Please Don't Bury Me Down In the Cold Cold Ground / I'd Rather Have Them Cut Me Up and Pass Me All Around
Graeme Wood, meet Gil the A.R.M.
(Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for pointing me to Graeme Wood’s piece.)
Seriously, folks: Larry Niven, being a science fiction writer, exaggerates for effect. But I think the effect he predicts is real. If we harvest the organs of condemned criminals, that will change our attitudes towards the death penalty at the margins. In particular, it will be a cogent argument for the death penalty and against life in prison. Alive, John Doe is a psychotic multiple-murderer who we cannot imagine redeeming himself. Dead, John Doe could save the lives of half a dozen people in desperate need of livers, lungs, kidneys, hearts.
When the prophet Samuel commanded King Saul to exterminate the Amalekites, he told him to wipe them out completely: leave no trace, living or material, of their existence on earth. Saul dutifully wiped out the Amalekite army, and slaughtered all the men, but he spared the Amalekite king, Agag, and took booty – cattle, jewels, furnishings, and slaves. Of course, he made a generous sacrifice to the Lord from the booty, but Samuel rebuked him, saying that the Lord does not want sacrifices: he wants obedience. And then the prophet slew Agag, hewing him into quarters before King Saul’s eyes.
For this disobedience, Samuel says, Saul will lose the crown; David, not Saul, will found the eternal dynasty ro rule the Israelite tribes. But what was Saul’s sin? It might seem that his sin was failing to kill Agag. But in fact, his sin was slaughtering the Amalekite nation. The only justification for that act of genocide was an explicit command from God. Without that justification, the murder of so many people would be a terrible crime. But because he spared Agag, and took booty, it was plain that Saul was not following the command. Hence the full weight of the sin of murder was on his head.
I have never found justifications for the death penalty on the basis of deterrence to be especially compelling, because I do not think that the utility to be derived (arguably) from execution is any kind of justification for taking the life of a defenseless person. The only justification for the death penalty is that the convicted person deserves to die – that the moral order demands death. I’m not endorsing that argument, but I respect it. I wouldn’t want to muddy the question by providing more arguments from utility.
Selecting organ donors based on merit (or demerit, as the case may be) also makes it incongruous to select recipients based on need. If we’re going to harvest organs from the most wretched, then we should presumably give preference to virtuous recipients. I suggest a televised contest in which the sick attempt to do more good deeds than one another, with a panel of celebrity judges deciding who gets each kidney.
— Matt Frost · Feb 26, 09:02 PM · #
Leaving aside the urge to rehash Kierkegaard, what I thought was funny about this section of the Bible is: 1) David was king when this section was being ghost-written, 2) David pursued a genocidal campaign against the Amalekites during his reign, and 3) If I wanted to kill all the Amalekites, boy would it be handy if I could get those priests to claim that failure to kill all the Amalekites caused God to forsake my predecessor. And, what do you know, if one reads forward a bit, David eventually kills every last one of them. For all the claims that God works in mysterious ways, God sometimes works in really, really obvious ways.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that the premise of this whole post seems exactly backwards. God and nebulous ‘moral codes’ are fine for answering questions like ‘What sort of foods should I not eat?’ and ‘How shall I spend my Sunday mornings?’, but are, shall we say, sub-optimal at matters of life and death.
— Bo · Feb 27, 07:53 AM · #
I don’t have anything to add other than to say that I saw John Prine this past weekend and heard the song from which the title of this post comes. What a great song!
— Kevin Holtsberry · Feb 27, 06:40 PM · #