If I didn’t do it, someone would

Dehumanising others makes it easier to kill them, but it dehumanises the killer equally

A mountaineer at the summit of a mountain. By AI.

The difference between Charles Manson and a corporate CEO is not motivation. The motivation of both is their lust, whether their love of the job or their desire to see its fruition. Although parts of what both engage in are shy of legality, what differentiates them is in large part the fact that one of them could refrain from his actings without recrimination. And the other couldn’t.

Life at the top can be lonely, even if you have a team of followers to support you in what you do and who obey your every command. The wise surround themselves with critics, with the checks and balances that prevent them from becoming … Charles Mansons.

But being a lonely CEO at the top of your game is one thing. Being the lowly minion is quite something else. The moral freedom that one can accumulate for oneself becomes a veritable playground of accusation. At once you are the Zola, perchance the Dreyfus accablé, never the mighty Minister of Justice.

Far more worrying than the murder of a chief executive on a New York street—an event that, aside from the qualification chief executive, is a daily occurrence across that city—has been the veritable chorus of approval of the deadly act in many parts of American society: a society that abhors police brutality, and yet mourns the deaths of its police officers in the execution of their tasks; a society that will be outraged at violence towards its medics, yet reels in horror at malpractice by those who care for the sick. And yet, Mr Thompson is, in an uncomfortable number of eyes—including some of medics themselves, viewed as having deserved it. He deserved to die: the enormity of the notion of deserving to die is really quite shocking. Do you deserve to die?

I work in a retail shop in Belgium specialising in British goods, which are now harder to source than prior to the UK’s withdrawal from the Treaty of Rome. A lady asked me the other day, “Can you not ban from your store the people who voted for Brexit?” I don’t think she was serious, but, like those baying for the blood of health insurance executives, I don’t think she’d thought about the implications of what she was saying. I asked her, “The Brexit vote was a secret ballot. How do you expect us to know who voted for what?” In short, how did she expect us to discriminate—at her behest—against those in respect of whom the grounds for the discrimination are not even discernible, let alone detectable? She mockingly took a stance that she fully expected me to endorse, one that entailed discrimination; for her behoof. I think I was quite polite in how I answered.

When President Duterte (who is likely imminently to receive a citation from the International Criminal Court in precisely this regard) declared open season on drug dealers in the Philippines, he effectively declared open season on anyone you have a grudge against: it is far easier to plant drugs on a dead corpse than on a living human being. Announcing a one million-peso bounty for police officers only added fuel to that fire. Thirty thousand people were shot dead under the Duterte anti-drugs policy. It’s not that not all of them deserved it; none of them deserved it. Duterte’s justice system—justice, if you would—endorsed a vigilante shoot-to-kill policy. One that was manifestly open to abuse and falsification. One that Mr Duterte will now need to answer for.

And the Philippines? They still have a drugs issue. Perhaps they deserve that.

Think carefully before you decide who deserves to die, for it is a dreadfully deadly decision, which only those with blind disregard for the very society in whose name they vaunt such acts can possibly stomach.

A decision to end another person’s life for the behoof of society robs society of two of its members. It robs it of him who is killed; and it robs it of him pursuant to whose decision the killing occurred. The society that would supposedly be protected by the killing is poorer by two of its members. This is so whether the killing be unlawful or lawful.

In judicial systems that do not have the option of execution as a mode of punishment, the pathway is left open to reform of the criminal. Whether reform of the criminal ever succeeds, in absolute terms, in curing the ills of the miscreant that drive him toward his acts may be open to question, but, I must contend, is only part of the question at all.

We should nonetheless strive for processes that achieve reform in as many cases as possible: their failure, if failure there be, is not a ground for shirking in the endeavour. For the benefit of success, if success there be, inures to the society we yearn to protect. And, what is more, the endeavour inures to the benefit of those who put their hearts to the task, and hence to that society too: if it can care that much for those who have strayed, then it can care that much more for those who have not. But a society that exacts retribution, from whomever, lies ill at ease with itself.

There is no more onerous a decision incumbent on a human being than the decision to end the life of another: it requires, sine qua non, that the victim be dehumanised; and that process, of dehumanisation, in and of itself dehumanises him who takes it.