Why liberalism is worth saving

A lot of people, including myself, were instinctively horrified by this announcement.

This would have been the first, as you mentioned, the first firing squad death since the end of World War II and the first public execution in the US in almost a century.

But many of us didn't actually stop to think about the ethics of the situation.

So to quote your own article back at you, What is it exactly about a public execution that is morally wrong?

Yeah, and I think a lot of us, like you and like me, we're kind of repulsed by this idea.

There's a certain kind of element of disgust in the idea of publicly televising an execution.

But when we want to go into understanding the moral dimension, there's something deeper than just our immediate emotional response, because not everyone had the same response.

There were some people who were quite pleased with this idea, some people who were celebrating this idea.

But when we get to the moral dimensions of it, what we want to do is really unpack what are the effects of this? What are the principles involved? And from my perspective, I think there are two really big moral dimensions of this.

One is that public executions corrupt the individuals who watch.

There's a way that they degrade those individuals and cause a moral injury to those individuals and potentially set them up for being desensitized to violence.

We can go into that a little bit more if you want.

But the other dimension, which I also think is really important and really telling in this case, is that public executions corrupt the state.

Any liberal democracy ostensibly has made a commitment to say we put violence as a last resort and we don't celebrate violence when we do enact violence because a part of the liberal kind of contract that we have in a liberal state is that We as individuals give up our right to use violence against anyone else.

The state has a monopoly on violence.

So it's the only one who really has the ability to use that violence.

But it does so with great care, great oversight, great accountability and great reluctance.

So I think a public execution corrupts the state, not just in the sense that it's a death penalty, which is something I also oppose, But it corrupts the state in the sense that it goes further in normalising the state's use of violence and celebrating that use of violence rather than signalling that it's like a last resort.

Well, we'll come back to that idea about the liberal state and the role of violence.

But I wanted to talk a little bit more about this purpose that the... public execution has and in this case that the Trump administration may have had in going about this.

You write in your piece that public executions use theatre and narrative to signal something What is it that states are trying to signal and how closely did the Trump administration's rhetoric map onto that idea?

Yeah, I mean, look, the key thing about a public execution is it's public.

So if a public execution was just about punishment, even if you support the death penalty, And there are some arguments in support of the death penalty, mainly along the idea of what's called a retributionist view, which is the idea that if someone does something wrong, we are entitled to do something wrong back to them in punishment.

If they've done something seriously wrong taking a life, we're justified in taking their life.

Now I don't buy into that, but some people can justify that.