Death Penalty - News, Thoughts, Info

[Nat]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

Okay, so you would not, in principle, have a problem with returning to system of ad hoc vendetta such that if someone kills your brother you can kill one of their relatives? I mean at the point where we are talking about state-sanctioned revenge, why involve the state at all? Why not just go for the direct, personal route? Because now we're not talking about justice, now we're talking about vengeance.

And I'm not saying that if someone harmed my wife, son, granddaughter, sister et. al. that I wouldn't want revenge--but that's why I live in a (nominally) civilized nation because I need to check my *own* impulses as well as others.

Cheers
Aj

This actually leads me to a question I've been asking myself lately:

Human sacrifice has been a practice in different societies in history. Did it go away or did it just transform into these types of things?

and

In a podcast of "Speaking of Faith," with Krista Tippett, she spoke with Michael McCullough, professor of psychology at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, where he directs the Laboratory for Social and Clinical Psychology and also teaches in the Department of Religious studies. He wrote a book called, "Beyond Revenge," where he analyzed extensive data from social scientific studies on humans and animals as well as biology and brain chemistry.

During that podcast, he mentioned that Japanese macaques are very status-conscious and intimidated by power. He said, "If you're a high-ranking Japanese macaque and you harm a low-ranking Japanese macaque, that low-ranking individual is not going to harm you back, right? *It's just too intimidating. It's too anxiety-provoking. But what they do instead, and this still astonishes me, is they will find a relative of that high-ranking individual and go seek that low-ranking cousin or nephew and harm him in retaliation...So it's as if they're saying, "You know, I'm not powerful enough to get you back, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to harm your nephew...Here's the kicker, is when they're harming this nephew, most of the time they're doing it while the high-ranking individual is watching. They want the high-ranking individual to know that, 'You can harm me, I know you can harm me, I know you're more powerful than I am. But rest assured, I know how to get at what you care about and what you value."

And then Krista Tippett's response intrigued me: "I had this realization a few years ago when we did a program on the death penalty. It might seem simple, but it seems so stunning to me to realize that the criminal justice system, and even, and especially, the death penalty in history, was progress because before there was any kind of criminal justice system, human societies regulated themselves by precisely that ind of revenge you're describing."

So, if she has a point, though I personally think the death penalty is extremely repugnant, maybe society demands a certain amount of blood-letting, a certain amount of human sacrifice, in order for peace to be kept and in order to keep people from taking the law back into their own hands?

I asked a few friends if they thought the death penalty was a modern form of human sacrifice. One said no way. Another said, yes - and also mentioned the religiosity around the deaths of soldiers to fill another part of that same societal yearning. So I guess I do wonder if the death penalty serves some sort of vestige blood lust. Humans are pack animals and predators and yet most of us live lives very far away from that reality.