Lecter, Werewolves, And Executions
If you've read Thomas Harris's novel The Silence Of The Lambs, or have seen the movie that was made from it, you're familiar with the character of Dr. Hannibal Lecter: the brilliant psychiatrist-turned-serial murderer and cannibal who entrances FBI agent Clarice Starling and coyly helps her to solve another serial murder case while contriving his own escape.
Have you ever pondered why, after all the gruesome crimes he'd committed, Dr. Lecter was still alive? Have you asked what kind of society would refrain from executing a man like that, and what its reasons might be?
Some, who misconceive the right to life and the nature of rights generally, argue that to execute a man is morally indistinguishable from murder. Others, less muddleheaded and more inclined toward utility, argue that an executed monster is useless to anyone, whereas a living monster kept safely confined may be studied, so that society might someday learn how to forestall others from committing comparable monstrosities.
When I ponder those arguments, I can't help but think of werewolf legends. The werewolf, a man who turns into an irrational, murderous beast under the light of the full moon, is a poignant fictional contrivance who presents a captivating contradiction to the reader. He is a moral actor when he is not a wolf. But when he's a wolf, he's a savage killer of enormous power, who nonetheless is not morally responsible for his deeds. What to do with such a creature?
None of the available choices is perfectly satisfactory. Kill him? But he's a man 90% of the time, and not responsible either for his condition or for what he does the other 10%. Confine him? But he's murdered all those people; what about their rights? And besides, 90% of the time he's not dangerous to anyone; how can we justify keeping him locked up then? Lock him up only when the moon is full? Can we guarantee that this will even be possible?
A modern thinker of humane impulses, zeroing in on the involuntary nature of the werewolf's condition, would propose studying him, and searching for a cure. He would argue that the risk taken by allowing the werewolf to live was an investment in the possibility of learning how to eliminate lycanthropy for all time.
What a good thing for the human race that there are no werewolves!
In a world where no one involuntarily turns into an irrational, murderous beast, can we justify keeping a man alive who has voluntarily become such? Is there a moral argument for not executing him, that doesn't proclaim an absurd moral equivalence between murder and social self-defense?
If so, it can only be the werewolf argument: study the monster, in the hope that we'll learn how to prevent the emergence of future monsters. Ask the victims to forgo vengeance, and assume some risk and expense today for the sake of a better tomorrow.
It's a sophisticated position. The only problem with it is that it's premised on intellectual arrogance and veiled totalitarianism.
The arrogance of it involves the idea that, even if there were some combination of hereditary and environmental factors which made a man susceptible to violence, we could separate those threads of causation from all the other influences in a man's life, and then spot them intertwining in a young person in time to do any good. Literally no theory about human development has shown enough predictive power to have fewer exceptions than successes. Why should a theory of violent crime be more accurate? Have our intellectuals covered themselves with glory in their attempts to rehabilitate even petty criminals?
The totalitarianism of it is threefold:
First, it steals from the victims their rights to retribution or restitution. For to whom has a murderer forfeited his rights? In a society that respects the individual, no one but the victims' heirs would hold the right to decree what should be done with a convicted murderer.
Second, even granting the possibility of learning what makes a man a monster, it supposes that the State could be trusted to supervise us all so minutely that it could see a monster developing and intervene in time.
Third, even if we allow the first two intrusions, it sets aside human free will, by defining a man who has experienced certain influences as a killer-to-be, thus denying that he might yet make himself something other than what we fear. It removes the killer from our common nature as moral actors and redefines him as a force out of legend: a werewolf.
I can see an argument for the mandatory execution of a convicted murderer, even if the victims' families were against it, on the grounds that "to stop short of that is to put the rights that he has deliberately forfeited above the public security." (H. L. Mencken) However, I cannot see an argument for rescuing the murderer from the vengeful desires of his victims' heirs, making a prize of him at public expense, and claiming to study him for the eventual improvement of the race. It smacks too much of Nazism.