them would be to hold their noses and vote for the least or the lesser of the evils. Politics is always about choosing the least or the lesser of evils.  To not vote because there is no perfect candidate is to let the best become the enemy of the good.

I'll conclude by considering an objection. I said that 'One man, one vote' is a flawed principle. For it implies that the vote of a sage and the vote of a dolt count the same. It might be objected in defense
of the principle that both sage and dolt are equal in point of both having an equal interest in the structure of the society in which they live. Granted. But not all know their own long-term best interest. So from the mere fact that A and B have an equal stake in a well-ordered society it does not follow that each person's vote should count the same. 

What's more, this sort of reasoning proves too much. For children and felons and illegal aliens also have a stake in a well-ordered society, and only the seriously benighted  want to extend the vote to them. Of course, this does not stop many contemporary liberals from wanting to extend the vote to children and felons and illegal aliens. It merely  shows that they have lost all common sense. (Presumably they would make an exception in the case of the unborn!) So if equality of interest entails right to vote, then we have a reductio ad absurdum of  'one man, one vote.'

Be Positive!

The Cloudview Trailhead is the one nearest to my house. It is a bit hard to get to as one must negotiate a number of turns. One fellow didn't like people driving onto his property in search of it so he posted a sign: Not the Trailhead! Some time ago I notice he had replaced his sign with a new one depicting an arrow that pointed in the trailhead's direction.

Therein lies a moral: how much better to be positive than negative! The first sign said where the trailhead is not. The second one did that too (by implication) but also pointed out where the trailhead is.

Happy people work at maintaining a positive attitude, and it does take some work, how much depending on how naturally inclined you are to be positive. We were not all born with sunny dispositions.  The happy realize that nobody likes to be around negative people.  This is something the negative rarely realize.  They are too wrapped up in themselves to realize it.  And they feel oh so justified in their negativity.  What they don't appreciate is that others don't care about their justifications or how they were mistreated.  They don't see that others will not excuse their bad behavior because of what they suffered in the past.  X judges Y by Y's behavior toward X at the moment; that Y has a load of justifications for being negative is typically of no interest to X.

And while we are on the topic of the power of positivity, why does Colin Fletcher, the grand old man of walkers, and author of the backpacker bible, The Complete Walker, refer to trailheads as roadends? I say good man, be positive! It is not the end of the road, but the beginning of the trail!

And while I'm on his case, it is not walking, it's hiking: a walk is what I take to fetch a newspaper, or what I would take to fetch a  newspaper were I to read them, whereas a hike is on another level entirely. We need to mark this distinction, do we not? [Humor Off]