The Necessity of Capital Punishment to Enforce the Right to Life

In response to my article, "The Evil of Islamist Intolerance" -- which called for the death penalty to be applied to violent, murderous Islamist fanatics, Dr. Robert P. Murphy wrote to the Hillsdale Collegian critiquing my advocacy of capital punishment. I replied to Dr. Murphy's letter in "The Capital Punishment Imperative," which Dr. Murphy answered in Gene Callahan's blog.

This will be my second reply to Dr. Murphy, where I will answer his principal objections to my case, point by point. I will cite the entirety of his arguments in the course of responding to them -- therefore allowing readers to view both positions side by side.

Dr. Murphy wrote: " (1) [Mr. Stolyarov] has still just asserted that someone forfeits his right to life when he murders another. I still maintain that I don't find this assertion compelling. [Mr. Stolyarov] adds a little bit I suppose with the non-contradiction stuff, but I can walk around thinking, "I don't have any mass." Nonetheless I do. By the same token, even if by his actions a murderer shows that he doesn't believe people have the right to life, nonetheless they do."

Dr. Murphy seems to think that it is possible for a society to simultaneously hold that both a) every individual has an inalienable right to life and that b) some individuals may be allowed to proceed to violate others' rights to life while theirs remain respected. This in itself is a contradiction. How can one consistently assert that these rights are universal and yet may be violated with impunity -- without adequate retribution?

A society that holds a contradictory view of rights does not hold a valid or effective view of rights in the area where the contradiction exists. This is because the very concept of rights follows from the law of non-contradiction. This law, A=A, is actually a statement of three fundamental axioms: existence, identity, and consciousness.

Man exists, he has an identity, and we -- as men -- are both conscious entities and conscious of our own identity. Man's identity is what it is and any action in contravention of man's nature is a contradiction held with regard to his identity. Only an internally consistent view of man's nature allows the derivation of natural rights from the identity of man. Man is a being of volitional consciousness with the capacity to reason. Reason is man's sole means of survival, and it is a profoundly individual faculty. Though man is able to violate the dictates of reason, nobody else can reason competently in his place; nobody else has an individual's direct access to his own mind.

Thus, because reason is man's sole means of survival and no one else can reason for him, it follows that he ought to be allowed to use his own reason without any external coercive intervention. This conclusion translates into the natural right of property -- because man's reason is his own property if we grant him full sovereignty to use it. Furthermore, to use reason is to use reason in the material world -- which means to have sovereignty over the material products of one's use of reason. The same principle that grants a given individual the sovereignty over his property also grants every other individual an identical sovereignty over theirs. The two parts of this principle form an inseparable unity; one cannot violate either without violating the other. The question is not, "Who, among individuals, ought to have full sovereignty over his property?" but rather, "Are all individuals either fully sovereign over their property or not at all?"

A murderer who violates the right of any other over his most fundamental property -- his life -- from which his reason and bodily faculties stem -- answers that question negatively and therefore concedes that he is not at all sovereign over his fundamental property and may thus be deprived of it in accordance with the magnitude of his crime.

A vast difference exists between thinking contradictory thoughts and acting on them. A mere thought gives no final indication of genuine preference. As Murray Rothbard pointed out in "Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics," an external observer can only clearly discern another's preference from his actions.

A person who merely says that he has no mass might be joking, trying to get attention, deliberately lying, or enjoying the sound he makes when uttering those words. From his words alone, we have no guarantee that he is serious. The only way in which he can truly convey his belief to us is by attempting to actualize it. If he really thinks he has no mass, he will attempt to eliminate all the mass that he has; he will have to obliterate himself in order to prove to us that he is earnest!

Conservation of matter will render this endeavor difficult; he will have to transfer all of his mass to other entities -- after which he will, of course, cease to exist. The laws of reality themselves do not allow him to seriously maintain such an erroneous belief and continue to live as a massive being.

Similarly, a man who only thinks and verbally asserts that some people have more rights than others ought not be punished because he has not earnestly manifested a contradiction in his thoughts. He, similarly, might have ulterior motives for voicing this belief: he might be satirizing it or playing devil's advocate or just seeking to shock people by his pronouncement. The only way somebody genuinely demonstrates that he holds a contradiction with respect to rights is by acting on it. Thus, the only way one can truly show that he believes that some people have no right to life is by killing them. If he is allowed to hold this contradiction with impunity, he will obliterate the sanctity of rights in his society.