Licensed Killers

 In his excellent study of the tropes of anti-liberal thought, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (1993), Stephen Holmes includes at one point a paraphrase from Joseph de Maistre's notorious discussion of the role of the executioner in society. 

"Imagine a philosophical visitor from a foreign planet," Holmes summarizes Maistre's argument, "who has been informed that, on earth, there are two licensed killers. He knows that one, the soldier, kills the innocent, while the other, the executioner, kills the guilty. [...] The extraterrestrial observer is then asked to guess: which one of the two is the most highly honored by human society?"

A rational being, according to Maistre, would of course pick the executioner. Yet human societies throughout history have universally honored the solider and abhorred the executioner (even while continuing to hire him for his services). This, for Maistre, proves how ultimately irrational the foundations of society are and how unfitted humans are for self-rule. 

I, however, can think of a quite different and much more rational explanation of the phenomenon Maistre observes. 

Why are soldiers almost universally honored in every society? Why do even the most pacific and least militaristic among us feel some swelling of the heart seeing soldiers in uniform at the airport, and experience some desire to give them a salute or to say "thank you for your service"? 

The answer, surely, is not because they sign up to kill. The answer is because they sign up to die. 

John Ruskin makes this point eloquently in his theory of the "Roots of Honour" in Unto This Last. The essence of all honor, he insists, derives from self-sacrifice. We honor soldiers above all others because they have in some sense—merely by donning the uniform—laid themselves on the altar for the rest of us. That's why—even if we would refuse the sacrifice—we cannot help but honor it. 

That's why the heart leaps into the throat for most people when they see a nineteen year old kid in fatigues. 

As Ruskin writes: "For the soldier's trade, verily and essentially, is not slaying, but being slain. This, without well knowing its own meaning, the world honours it for."

This is why even a relentless critic of war—the madness of war, the needlessness of war, and (most famously) the pity of war—as Wilfred Owen could nonetheless write a poem like "Greater Love": "Red lips are not so red / As stained stones kissed by the English dead. [...] O Love, your eyes lose lure / When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!"

The soldiers' "greater love" was expressed not in the fact that they were willing to kill other soldiers who were as innocent as they—but in the fact that they were willing to die. 

Now compare this with the soldier's opposite number, according to Maistre—society's other "licensed killer," the executioner—whose role, as Maistre well notes, common opinion has always regarded with horror and disgust. 

Why is this? Is it really because society prefers killing the innocent to the "guilty," as Maistre alleges? 

Or is it not rather because the executioner—unlike the soldier—is never even for an instant himself in danger? 

The soldier—at least when fighting according to the rules of lawful international armed conflict—fights only when their own lives are in peril. They kill only those who would have killed them if they had the chance. They kill, in a sense, only for self-defense. 

The executioner, by contrast, kills the helpless. They may kill the "guilty" (if we assume—implausibly—an epistemically perfect legal system that never makes an error)—but they also kill people who are unarmed, defenseless, and are entirely at the mercy of the state—whatever wicked prior acts they may have committed. 

Far from being irrational, then, the public's estimate of the relative honor of soldiers and executioners reflects a basic moral intuition. We have always recognized that violence in defense of self or others is partially justified; but that violence against someone who is already incapacitated is not.

This is why everyone except our current Secretary of Defense knows that the soldier's noble offer of self-sacrifice on our behalf is dishonored when they—who signed up to be ready to die defending our country—are instead ordered to murder the helpless. 

This is why the rest of us recognize—unlike Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump—that there is only dishonor to be found in those beloved and fondly-fingered snuff films they keep showing off of their  extrajudicial killings of unarmed and defenseless people on fishing boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific. 

Doubtless, this also accounts for something that really is irrational in the public attitude toward the death penalty—namely, the fact that many people vote to preserve capital punishment, yet abhor the profession of the executioner. 

This, to be sure, really is rationally indefensible. If the public wants to execute people, they certainly should not blame the hangman they themselves hire to perform the duty. 

But I suspect the reason for it is that, when people cast that vote for the death penalty, they are imagining themselves in a situation of self-defense. They are imagining some killer on the other end of the sentence who must be imminently struck down before he takes the life of another. 

They are forgetting, when they vote on the subject, that the convicted person—no matter how guilty of past crimes (and they may and often are proved to have been actually innocent all along, recall)—will be in a state of helpless dependence by the time they are brought to the death chamber. 

The sight of the executioner reminds them of this fact, which is why they regard the latter with horror. No one can actually behold or contemplate that spectacle of killing the defenseless without knowing that it is actually a stain on our society's honor, not an act worthy of it. 

Of course, I admitted above that part of the reason we honor soldiers so much is in part due to an atavistic sense of the nobility of self-sacrifice, stretching back to the dawn of human society. 

So too, critics of the death penalty have long argued that our insistence on executing people is simply the ancient practice of human sacrifice in modern guise. 

As the great Thomas Love Peacock aptly put it, in The Misfortunes of Elphin, "[T]he exhibition of some half-dozen funipendulous forgers might have shocked the tender bowels of [the Druid's] humanity, as much as one of his wicker baskets of captives in the flames shocked those of Caesar."

And indeed, some of the most sanguinary defenders of capital punishment have even bitten the bullet on this and defended the death penalty on this basis. Charles Baudelaire, in a heavily Maistrean passage in his Intimate Journals, suggests that society needs a regular blood sacrifice as much now as it did in ancient times, and that the condemned criminal is simply fulfilling this admirable social function. 

This seems to be our own current administration's attitude. 

In their constant gloating over the videos they post of their own murders at sea; in their stated policy of trying to increase the use of the death penalty at every state and federal level; in their attempts to limit procedural protections for the people they are deporting to torture prisons abroad; they do not appear to care in any way whether the people they are harming are innocent or guilty. 

For their sanguinary rites—any blood or bodies will do.  

It requires a Baudelaire or a Maistre, however, to overlook the obvious distinction between the kinds of "sacrifice" that we still rightly honor as a society, and the kinds that we abhor. 

What we honor is voluntary self-sacrifice; the sacrifice the soldier makes by putting on the uniform and signing their enlistment papers; the person who agrees to put themselves at risk to keep others safe. 

Only a thinker as irrational as they accuse others of being, like Maistre, could fail to observe that this is quite a different sort of sacrifice than the involuntary butchery of others, without their consent and without any credible justification from self-defense, to feed whatever atavistic gods this administration serves—who seem to be even more bloodthirsty than the Druids'.