Glenn Reynolds Comes Clean

Italicized emphasis is mine:

EUGENE VOLOKH has changed his mind on the advisability of painful punishments -- or at least on the ability of the legal system to mete them out fairly as opposed to their abstract fairness.

I think that's right. I feel somewhat that way about capital punishment. I'm utterly unpersuaded by the argument that there is something uniquely immoral about state-sanctioned killing. (At its core, the nation-state is all about killing; everything else is window-dressing). But I'm quite persuaded, as I've written before, by what Charles Black called "the inevitability of caprice and mistake" in the application of the death penalty.

UPDATE: Some readers wonder what I meant about the nation-state being all about killing. That seemed pretty obvious to me: We have nation-states because they're more effective at focusing violence against those who threaten their authority than other human organizations. That's why nation-states have pretty much taken over the game of doing things via violence. They don't have a monopoly, of course, but they owe their preeminence to their success in this regard, not to their other characteristics. As I say, this seems quite obvious to me.

And here I thought the Good Professor was a lost cause. He explicitly rejects the notion that the state is so common and widespread because it is good; the state is around because it deals out violence better than nearly everything else. The state is a tool to use against those with whom you disagree, dislike, or want stopped. Notice that he also, importantly, predicates this upon threats to their "authority" and not higher concepts of right and wrong.

If he can idenify this and do it so openly, there perhaps may be hope for him yet. Of course, I expect blank-out to occur once you confront him with the simple reality of everyday violence in the form of 99.99% of what the state does regularly, things that he has openly supported in the past.

Posted by Drizzten at March 21, 2005 11:11 AM