“The special evil and horror of murder consist, of course, not in the actual taking of life but in the intrinsic renunciation of a basic moral norm, to sever decisively by one’s own resolution and action the connection of common human solidarity regarding the actual fellow creature standing before me, who is the same as I, a bearer of the image and likeness of God. But this resolution to put an end to a man more clearly and completely than in simple murder is expressed in the death penalty, where there is absolutely nothing apart from this resolution and carrying it out. Society only has left an animus interficiendi in absolutely pure form with respect to the executed criminal, completely free from all those physiological and psychological conditions and motives which darkened and obscured the essence of the matter in the eyes of the criminal himself, whether he committed the murder from calculation of gain or under the influence of a less shameful person. There can be no such complexities of motivation in the death penalty; the entire business is exposed here: its single goal — to put to an end to this man in order that he not be in the world at all. The death penalty is murder, as such, absolute murder that is in principle the denial of a fundamental moral attitude toward man. “
—Vladimir Soloviev, “On the Death Penalty” in Politics, Law & Morality: Essays by V.S. Soloviev. Ed. and trans. Vladimir Wozniuk (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 180-1.
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