Thanks for the great example of fetishistic disavowal! "I know very well that these films could be read as tacit political endorsements, and yet... they are purported to be of a high caliber relative to the competition just [in] terms of their aesthetic construction."

Thanks! We used Grace and Thomas West's translation of Apology and Crito: http://www.amazon.com/Four-Texts-Socrates-Euthyphro-Aristophanes/dp/0801485746/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1344981888&sr=1-2&keywords=4+dialogues+plato and Eva Brann's translation of Phaedo: http://www.amazon.com/Plato-Phaedo-Focus-Philosophical-Library/dp/0941051692.

I hear you. And I would love to hear more about why you think Arendt is wrong about the justness of executing Eichmann. I think she must be wrong about this, but I don't know her argument well enough to say why. Let me clarify something. By "not entering into the debate," I don't mean "not taking a position" on the death penalty. I think we have to argue strenuously against the death penalty, with all the words we have. But I also think that the debate-form that shapes most discussions of capital punishment - especially in the US, especially since Furman v Georgia - is insidious in all sorts of ways. For one thing, the form of the debate places the "pro" and the "con" side on an even plane, as if they were two options between which one may choose, given enough reasons on one side or another to tip the balance. This structure obscures the fact that _lives and deaths hang in the balance_. I know you realize this; if I understand you correctly, you're saying _that's why we have to keep debating!_ But is a "debate" adequate to grapple with the enormity of these issues? There are high school and college students across this country preparing their pros and cons for the upcoming debate. Some of them are saying, "Capital punishment is not enough, we should torture them first!" (as students in my friend's Intro to Ethics course argued a few years ago). Don't get me wrong -- I don't think that we should stand in awe-ful silence before the stakes of capital punishment, but every time someone trots out an old saw in the death penalty debates (for _or_ against), I want to say: STOP! _Think_ about what you're saying! These are peoples' lives and deaths you're talking about! The other thing that makes me suspicious about the death penalty debate is that, as long as execution is on the table, all other punishments start looking reasonable by comparison. Life Without the Possibility of Parole? Well, at least it's not the death penalty! 20 years in solitary confinement? Well, at least it's not the death penalty! These punishments should make us reel, and sometimes they do. But as long as "the death penalty debate" determines the terrain of reasonable discussion, we get a skewed perspective on all the other forms of violence perpetuated by our criminal justice system.

@ Matt - The position I'm developing here does not find its roots in Kant, Mill or Aristotle. It comes from Levinas. I'm sort of reinventing the wheel here because Ben Yost has already written a fine paper on the topic, called "Responsibility and Revision: A Levinasian Argument for the Abolition of Capital Punishment" http://www.academia.edu/463413/Responsibility_and_Revision_A_Levinasian_Argument_for_the_Abolition_of_Capital_Punishment_Cont_Phil_Rev_ But in this post, I'm basically "talking out loud" to try and find a way of articulating both the harm of murder and the injustice of capital punishment in a way that is respectful of those who find themselves having to deal with such issues in a way that it not abstract and (merely) intellectual, but concrete and personal. What power, if any, does philosophy have to confront the horror of killing - "justifiable" or not, excusable or inexcusable - and to respond in a way that clarifies the stakes of life and death rather than obscuring them? @ Gordon - Thank you, the reference to Nell Noddings is helpful, and so is your reflection "that there is no way to kill without damaging oneself, even if killing was in some sense "necessary."" I think I can get on board with the distinction between "excused" and "justified," or "excusable" and "justifiable" -- and there's probably a whole legal and ethical literature out there somewhere, as you note. But I'm less interested in parsing or fine-tuning these distinctions than in asking a bigger question: When, as philosophers, do we really grapple with the ethical stakes of killing another person? We often turn ethical issues into debates: Are you pro- or con-? What are the standard arguments on both sides? Is your side winning or losing? Or we flip ethical questions around, asking (in effect): How much can a person get away with before having to worry that they might be in the wrong? What steps would I have to take to avoid a bad conscience? There's something obscene about both of these tendencies, and that's what I want to address.

I apologize for the unclear language. By "murder" I mean killing. I don't think it's ever morally justifiable to kill another person. And yet I recognize that it happens, people kill other people -- sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident, sometimes in order to defend themselves or others. I recognize that we need legal concepts to deal with all the varieties of killing and to rank their severity, to consider their context, and so forth. But we also need more. Because there's an ethical nightmare buried in concepts such as "justifiable homicide" and "self-defense." The number of "justifiable homicides" doubled from 2000 to 2010, and most of the victims were black. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303404704577311873214574462.html Really?! We can and should analyze this in terms of power and racism. But I also think that a Levinasian distinction between ethics and politics can be helpful for articulating both the necessity and the ethical insufficiency of legal concepts for articulating responsibility and justice. In a 1982 interview, Levinas says: "I don’t at all believe that there are limits to responsibility, that there are limits to responsibility in ‘myself’. My self, I repeat, is never absolved from responsibility towards the Other. But I think we should also say that all those who attack us with such venom have no right to do so, and that consequently, along with this feeling of unbounded responsibility, there is certainly a place for defense, for it is not always a question of ‘me’ but of those close to me, who are also my neighbors. I’d call such a defense a politics, but a politics that’s ethically necessary. Alongside ethics, there is a place for politics." (The Levinas Reader, Ed. Sean Hand, 291-2) And beyond politics (in the sense of a legal system and its concepts), there is an ethical meaning of justice that demands "going beyond the straight line of the law" (Totality and Infinity, 245).

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this, Jason. My response will be a bit long-winded, but I am thankful for the chance to think about these issues more systematically. In fact, my response is so long-winded, that it seems to have exceeded the word limit of the comment box! So I will post it as another entry.

No, I don't think there's an adequate response to murder. I put it this way in my comment above, when I tried to explain what I have learned from talking to convicted murderers and also family members of murder victims: that murder is "impossible to understand or accept, and there’s no good response to it. But somehow you have to move through it and not let it structure your entire life and your world." And I don't think it's possible to separate actions from actors, but since Michael Kochin claimed that "We don't punish people because they are bad, we punish them because they have done bad things," I felt like I needed to address the question in that way. So how should "we" respond to murder, given that it happens, and assuming that there is no adequate response? I don't know the answer to this question, but I think a serious, but not interminable, prison sentence is "less inadequate" than LWOP or execution.

A million people have asked this question, and a million people have responded to it in various ways. The short answer is that two wrongs don't make a right. Execution is an inadequate response to murder. A more complex answer would have to interrogate the "we": Who are "we" who punish people for doing bad things? Are we so sure that our prison system targets their actions rather than their being? In practice as well as in theory?

The opening reception for the art exhibition was last night. We had a great turn-out and a wonderful group of speakers: Janet Wolf spoke about prison education and the cradle to prison pipeline; Linda Manning spoke about trauma and healing in the context of her work with Abu Ali Abdur'Rahman; Terry Horgan spoke about the "musical chairs" structure of death penalty convictions; Patricia Earnhardt spoke of her own experience as the family member of both a convicted murderer and two murder victims; and Jeannie Alexander spoke of the "disappeared" in US prisons and jails, the "dangerous space" of both the prison and the gallery. She reminded us of the risk that this art exhibition could become just that: an exhibition of work by absent and invisible artists, a passing curiosity. She drew our attention to one of the pieces: "Do I Compel You?" by David Duncan: http://rethinkingprisons.wordpress.com/art-from-tennessees-death-row/#jp-carousel-274. Murder is always just below the surface of American culture. It’s the plot of our movies, the subtext of our foreign policy, the nightmare that drives our criminal justice system, and the logic of our penal system. Why would you ever want to scratch that surface? But it’s not clear what's more violent: murder or the normalization of it, the desire and even the need for murder and murderers to secure a kind of phony peace for the rest of us. By contrast, there’s a surprising gentleness in every encounter I have had with people convicted of murder, and with people who have lost their loved ones to murder. It’s as if they said: Look, it’s not normal, but it’s here, it happens, it’s impossible to understand or accept, and there’s no good response to it. But somehow you have to move through it and not let it structure your entire life and your world. I think that's what should compel us.

See also this analysis of the way that treaty relationships with indigenous people constitute the identities of settler colonials: http://www.toboldrollo.com/2013/01/01/i-am-canadian-because-of-treaties-with-indigenous-nations/ "The point I wish to make here is that the legitimacy of Canada and of Canadians as a people is constituted by historical treaties and agreements that contemporary citizens did not consent to but nevertheless benefit from and are obligated to uphold. We recognize the violation of such treaties as unjust. Imagine if citizens of Washington State decided that because they did not personally sign the Treaty of 1818 they could unilaterally assert ownership over the majority of British Columbia. Ridiculous, right?" Right.

http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/12/20/parsing-the-comments-on-idlenomore/

Thanks for the clarification. There have been calls for a treaty in Australia - http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/collections/exhibitions/treaty/atc.html - but I take your point that there is no treaty to define the legal relationship of settlers and aboriginals in Australia. So the slogan, "We are all treaty people," does not apply to Australia. But what about the idea that a (social, ethical, political, material, historical...) relationship to aboriginal people is constitutive of settler identity, even if "settlers" do not recognize themselves as such? And the further point that non-indigenous people in sites of settler colonialism such as Canada, the US, Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia have a social, political, and ethical obligation to reckon with the conditions of their existence as settlers and to forge relationships of respect and collaboration with indigenous people and groups in the land that they currently occupy? Not as catchy as the slogan, but you don't need a treaty to do this work. Or do you? (This is a sincere question, not a snarky one.)

(Which Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States originally voted against -- but yeah, it's awesome! And non-binding... But good that they eventually endorsed the declaration. And/but/and...) @ Michif Speaker: Thank you, I should have explicitly mentioned the participation of Metis/Michif and Inuit peoples in #Idle No More.

Academics! You can show your solidarity with Chief Theresa Spence by adding your name to this open letter: http://academicsinsolidarity.wordpress.com/

Thanks for your comment! For some reason, I missed this back in April, so I'll respond to it now. I agree that there are problems with the characterization of slavery as social death AND NOT forced labor -- because that would obscure the economic exploitation of slaves (and of prisoners, for that matter! This is perhaps where we disagree.) There have been some perceptive critiques of the social death paradigm, for example by Vincent Brown: history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/.../brown-socialdeath.pdf Even if slavery is _structured_ as a social death sentence, this does not preclude multiple forms of resistance through which slaves have generated and sustained their social life as a culture and as individuals. In addition to Brown's critique, I highly recommend this article by Alan Eladio Gomez: "Resisting Social Death at Marion Federal Penitentiary, 1972": realcostofprisons.org/materials/Resisting_Living_Death_Gomez.pdf In spite of this concern, I still think it's important to track the _structure_ of social death from slavery through the convict lease system (etc) to the present-day prison industrial complex, so that we can analyze the work that the penal system is doing to isolate, exclude and stigmatize a whole sector of society in the name of "criminal justice."

@Adriel: Yes, in fact I taught this article in a class on biopower a few years ago, and the students' response to this article motivated me to think more about solitary confinement, and eventually to write a book about it. For the most part, students thought that solitary confinement could not really be torture, in spite of what the article said, and even in spite of John McCain's testimony to the contrary. They all thought that isolation would be easier to bear than physical pain. I thought: How would you have to think of yourself, in order to believe this? What implicit view of subjectivity would you have to be operating with? (And how could phenomenology help to disabuse you of this view?!)

GPTLA: Thanks for re-posting this! There's also a very interesting set of articles by prisoners on death row in California analyzing the potential impact of the SAFE California Act, which proposes to abolish the death penalty and replace it with LWOP (Life in prison without the possibility of parole). All three prisoners are against the initiative: http://sfbayview.com/2012/death-row-debate-yes-or-no-on-the-safe-california-act/ Paul: Thank you for your offer and suggestion. If I had more time, I would try to follow through on this, but I have too much on my plate right now! But I encourage others to write and submit their own statements to the committee. Thanks, lisa