2266 The efforts of the state to curb the spread of behavior harmful to people's rights and to the basic rules of civil society correspond to the requirement of safeguarding the common good. Legitimate public authority has the right and duty to inflict punishment proportionate to the gravity of the offense. Punishment has the primary aim of redressing the disorder introduced by the offense. When it is willingly accepted by the guilty party, it assumes the value of expiation. Punishment then, in addition to defending public order and protecting people's safety, has a medicinal purpose: as far as possible, it must contribute to the correction of the guilty party
2267 Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.
If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.
Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm - without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself - the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically nonexistent."
-- Catechism of the Catholic Church
First of all, the subject of this post is actually quite different from my other posts on the death penalty, which were about the death penalty as an idea, regardless of whether it were ever carried out or not. Here we are talking about executions that actually occurred. The question is, should they have?
First, let's look at this from the perspective of the operative virtues. Did the executions respect justice? That is, were the guilty parties really guilty of crimes so serious that they merited death? I don't think there can be any doubt that the answer is YES.
Was mercy operative in the executions? Although there will be some who think it is a mercy that the terrorists were not tortured the same way ISIS tortures its victims, again I think the answer is clear, and this time it is NO. However, the requirement for mercy is not of the same nature as the requirement for justice, and sometimes it will not be possible to be merciful.
The state must not show forbearance when the virtue of prudence shows that this would grossly violate its obligation to the public. Would it have been dangerously irresponsible for the Jordanian government to have simply continued to hold the terrorists in prison? That is hard to say. The main consideration is not what the individuals already in custody might do, but rather what their allies still under arms might do. Those allies are unlikely to be intimidated by the executions, and an escalation in the conflict between Jordan and ISIS seems unavoidable, but a failure of Jordan to (among other things) carry out the executions would likely have been taken as a sign of weakness promising future ISIS successes, and that could be very dangerous -- particularly regarding the ability of ISIS to attract and retain supporters and recruits.
In other words, this appears to be a case of achieving war aims by killing people who have in fact committed crimes meriting death. War is not inherently evil, particularly if you have expansionist psychopaths with stated plans of world domination on your border and they have already invaded a neighbor. If it is not necessarily wrong to effect the deaths of soldiers guilty of nothing but being on the opposite side, so long as the rules of a just war are observed and it is done to achieve important military goals, surely it is not necessarily wrong to achieve similar goals by killing those who actually deserve to die.
Interestingly enough, although both war and capital punishment are explicitly treated in the Catechism, this sort of overlap is not.
Some of the arguments for the existence of God as a First Cause depend on the assertion that there can be no infinite regress of causes. It is safe to say that although such an assertion is plausible, it is not self-evident. I thought it would be just as well to attempt to construct an example. My attempt fails, but it is an interesting failure (at least to me).
The idea is this: Achilles throws his spear, which we will take to be made of continuous, infinitely divisible matter. (Sorry Democritus!) In making his through, he obviously does not hold the spearhead directly; he holds the spear by somewhere near the middle of the shaft, but the push of his hand is ultimately responsible for the motion of the spearhead. Ultimately responsible, but not directly responsible! We can divide the shaft between his and and the spearhead (of length L) into halves: Achilles pushes the first half, the first half pushes the second half, and the second half pushes the spearhead. We can divide this again, so that now we have quarters: Achilles pushes the first quarter, which pushes the second quarter, which pushes the third quarter, which pushes the fourth quarter, which pushes the spearhead. We can continue, a la Zeno, to divide the shaft indefinitely, but each time we do, there remains a well-defined chain of causes, with the last piece (ending at distance L) being pushed by the penultimate piece (ending at distance (1 - 2-N)L). Isn't this an example of an infinite regress?
Well, no. It is a finite regress of arbitrary length, and no one has ever had a problem with finite (though long) regress. We are safe as long as the number of divisions of the shaft is an arbitrarily large but finite number, but what happens if we do what the Greeks would never feel comfortable in doing and "complete" the infinity of divisions? Then the last piece, at distance L, will be pushed by the penultimate piece at distance (the largest rational number less than 1)L. But there is no such thing as "the largest rational number less than 1".
Of course, another way to avoid a first cause is to have a closed causal loop. Those may be possible in General Relativity, but it is highly doubtful that they can describe the universe as a whole. Worse, although the cause of each element in the loop may be well defined, the loop as a whole seems very ... artificial, a thing even more unsatisfying and in need of an explanation than a chain of events going back into the infinite past (with apologies to the Big Bang).
Last night I dreamed that there were huge carvings on the surface of the moon. They were similar in style to the Elgin Marbles, but each figure was at least 1 mile high, and were easily visible from Earth through sufficiently powerful telescopes. Although there were heroes, centaurs, etc., the carvings did not correspond to any known characters or stories from any mythology; I had the vague feeling these might correspond to a mythology from the age of the Titans, before Zeus overthrew his father. There was an accompanying inscription in very old Greek; a few people could read it, but I never found out what it said. The whole display was clearly meant to be seen from Earth. Naturally enough, there was a mission planned to visit the carvings in the hope of learning something about how they had been made, whether this meant that people had once lived on the moon and it once had (surprisingly) an atmosphere, etc.
My dreams are still better than SyFy made-for-TV movies.
Lately I've been watching the series of YouTube videos put out by Stanford University in which Leonard Susskind lectures about string theory and M-theory. He really is an excellent lecturer, so even though I have had little cause to use advanced quantum mechanics over the past two decades, let alone particle physics or string theory, it's easy to follow his lectures. (They are not lectures for the general public, though, because they do require having had at some time a pretty good background in physics, but they are OK for an advanced undergrad or someone who is very rusty.)
I have tended to be a skeptic regarding superstrings, mostly because it is too often presented to the general public in exactly the same way ancient Greek philosophers presented their physics theories: long on an appeal to what a beautiful idea it is, but almost completely lacking any evidence from experiment or observation. That is very bad form for a scientist! It hasn't helped that some of the theory's proponents have even suggested that perhaps it is the ONLY possibility, so that "God had no choice" but to build a universe out of superstrings -- a statement that is at least borderline blasphemous and which displays a mind-boggling absence of imagination. Happily, though, the actual science behind string theory is not quite so muddle-headed as the popularizations.
One thing that is still surprising, though, is how reliant string theory seems to be on physics that is backed up mostly by our experience with molecules, atoms, and nuclei. In particular, Susskind starts off with a string of masses connected by springs, considers that string in a reference frame in which it is moving close to the speed of light, then applies the standard techniques to quantize it. This is all pretty basic stuff, very similar to what is used in the Debye model of a generic crystal. The only thing is, he wants this to apply all the way down to the Planck scale.
To me that seems to be unjustified optimism. Quantum mechanics has of course been phenomenally successful in explaining or predicting all kinds of phenomena, but there are, after all, a number of foundational problems about it, and it requires a huge jump to go from they physics of hadrons and mesons to the Planck scale. Somehow, it seems likely to me that along the way, we will have to replace Quantum Mechanics itself with something new that will be even weirder. Quantum Mechanics would remain as a "low energy" approximation for whatever comes next, just as Newtonian Mechanics remains as an approximation for Quantum Mechanics.
Like most people, I suspect, my dreams come in different kinds. Some of them are like short stories, and if I remember enough details these can be quite interesting. Many are like a confused movie, except that the confusion is usually not noticed until I wake up. In yet other dreams the main character really does seem to be much more identifiable as "me", partly because the people with whom the character interacts are often family or friends, or because the places the character visits are places I have been, and partly because he thinks much the same way my waking self thinks.
The fact that this dream self thinks so much like me makes the differences all the more interesting.
One thing that stands out is that at some level -- something like the subconscious of my dreaming self -- I know that I am dreaming. I do not have lucid dreams, but in some cases I end up debating with myself whether I can disregard an unpleasant event because it is just a dream or whether I am just in denial. This happened twice over the past week: in one dream I had accidentally backed my truck into a car behind me, and in another I was hunting with a friend (not anyone my waking self recognizes) and got into trouble both for shooting a moose on private property without the landowner's permission and for discharging a firearm too close to the road. The fact that I have never hunted nor lived in a place with moose makes that second dream particularly strange. I tend to wake up shortly after beginning to suspect that I am dreaming.
Geography is very confused in my dreams. I know the layout of the US states pretty well -- the main mistake I am likely to make is confusing Vermont and New Hampshire. Maps in my dreams are horribly confused. The distances are much reduced, with the cities that are landmarks on my drives each lying about one hour or less from its neighbor, and the roads are much more north/south and east/west than in reality. In my dreams, a good day's road trip would be from Tuscaloosa up into Indiana, then over to New Jersey and down to Philadelphia. In the real world this would be a trip of about 1300 miles; in my dreams it is more like 250 miles, and I seem to have made many such trips just of the heck of it. (Update 1/19/15: Last night I dreamed my dad had driven to Detroit and back as part of a long day's work, and the round trip took him 8 hours. In the real world it would have taken 32 hours.)
When I was a student I used to dream that I was studying for the test that was (in the real world) coming up the next day. I would try to read from my textbook, but it was impossible to focus on it, either visually or mentally. This usually happened just as it was time to get up, and eventually I realized I needed to wake up because the fuzziness of the textbook was a dead giveaway.
Something similar happens when I try to do math in my dreams. For instance, just last night I dreamed I was talking to someone about the manganese nodules on the seafloor (why we would be talking about this, I have no idea), and he suggested that there were only a few thousand of them. I knew that was much too small a number, but all my efforts to make an order-of-magnitude estimate were frustrated, even though I used dream paper to try writing it out. I made all kinds of mistakes: I mixed up the formula for the volume with the formula for the area,
even though I knew I was doing something wrong; I estimated the oceans to cover half the earth, rather than 70%; and I used 4000 km as the radius of the earth, when it is 4000 miles. I also estimated one nodule per square kilometer of ocean, but I knew that would be a generous lower bound. I can do a calculation like this in my head in just a few seconds while awake, but it was quite beyond me while asleep.
The weird thing is that once, back in high school, I went to bed knowing there was a serious problem with the proof for a theorem I was trying to prove. At about 3 am, I woke up knowing what the solution was to my difficulty, so I got up and wrote it down. Somehow I had solved the problem in my sleep. Sadly, this seems to have been a once-in-a-lifetime event.
Well, no. This is just a stupid trick of the light on some blank DVDs I had on my much-too-messy desk. Still, I can kind of make out two eyes and a nose.
What's really sad/funny is that this is actually as good as or better than many of the "ghost photos" one can find on the Internet.
Wednesday will mark the 69th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, which, together with the bombing of Nagasaki, killed well over a hundred thousand civilians. That was according to plan; the bombings were intended to make it blatantly obvious to the Japanese that the war was unwinnable and the cost was unthinkable, so that they would promptly surrender. If this was not terrorism, nothing is terrorism. Please do not pretend that the target was a ball-bearings plant.
This much is generally conceded, but it is argued that it was the better of only two alternatives. The other possibility was a D-Day-style invasion that was expected to result in a million American casualties, with even larger numbers of Japanese military and civilians killed. It is easy to say that we must not do evil that good may result, it is argued, but if doing evil saves over three million lives, then the evil must be done.
But were these the only two possible alternatives? Actually, there was another choice available -- one that is so much more shocking than the deliberate slaughter of 100,000 civilians that it is overlooked: admit that the president of the United States had made a mistake.
Franklin Roosevelt had insisted that the surrender of the Axis powers must be unconditional, and Churchill and Stalin had agreed. This was in no small part bravado, which was necessary in the early part of the war, but it was also intended to make sure that the defeat of the Axis would be unambiguous. The Allies did not want a repeat of the claim that Germany had not lost the First World War in the field, but rather was betrayed by cowards well behind the front.
Look at this from the perspective of the Japanese, though. What could unconditional surrender mean, other than that if they knew what the Allies had in mind they would never surrender? It would have been easy for them to imagine atrocities; all they had to do was remember how they had treated China and Korea. The Japanese tendency to commit suicide rather than surrender was only partly a matter of honor; there was also a very practical fear of how the defeated were made to suffer. What terrible things could the Allies have in mind that they were not willing to declare?
Of course, the reality was far milder than anyone, Japanese or American, could have imagined. Tojo was hanged, as were a few others, but Japanese war criminals were pursued with nothing of the gusto applied to the hunt for German war criminals. Japan surrendered the right to wage war, but a small self-defense force was retained. Hirohito abandoned the claim to divinity, but both his life and his office were spared. The occupation forces were well-disciplined, and Japan was welcomed as a trading partner and ally, leading to greater prosperity than at any earlier point in Japanese history.
What if the Japanese had been told what lay in store for them? Would they have stubbornly insisted on continuing to fight, regardless of the costs? Probably not: even before the atomic bombs were dropped, about half the Japanese cabinet favored surrender.
Would this have allowed Japanese militarists to insist that Japan had not "really" been beaten? Possibly, but that kind of person will make outrageous claims no matter what the facts may be. The German perception that their armies had not lost World War I in the field had less to do with the rise of the Nazis than the terms of surrender and (above all) the Great Depression.
Americans have always had too great a tendency to deify our presidents, and FDR was an extreme example. This often comes at a cost. Let us pray that we never again consider the reputation of a president to be worth more than a hundred thousand civilian lives.
