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{"id":55333,"date":"2014-10-29T00:08:56","date_gmt":"2014-10-29T07:08:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=55333"},"modified":"2014-12-28T20:43:59","modified_gmt":"2014-12-29T03:43:59","slug":"moral-disengagement-and-the-death-penalty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2014\/10\/moral-disengagement-and-the-death-penalty.html","title":{"rendered":"Moral Disengagement and the Death Penalty"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

One of the overlooked aspects of the death penalty is what it does to those who inflict it<\/a>. \u00a0Combox executioners, who so easily thirst for the blood of others and whose overriding question is \u201cWhen do we *get* to kill?\u201d are, like warmongering chickenhawks and torture defenders, never the people who have to do the dirty work. \u00a0That\u2019s for little people to do. \u00a0The Combox Death Eaters are the Big Picture Thinkers, the geniuses who are smarter than the Magisterium and who leave others to suffer the damages they rationalize.<\/p>\n

But, in fact, killing people does something to the killer. \u00a0The killer has to break something in himself to find a way to morally disengage from the fact that he is taking a human life. \u00a0And very similar breakage goes on whether the killer is an abortionist, a soldier, an executioner, or somebody administering euthanasia. \u00a0Sometimes the killer may learn to *like* the damage killing does to himself (one thinks of a monster like Jack Kevorkian). \u00a0Most times, the killing creates a kind of interior void where the victim has to be turned into something other than a person in order to kill\u2013a \u201cblob\u201d, \u201cthe enemy\u201d, \u201ca life unworthy of being lived\u201d, \u201ca criminal\u201d. \u00a0But that distance is always a move in the opposite direction from the gospel which insists that \u00a0the person about to be killed is the image and likeness of God and one for whom Christ died.<\/p>\n

This, ultimately is what governs the Church\u2019s teaching, not only about the death penalty, but about all questions of life and death. \u00a0It\u2019s why the Church\u2019s approach, even with guilty human life, is always \u201cHow can we preserve human life, even guilty human life, unless it is absolutely necessary to harm or kill?\u201d \u00a0I call this the \u201cpreferential option for life\u201d. \u00a0And it\u2019s why all reactionary dissent on war, torture, gun rights, and the death penalty is fundamentally tin-eared to that question since it, just as much as pro-abortion reasoning, always begins, not with \u201cWhen might we tragically have<\/em> to kill?\u201d but with the question \u201cWhen do we get<\/em>\u00a0kill?\u201d. Reactionary dissent, like progressive dissent on abortion,\u00a0spends its energies eagerly searching for a rationale to slake its thirst for human blood. \u00a0It, like proabortion reasoning, lacks the fundamental reluctance<\/em>\u00a0to kill a\u00a0sought-after victim that marks Catholic thinking on all<\/em>\u00a0life issues. \u00a0And it gives no consideration at all to the effects on the people tasked with the job of doing the killing.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"