AN EXCHANGE

Camus and His Critics

on Capital Punishment
Donald Lazere

A LARGE MAJORITYof the American public

continues to favor the death penalty,
and a 1972Supreme Court decision virtually abolishing capital punishment on
constitutional grounds has gradually
been superseded by a variety of legislation within individual states circumventing the Courts constitutional objections
and resulting in a new cycle of executions during recent years. For this reason, Albert Camus classic essay against
capital punishment, Reflections on the
Guillotine,retains all of its timeliness and
power as a challenge to Americans and
citizens of other countries where support
for the death penalty remains strong. Reflections was published in France in a
1957bookceauthored by Arthur Koestler
titled R&exions sur la peine capitale, and
the English version appeared in a 1960
collection of Camus journalism, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death.
For the purpose of reconfirming the
viability of Camus arguments on capital
punishment and the larger philosophical, political, and literary issues the essay raises, I will briefly review his lines
of argument and then evaluate two major attempts in the United States to refute them, On Camus and Capital Punishment by Thomas Molnar and For
Capital Punishment by Walter Berns.
This exchange retains additional contemporary significance because Molnar

and Berns represent the movement of

intellectual conservatism that has gained
increasing influence in the United States
in the past few decades, so that the
debate provides an exemplary case of
the nature and quality of conservative
versus liberal ideology-though Camus
was more inclined toward nonviolent
anarchism and communitarian socialism than liberalism.
Published fifteen years after Camus
The Stranger, Reflections recapitulates
several of that novels images and themes
concerning the impending execution of
its narrator Meursault: the story of
Camus/Meursaults father self-righteously going to watch an execution but
coming home vomiting; the agonies of
the condemned man in the death cell,
the theatricality of courtroom rhetoric
and arbitrariness of the verdict, etc.
Camus continues beyond The Stranger,
which ends before Meursault is guillotined, to describe actual executions, juxtaposing their barbaric reality to the
euphemisms in which society inconsistently shrouds this purportedly exemplary ritual. (Camus argues that executions should be televised rather than
taking place in private if society truly
believes they serve as a deterrent to
potential criminals.)
After beginning with these gruesomely
visceral physical descriptions of decapi-

Modern Age

371
LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

tation, Camus reviews criminological

data refuting defenses of capital punishment based on its alleged deterrent value
and citing the high incidence of judicial
errors and variability in verdicts from
one time and place to another. These
data provide the basis for arguing against
capital punishment on the grounds of its
irreversibility; on these grounds alone,
Camus argues for life imprisonment without parole as an alternative. H e goes on,
however, to philosophical, religious, and
political levels of argument. H e does not
wholly reject conservative defenses of
punishment as revenge or retribution,
but draws the line at death, not only
because of the dangers of erroneous
executions but because society drags
itself down to the level of its most irrational members in indulging the impulse to
bloodshed, and indeed may incite more
of those members to murder through
emulation than it deters.
On the metaphysical level, Camus attacks capital punishment as blasphemy
against Christian mercy and repentance:
There could be read on the sword of the
Fribourg executioner the words: Lord
Jesus, thou art the judge.... And, to be
sure, whoever clings to the teaching of
Jesus will look upon that handsome
sword as one more outrage to the person
of Christ.2Moreover, he argues that the
religious faith undergirding earlier
church-states can no longer justify modern secular states assumption of Godlike power over life and death.
On the political plane, Camus argues
as a leftist that bourgeois society breeds
and profits from anti-social conditions
like poverty and alcoholism, but totally
absolves itself of responsibility for the
criminal consequences of these conditions. (This argument has been supported by recent studies of atrocity killers in the United States showing nearly
all ofthem to have been poor and abused
as children.) His argument is not that
individuals bear no responsibility for

crime or that society is not entitled t o

defend itself, but that as long as society
bears the smallest fraction of responsibility, it is unwarranted in placing 100%
of responsibility on criminals in executing them; the cost of life imprisonment
should be considered societys minimal
share of responsibility. Finally, and most
compellingly, he argues that capital punishment is the ultimate weapon of excessive state power over the individual, and
should be abolished as a first step toward reversal of the deification of the
state and nationalism that has led in the
twentieth century to two world wars, the
threat of nuclear war, totalitarianism,
and the diminishing of individual liberties, even in democracies.

I1
Thomas Molnars OnCamus and Capital Punishment appeared in the summer 1958 issue of Modern Age. Walter
Bernss For Capital Punishment was
published in the April 1979 Harpers, at
that time predominantly neoconservative in its politics; the essay was republished the same year in Bernss bookFor
Capital Punishment: Crime and the Morality of the Death P e n ~ l t yBerns,
.~
a political scientist, was and still is a resident
scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. In my view, Molnars
article, although appearing only a year
after Camus, presents a more informed
account than Bernss later one of Camus
philosophy and its basic points of opposition to conservative thought. Nevertheless, I will make the case that both essays misrepresent Camus ideas t o the
point of attacking a straw man and evading the central issues Camus addresses.
Before summarizing Molnars and
Bernss arguments, it is necessary to
note that neither critic addresses all of
Camuss main lines of argument, including the issues of judicial error and variability-an omission that presents problems for the moral position they defend,
Fall 1996

3 72
LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

which assumes a high degree of rectitude in the judiciary system. Both d o

raise the traditional conservative argument for deterrence, only to acknowledge its weakness as a defense of capital
punishment; they reject it not so much
because empirical evidence does not
support it (which neither denies), but
because any empirical argument, as
Molnar says, enters into the game of
pragmatism and statistic^,"^ as opposed
to the moral dimensions they both emphasize.
Molnar begins his essay with the case
of an elderly, white New Yorkshopkeeper
who, having been held up twice, finally
shot to death athird blackrobber,whose
gun, as it turned out, was a toy. Molnar
defends t h e shopkeepers action against
predictable liberal criticisms, moving
from this individual execution of justice
t o the death penalty. In both cases,
Molnar asserts, man has a moralduty to
react with indignation when his common sense, uncorrupted by psychological and sociological sophistication, tells
him that evil is evil, ...that every action is
projected against the walls of the social
order and of the divine order, and reverberates from there.j
Molnar opposes this definition of justice to the alleged moral relativism of
modern liberals, including Camus. After
a fairminded summary of Camus various works expressing his social and
metaphysical skepticism, particularly
regarding the frailties of legal justice
and the role of the judge who assumes
divine prerogatives in an agnostic society, Molnar charges that Camus idea
of justice is tinged with sentimentality,
and it fails to distinguish between a generalized and hazy guilt-feeling(made fashionable by the novels of Dostoevsky and
Kafka) and the moral and legal concept
of individual responsibility.6 Molnar
continues:
I reply to Camus that responsibility ought

to be kept limited if we want it to have a

meaning.... It is human nature to feel interested in, concerned with, and, hence,
responsible for a relatively small number
of people and issues. This is contrary to
the prevailing liberal, humanitarian philosophy which wants to impress upon us
a universal concern for all mankind, and
responsibility for events distant from US,
outside of our possible sphere of influence and effectiveness. The man who
would adopt this attitude [is] oblivious to
its abstract and artificial nature....
Molnar goes on to reply to Camus
arguments about the impossibility of
definitively delineating between the
individuals and societys responsibility
for crime;equating Camus with the kind
of liberals who say or imply that man is
good, but society corrupts him .... We
know these Rousseauistic laments, but
we may be surprised t o find them under
Camus pen.8
In spite of Molnars generally wellinformed view of modern moral philosophy and Camus thought in general, he
misrepresents Reflections on the Guillotine on three major points: Camus
alleged denial of the responsibility of
criminals and the legitimacy of punishing them, his displacement of responsibility for crime onto society, and the
abstract nature of his position. To begin
with Molnars charge that Camus has a
romantically sentimental attitude toward
criminals and exonerates them of all
responsibility, Camus could not be more
clear in his opposition to such attitudes:
There is no question of giving in to some
conventional set of sentimental pictures

and calling to mind Victor Hugos good

convicts. The age of enlightenment, as
people say, wanted to suppress the death
penalty on the grounds that man was
naturally good. Of course he is not (he is
worse or better). After twenty years of
our magnificent history we are well aware
of this. But precisely because he is not
absolutely good, no one among us can
3 73

Modern Age

LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

pose as an absolute judge and pronounce

the definitive elimination of the worst
among the guilty, because no one of us
can lay claim to absolute innocence.Capital judgment upsets the only indisputable human solidarity-our solidarity
against death-and it can be legitimized
only by a truth or a principle that is
superior to man?
The key word here is absolute. Likewise for Camus view of punishment:
The instinct of preservation of societies, and hence of individuals, requires
...that individual responsibility be postulated and accepted without dreaming
of an absolute indulgence that would
amount to the death of all society. But
the same reasoning must lead us to conclude that there never exists any total
responsibility or, consequently, any absolute punishment or reward .... The
death penalty, which really neither provides an example nor assures distributive justice, simply usurps an exorbitant
privilege by claiming t o punish an always relative culpability by a definitive
and irreparable punishment.I0 And,
Compassion, of course, can in this instance be but an awareness of a common
suffering and not a frivolous indulgence
paying no attention to the sufferings and
rights of the victim. Compassion does
not exclude punishment, but it suspends
the final condemnation. And finally,
We should admit at one and the same
time our hope and our ignorance, we
should refuse absolute law and the irreparable judgment. We know enough to
say that this or that major criminal deserves hard labor for life. But we dont
know enough to decree that he be shorn
of his future.l2
In response to Camus citation of the
high incidence of slum housing and alcoholism in France as factors contributing
t o crime, Molnar claims, Now Camus
may be hoist by his own statistical petard,I3 since France has a lower crime
rate than other countries with better

housing and less alcoholism. Camus

never attempts, however, t o make such
a reductive correlation between social
conditions and crime in one country or
another; his point is thatany society that
fosters, and allows profiteering from,
poverty and vice bears a minimal share
of responsibility for the criminal consequences.
So Camus case rests not on a denial of
individual responsibility or punishment,
but only on drawing the line at carrying
them t o the point of death; in ignoring
this essential distinction, Molnar misses
Camus entire point. Ignoring the distinction likewise misleads Molnar into
an analogy between capital punishment
and a mother slapping her child for disregarding her instructions:

Beyond the mothersimmediateresponse,

avenging, in some way, the injury against
a visible (or invisible) order, there is, of
course, the further and inseparable intention of teaching the child a lesson.
But again, this does not amount exactly
to discouraging him from repeating the
same thing; it merely informs him that
each time he commits act A, he takes risk
R that punishment P might follow. The
legal systems of civilized nations express
the same idea.
Thus the law does not punish only in
order to set an example and prevent other
misdeeds, but also because our innate
concept of justice, reinforced by tradition, demands an immediate reaction
against crime and apenalty possibly equal
to the amount of suffering or damage
caused.I4
Whether Molnar is arguing here for
deterrence or retaliation, the analogy of
slapping the child, for whatever purpose, is surely incommensurate with
teaching someone a lesson by killing
him. And the notion of a penalty possibly equal to the amount of suffering
could be said t o enter into the game of
pragmatism that Molnar eschews, since
it involves what Camus calls a casuistry

3 74

Fall 1996

LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

of bloodshed attempting t o measure

what degree of imposed suffering justifies execution-murder in various degrees, kidnapping, rape, adultery, etcand possibly leading to justification for
crucifixion, drawing and quartering, or
keeping killers alive to torture them daily.
Molnar makes another dubious analogy in criticizing Camus cheap rhetoric in his gruesome descriptions of a
decapitation, intended to expose the
hypocritical euphemisms in which executions a r e shrouded. After all,
Molnar comments, few people could
bear witnessing even a minor surgical
intervention, let alone a major
operation.15It is generally agreed, however, that the gore of an operation is
justified by its salutary effects, whereas
the salutary effects of executions, on
society if not on the patient, are exactly
what abolitionists dispute. Molnar further ignores the point of Camus use of
emotional appeal-that
many people
who approve of capital punishment in
the abstract would not d o so if they
understood its flesh-and-blood reality.
Molnars penchant for analogies that
distract from the visceral specifics of an
individuals death is only one sign of
precisely the abstract modes of thought
Camus essay and the rest of his works
are addressed against. When defenders
of capital punishment dismiss cases
where innocent people may have been
executed, on the grounds that such cases
are exceptional, Camus remarks that
all of our lives are exceptional, too.16
Molnar, accusing Camus and other liberals of abstract moralizing is anomalous
in an essay filled with phrases like,
[Camus]simply fails to see that it is not
the judge-in-person, but the representative of the law who sits in the chair, and
that the law-expression of the social
order-possesses
certain definite, although imperfectly mirrored, attributes
of the divine order.l7 Such phrases inevitably bring to mind one of Camusmost

powerful criticisms of the abstractions of

legal justice, the passage in The Stranger
where Meursault,having been condemned
to death for a murder committed in a
moment of sun-blindness, muses:
Try as 1 might, I couldnt stomach this

brutal certitude. For really,when onecame

to think about it, there was a disproportion between the judgment on which it
was based and the unalterable sequence
of events starting from the moment when
that judgment was delivered. The fact
that the verdict was read out at eight p.m.
rather than at five, the fact that it might
have been quitedifferent, that it was given
by men who change their underclothes,
and was credited to so vague an entity as
the French people-for that matter, why
not to the Chinese or the German
people?-all these facts seemed to deprive the courts decision of much of its
gravity.*
Criticizing Camus, along with other
existentialists like Sartre and Malraux
who assert the factitiousness of societys
claim to power over individual lives and
deaths, Molnar says, Never for a moment do they seriously consider theview
that the defects of institutions and of
society as a whole have their roots in
human nature, or as the Christian and
Jewish religions put it, in original sin;
that we are not justified to transfer mans
own failings to the community and its
defective organi~ation.~
Camus does
indeed consider such views, for more
than a minute, and thoroughly refutes
them. H e argues that modern societies
are essentially secular or ecumenical,
and therefore have no right to legislate
on the basis of the beliefs of specific
religions. Particularly in legislating matters of life or death, they cannot legitimately assume the existence of a God or
an afterlife in which the errors of human
justice might be redeemed. How can a
society like the United States, for example, whose present gods are the pursuit of wealth and consumption of com3 75

Modem Age

LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

modities, rock music stars and protessional athletes, suddenly lay claim t o
being the steward of divine order when
it comes to executions?
In Molnars statement about original
sin cited above, the phrase after the
semicolon seems a non sequitur. Even if
one accepts Molnars belief in original
sin (as Camus does not), the logical consequence of that doctrine, as Camus
suggests, would seem to be that the
postlapsarian state of all societies as
well as individuals should be a warrant
against the assumption that any such
fallen society should have the godlike
power to judge who shall live and who
shall die. Thus Camus does not attempt,
as Molnar claims, to transfer mans own
failings to the community, but only to
assert (an assertion that would seem t o
be equally valid for either believers o r
agnostics), There is a solidarity of all
men in error and aberration. Must that
solidarity operate for the tribunal and
be denied the accused?20One can imagine Camusbemused reaction to Molnars
reference t o imperfectly mirrored attributes of the divine order. Which society is nearly enough perfect t o mirror
divinity, and which isnt? Nazi Germany?
Communist Russia? The United States?
One would think that Molnar, as an
Hungarian survivor of Nazism and Communism, should be as skeptical as Camus
of the claims to omnipotence by modern
states, including Nazi Germany, which
claimed the religious mandate, Cott mit
Uns,especially in exterminating political criminals. Molnar claims that
Camus arguments against capital punishment (which Molnar sees as a plea for
mercy toward victims of political persecution during the Algerian War, at its
height in 1957), may serve, in the eyes
of a nondiscriminating public opinion,
the much more dubious cause of exonerating common criminals, murderers, and
Gestapo-torturers.2This last claim ignores Camus record as a leading Resis-

tance journalist and his extensive postwar deliberations on moral dilemmas

such as executing Nazi war criminals in
Reflections on the Guillotine and elsewhere, including his account of his
change of attitude from favoring capital
punishment as the result of a debate
with t h e Catholic a u t h o r Franqois
Mauriac, who argued persuasively
against executing Nazi collaborators in
France following World War 11.
Molnar glosses over Camus central
argument that fascist and communist
totalitarianism arose largely out of the
modern deification of state power and
ideological absolutism epitomized in the
death penalty:
Those who cause the most blood to flow
are the same ones who believe they have
right, logic, and history [and, he might
have added, God] on their side.... Bloodthirsty laws, it has been said, make bloodthirsty customs. But any society eventually reaches a state of ignominy in which,
despite every disorder, the customs never
manage to beas bloodthirstyas thelaws ....
How can European society of the midcentury survive unless it decides to defend individuals by every means against
the States oppression? Forbidding a
mans execution would amount to proclaiming publicly that society and the
State are not absolute values, that nothing authorizes them to legislate definitively or to bring about the irreparable.22
Molnars position against Camus derives from a classic conservatism justifying state power in the tradition of European church-states and the divine right
of kings. But such a position seems anachronistic not only in light of twentiethcentury totalitarianism but also of the
degeneration of democratic states into
corporate plutocracy, corrupt parties,
and bureaucratic ineptitude. The mainstream of conservative ideology, at least
in the United States, has been libertarian
and other varieties of anti-statism. The
fact that Molnar himself cites Friedrich
Fall 1996

3 76
LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

Hayek as an authority makes it all the

more puzzling that he fails to acknowledge what would seem to be the strong
appeal in Camus arguments for antistatist conservatives. From my own socialdemocratic viewpoint, this appears
t o be one of countless contradictions
between absolutistic, judicial-moral statism and economic laissez-faire in contemporary conservatives (other than libertarians), whether the intellectual
variety of Molnar and Modern Age or the
vulgar variety of Nixon-Reagan-Bush
Republicanism-though, to be sure, leftists can be accused of the reverse set of
self-contradictions.

III
Walter Bernss For Capital Punishment
follows many of the same lines of argument as Molnar; Berns falls into the same
misrepresentations or misunderstandings of Camus Reflections and is even
more fallacious in his reasoning, adding
some flights of literary fancy to confuse
things. He begins by explaining that he
has come around to rejecting the conventional liberal wisdom that capital
punishment represents an unjustifiable
principle of revenge against criminals,
and now believes we punish criminals
principally in order t o pay them back,
and we execute the worst of them out of
moral n e c e s ~ i t y . He
~ ~reiterates this
point several times over, and yet, like
Molnar, he never explains how accepting the principle of punishment logically
dictates capitalpunishment, as opposed,
say, to life imprisonment without parole
as advocated by Camus.
Berns cites as authority for the principle of retribution Simon Wiesenthals
writings about his motives for bringing
Nazi war criminals t o justice, but he
presents no supporting quotations from
Wiesenthal. T h e fact is t h a t in
Wiesenthals memoirs and interviews
with Joseph Wechsberg he advocates
neither retaliation nor execution:

I am not motivated by a sense of revenge.Iz4

[Wiesenthal] was approached by several

groups who wanted to create gangs that
would capture and kill their former tormentors; he opposed this idea violently.
The Jews must not fight the Nazis with the
Nazis depraved methods, he said.25
Wiesenthal knew that the Nazi crimes
could never be avenged.... Obviously,
strict accountability for the crimes was
impossible.... The important thing was to
prevent the commission of mass murder
in the future.26
Wiesenthal explained that the Jews have
always had a high regard for the sanctity
of human life and didnt think that murder
would expiate murder.27
About Camus, Berns claims, The most
powerful attack on capital punishment
was written by a man, Albert Camus,
who denied the legitimacy of anger and
moral indignation by denying the very
possibility of a moral community in our
time. The anger expressed in our world,
he said, is nothing but hypocrisy.28This
grotesque distortion of Camus ideas is
based, not on Reflections but on The
Stranger, a novel which Berns views as
expressing unequivocally the same ideas
as Camus essay published fifteen years
later. To be sure, the novel and essay
express some of the same ideas, but
Berns either does not know or chooses
to ignore that Camus ViewedTheStranger
as a very limited and even anomalous
part of his total work-a study of one
distinctive character,his distinctive sensibility and reactions to an accidental
series of events pulling him into crime
and punishment. Others of Camuss
works, including Reflections,explictly
or implicitly repudiated the nihilistic
implications of his early novel.
Berns is especially equivocal in using
TheStrangerto gloss the following quotes
from Reflections:

Modern Age

3 77

LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

Our civilization has lost the only values

that, in a certain way, can justify that
penalty...[ the existenceof] a truth or principle that is superior to man. [Berns
ellipsis and brackets.] There is no basis
for friendship and no moral law; therefore, no one, not even a murderer, can
violate the terms of friendship or break
that law; and there is no basis for the
anger that we express when someone
breaks that law. The only thing we share
as men, t h e only thing that connects us
one to another, is a solidarity against
death,and a judgment of capital punishment upsets that solidarity. The purpose of human life is to stay alive.29
The preceding words may be an accurate enough account of The Stranger, but
surely not of Reflections or of Camus
work as a whole. (Even The Stranger
does not imply that staying alive at any
cost is all-important; Meursault could
avoid execution by lying about the circumstances of the murder he committed, but he refuses to.) On the contrary,
friendship and fraternal solidarity a r e
among the most positivevalues throughout Camus. He sees this precious solidarity constantly menaced both by t h e
absurdity of lifes physical constraints
and the absurdity of societys arbitrary
conventions-preeminently the power
of the state t o suppress individual lives
through war and capital punishment. By
temperament a solitary individual and
political anarchist, Camus nevertheless
emphasized the paradox that the metaphysical and social isolation of each individual creates a bond between her o r
him and every other individual; as he put
it in Lyrical and Critical Essays, Solitudes unite those society separate^."^'
This bond in turn should lead individuals to unite in struggling against social
forces encroaching on individual liberty,
and for the establishment of social conditions and political policies maximizing
that liberty. Hence Camus own lifelong
political commitments, including risk-

ing his life in the Resistance, and his

writings (such a s The Plague, The Rebel,
and The Just Assassins) delineating situations where sacrificing ones life takes
moral precedence over staying alive at
any cost-details that Berns inexcusably ignores. Finally, in Reflections
Camus makes it clear that murderers
must be deplored and punished for u p
setting our solidarity against death,
but that by executing them societydrags
itself down to the same level a n d - e v e n
worse-institutionalizes their personal
failure t o sanctify life.
Berns literary penchant leads him
even farther astray when he compares
The Stranger unfavorably with Macbeth,
prefacing his praise of the latter with an
endorsement by Abraham Lincoln,
NothingequalsMac6efh .... It is wonderful. Macbeth is wonderful because, to
say nothing more here, it teaches us the
awesomeness of the commandment
Thou shalt not
Berns, however,
does say more:
Can we imagine aworld that does not take
its revenge on the man who kills Macduffs
wife and children? (Can we imagine the
play in which Macbeth does not die?) Can
we imagine a people that does not hate
murderers? (Can we imagine a world
where Meursault is an outsider only because he does not pretend to be outraged
by murder?) Shakespeares poetry could
not have been written out of the moral
sense that the death penaltys opponents
insist we ought to have. Indeed, the issue
of capital punishment can be said to turn
on whether Shakespeares or Camus is
the more telling account of murder ....
In Macbefhthe majesty of the moral law is
demonstrated to us.... In a similar fashion, the punishments imposed by the 1egal order remind us of the reign of the
moral order; not only do they remind us
of it, but by enforcing its prescriptions,
they enhance the dignity of the legal or-

der in the eyes of moral men, in the eyes

of those decent citizens who cry out for

gods who will avenge inju~tice.~~

Fall 1996

3 78
LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

Now, even if we grant it to Berns that

Macbeth presents a more cathartic a p
peal to our sense of justice than The
Stranger, we must also note the ways he
has stacked the deck in this comparison.
To begin with, Macbeth is a butcherous
political tyrant, whereas Meursault is an
ordinary man who stumbles inadvertently into committing a single act of
manslaughter. (Granted, he fails to express remorse or compassion for his
victim, and in this respect, the books
morality is indeed open to being criticized, as Camus himself later acknowledged.) A much fairer and more obvious
point of comparison could have been
made with two of Camus plays, Caligula,
in which a Macbeth-like tyrant is likewise struck down by his oppressed subjects, or The Just Assassins, in which a
Russian revolutionary of 1905 voluntarily gives up his life as compensation for
his assassination of the Grand Duke.
Bernss comparison cavalierly disregards several major differences in the
teleological and aesthetic beliefs of
Shakespeares time versus Camus. Modernliterary realism and naturalism, from
which The Stranger derives, were precisely reactions against earlier ages of
belief in gods who will avenge injustice. We may still thrill today to the
poetic justice in Macbeth, but we know
that in real life, Macbeth would be just as
likely t o kill Macduff as the reverse.
Bernss appeal to the reign of the moral
order, like Molnars, seems quite plaintive in a wholly pragmatic, materialistic
modern moral order engineered largely
by and in the interests of the multinational corporations, their governmental
agents, and assorted lobbyists, law firms,
and public relations agents who are currently defined as conservatives. And that
awesome legal order invoked by
Berns-administered in America largely
through patronage and disabled ever
further through Reaganomic budget
cuts-is the same one denounced as

big government by Bernss supply-side

economist colleagues at the American
Enterprise Institute.
On a more mundane level, in Macbeth
justiceis administeredneither bythegods
nor by the state, but by Macduff. Is Berns
advocating that we deal with criminals by
giving them over to hand-tehand combat, perhaps with the survivors of their
victims? Vigilante justice may seem a p
pealingin our safeaesthetic distance from
the Shakespearean stage (or from the
films of a Charles Bronson and a Clint
Eastwood), but is Berns, or Molnar, really
prepared to turn over todays legal process t o anyonewho declares himself judge,
jury, and executioner? Bernss and
Molnars unqualified appeals to anger and
moral indignation against criminals disregard an elementary point agreed on by
most political philosophers in modern
constitutional democracies; as Camus
puts it in Reflections,If murder is in the
nature of man, the law is not intended to
imitate or reproduce that nature. It is
intended to correct it. Now, retaliation
does no more than ratify and confer the
status of alaw on apure impulse of nature.
We have all known that impulse, often to
our shame, and we know its power, for it
comes down to us from the primitive
Once again in this passage, as throughout his essay, Camus is not categorically
opposing the impulse to retaliation, but
he is emphasizing the need for limiting
that principle at the point where it becomes morally and socially d6rnesur6 or
counterproductive, as in the example he
gives of Arab countries cutting off the
hands of robbers. Neither Molnar nor
Berns really comes to terms with Camus,
because their absolutistic arguments
assume that his are equally absolutistic
(or absolutely relativistic), without ever
recognizing that the core of his philosophy in Reflectionsand elsewhere is its
classical opposition of measure and limits to both absolutism and relativism.
3 79

Modem Age

LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

1. Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, translated by

Justin OBrien (New York, 1960). 2. Ibid., 171.3. For
Capital Punishment: Crime and the Morality of the
Death Penalty (New York, 1979). 4. On Camus and
Capital Punishment, 301.5. Ibid.,299.6. Ibid., 300.
7 . Idem. 8. Ibid., 302. 9. Reflections on the Guillotine, 222. IO. Ibid., 210.11. Ibid., 217.12.Ibid., 230.13.
Camus andCapitalPunishment,302.14.Ibid.,301302.15.Ibid.,304-305.16. Reflectionson the Guillotine, 212.17. Camusandcapital Punishment,301.
18. The Stranger, translated by Stuart Gilbert [New
York, 1946),137-138.19.Camusandcapital Punish-

ment, 305.20. Reflectionson the Guillotine, 217.

21. Camus and Capital Punishment, 299.22. Reflections on the Guillotine,227-228.23. ForCapital
Punishment, 15.24. The MurderersAmong Us: The
Simon Wiesenthal Memoirs, ed. and with introductoryprofile by Joseph Wechsberg(NewYork, 1969,
8.25.Ibid..9.26.Idem. 27. Ibid.. 261.28.For Capital
Punishment,16.29. Ibid., 17.30.Lyrical and Critical
Essays, trans. by Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York,
1968), 12.31.For Capital Punishment, 17.32. Idem.
33. Reflections on the Guillotine.198.

A Reply to Camus and

His Critics on Capital Punishment
IN THE INTERVENING YEARS, thirty-eight, to be
exact, an entire generation, the issue
discussed inModem Age (Summer 1958)
has remained as valid and alive as it was
then-and so will it remain as long as
there are communities with a sense of
identity, on the one hand, and breakers
of law, on the other. History is not an
evolutionary science; the problems that
the passage of time raises are, while
different in style and anecdotal illustration, identical across civilizational periods. Crime invites punishment, and irreversible crime invites what the French
call le chBtiment supreme.
Albert Camus, and in his wake Professor Donald Lazere, discuss t h e issue
from the wrong angle. Although in Camus
time Western opinion had not yet plunged
into the mire of a tear-jerking humanitarianism, his American commentators
thesis benefits by the currently raging
universal hypocrisy: capital punishment
is declared an absolute evil. But the
butchering of innocents in abortion clinics has become a womans right; Pol
Pots massacres are said t o be redeemed
by pure intentions; and for certain Methodist churches every illegal immigrant

is Jesus Christ in person. N o wonder we

are confused. This confusion is also at
the root of the Camus/Lazere thesis. The
matter in question is not whether, as
Camus claims, a human being can be an
absolute judge because he is absolutely innocent; nor is it an issue of
human solidarity against death (ill-fitting Camusian phrases quoted by
Lazere). At issue is a societys (anations,
a states, a tribes) duty to restore a
certain moral balance when it is supremely upset. It is necessary t o restore
this equilibrium against external aggression when the community is attacked in
its vital identity and interests-the case
of Bosnia serves as a classic exampleand to restore it internally when in the
protected domestic area a life is taken.
So far, then, the justification of just wars
and capital punishment.
The difficulty of arguing against
Camus/Lazere is that they absolutize
man, not to say divinize him, aided as
they are in this endeavor by the contemporary humanitarian verbiage. Thus they
come to decide the issue of capital punishment according to two opposing a p
plications of the same standard: the vicFall 1996

380

LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

tim of assassination no longer benefits

by his sacredness as a person, yet Camus
insists on the continued sacredness of
the assassin. Former ages knew nothing
of this strange and obscene phenomenon; they sentenced a sacrilegious person to death, whether he killed a person
or de-sacralized a holy object. The notion still survives in the re-sacralization
of churches after the misuse of their
premises, for example, by communist
regimes which used churches for stables,
athletic clubs, or atheistic exhibits.
The transfer of the victims sacredness as a person t o the murderer-the
Camusian logic-protects the latter
against the formers fate. According to
this view, the judge is not permitted t o
impose capital punishment (to desacralize the criminal); the judge, that is,
the society which he represents, and the
killer become equal parties. More: as a
spokesman for institutionalized violence, the judge is regarded as a greater
criminal than the taker of life. In this
perspective, the modern one, light sentencing becomes a branch of social
therapy administered by the judge/therapist to the assassin/patient.
Let us note, however, that society is
neither achurch nor a hospital. The task
of these two institutions is to help save
souls and to help cure bodies. Society is
a network of reciprocal actions wherein
those who break the rules must pay the
penalty; but society also participates in
the moral order, and is ennobled in proportion as it defends that order. Thus
capital punishment is not merely a deterrent against the highest law-breaking, it is more importantly a restorative
act of the moral order. It is a misplaced
argument to say that sentencing one to
life imprisonment or hard labor would
be an adequate alternative. A citizen not
only fears the killer, he is also aware that
societys moral identity and integrity
suffer when the supreme crime is not
irrevocably compensated for.

What does it mean, then, that compassion does not exclude punishment,
but it suspends the final condemnation?
Either society punishes according to the
gravity and monstrosity of the crime, or
it hides behind judicial agnosticism,
claiming it does not know how to distinguish between one crime and another.
With this step, however, society mutilates itself, cutting off one of its functions. Judicial agnosticism, by the way,
is again manifest when the courts pretend ignorance as to whether a foetus is
alive or not at conception.
There is no question that Camus was
an eminently decent individual, a good
man, and that his plea against capital
punishment was motivated by a sense
of-here misplaced-charity. I still retain a letter from him, dated October
1952,in which he severely criticizes JeanP a u 1 Sa r t r es merc i 1es s rigor i s m
(jans6nisrne impitoyable) and asks for
the recognition of immediately obvious
values in our life. Yet, as also seen in his
novel, The Stranger, Camus confuses privatevirtues and public imperatives; thus
he justified in advance the demagogues
who use the first when the criminal belongs to their own camp, and the second
when he is an adversary. This was illustrated by Simone de Beauvoir when she
not only wanted to pardon the commonlaw criminal (his misdeeds are bourgeois societys responsibility), but also
called for the destruction of the political
opponent.
While in our time the concept of punishment yields t o that of therapy, we
should not be surprised that criminology and the practice of tribunals also
undergo vast changes. The foundation
of law used t o be God and nature, both
demoted by modern philosophy. To
make a long legal story short, let us
observe that in the Kantian-Fichtean
universe, underlined both by the French
Revolution and, less blatantly, by the
American Revolution, the foundation of

Modern Age

381

LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

law became man himself. Building on the

Kantian precedent, Hans Kelsen in this
century eliminated natural law, arguing
that it is based on fictional norms, and
that positive law alone is valid because
it is founded on ad-hoc sociological currents and interests. In this view, Soviet
law was as valid (because internally coherent) a s any other legal system
founded on circumstances and precedents.
In recent years, however, the concept
of man as the subject of law has been
changing. Human rights have become
exclusive of all others: family, nation,
God. But more was to come. The horizon
of human rights is no longer circumscribed bythe individuals concretesituation-his membership in a nation, a
religion, a class, a profession-since the
human person himself is held to be indeterminate and tending t o transcend all
limits. In present legal thinking, mans
humanity consists in his capacity to tear
himself out of any definition. Denying

him his right to turn into anything (to

choose his lifestyle or his sexual orientation) is condemning him to remain what
he is and forbidding him to become what
his potentialityand choices suggest. The
unjust law is the one which confines the
individual within a nation, a race, a sex,
or a social function. In contrast, just law
assigns no limits to free growth.
We find in this recent evolution the
influence of philosophy from Kant to
Nietzsche t o Sartre: the human being
builds himself independently of other
factors (tradition, law, moral norms) and
chooses an existence which should by
no means rigidify as a destiny. There is
no human nature, no divine guidance, no
social limitation. Man is free, and as
noted earlier, auto-divinized. Obviously
the law is subordinate to him, and he
owes it nothing. It is not murder but
capital punishment that has become the
absolute criminal act.
-Thomas Molnar

Fall 1996

382
LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED