Penultimate Penalty
Anthony McCarthy on the Man Who Loses His Right to Life
Who made you? God made me. Why did God make you? God made me to know him, love him, and serve him in this world, and to be happy with him forever in the next. Succinctly and baldly, the first answers of the old Penny Catechism tell the Catholic child the purpose for which he is made.
He is, like every other child, made in the image of God, and has a transcendent end which defines the kind of being he is and orders his capacities. That end is a moral goal to be achieved through choices made in this life.
Defining Dignity
It is right to refer to “human dignity,” given man’s defining end. And even those who disbelieve in the existence of such an end will generally accept that there is something about the uniqueness of human nature that at least demands respect. Human rights declarations tacitly acknowledge this.
But what are we to make of Catholics such as Christian Brugger, who stated, in a contribution to a National Review Online symposium on the execution of Saddam Hussein, that “one’s bodily life, as intrinsic to human nature, possesses inalienable, godlike dignity. To intentionally kill a man is to will in a radical and determinant way against this immeasurable source of godlike dignity”?
He is not referring to direct attacks on unborn children, targeted bombing of civilians, and such like. Certainly, one may never take it upon oneself deliberately to kill an innocent human being. Brugger is, rather, making these statements in order to claim that inflicting the death penalty on a convicted criminal is necessarily—always and everywhere—morally wrong.
It may come as a shock to learn that capital punishment is to be included in the short list of actions that are always and everywhere wrong, like abortion, rape, adultery, and apostasy. For one thing, Christ himself apparently approved of its usage (Matt. 15:4; Mark 7:10; John 19:10), not to mention St. Paul (Acts 25:11; Rom. 13:4). For another, the Catholic Church teaches and has always taught that capital punishment is acceptable in certain circumstances, though the church has increasingly stressed the rarity of these circumstances (for example, in the Compendium of the Catechism [469], followed this February by a rather untraditional, though admittedly low-level, statement by the Holy See).
It is man’s end—that which his capacities are to realize—that gives him dignity. And it is right to say that this is written into his very nature: The capacities remain what they were created to be, and the goal is unchanging.
But it is, tragically, possible for man to choose freely against this goal. While man has an ontological dignity, given the kind of being he is, he also has a variable existential dignity—i.e., a dignity that is affected, for better or worse, by his freely chosen actions.
Deprived Man
Anthony McCarthy is the founder and director of Bios Centre and a visiting scholar in moral philosophy at the International Theological Institute in Trumau, Austria. He previously held the post of research fellow at the Anscombe Bioethics Centre in Oxford and holds degrees in philosophy from King's College London, University College London, and the University of Surrey. He has lectured widely and published on ethical issues for both academic and wider audiences.
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