So when is the last time you seriously thought about murdering anyone?  If you are like me, then the answer is an unequivocal: Never ! ! !  Throughout out, I leave aside the issue of revenge, which is an extremely powerful motivating factor and which is conceptually tied to the belief (however mistaken, ultimately) that one has been wronged. 

Now the interesting question is this: Why have you never seriously thought about murdering anyone?  Is that you have been too busy with other things such as studying or parenting or getting in shape?  Surely you have been outraged by this or that person.  Surely, you find some people utterly despicable.  I know that both of these claims are true of me.  We could now play the philosopher’s game of “What is meant by seriously thinking about murdering someone?”  So let me give you a very weak notion of thinking about the matter seriously.  Have you ever looked at that incredibly sharp butcher knife in your kitchen drawer and so entertained the thought of murdering so-and-so that you shuddered at the very idea that this notion had been so vivid in your thinking?  If you are like me, the answer is still an unequivocal: Never ! ! ! 

Well, a most interesting consideration to raise at this point is that very nearly all serial killers (who are not motivated in the least by revenge) were victims of considerable and sustained child abuse.  And the mark of serial killers is that they can be as calm and as calculating about killing as the typical person can be about following directions or saving money—more so, often enough.  Vicious and sustained child abuse quite naturally results in the truncation of the affective sentiments.  This happens as a means of survival on the part of the child, since the very person who is doing the child so much harm is the very individual who is supposed to being caring for and protecting the child.  So when it comes to killing others, there aren’t any of the affective sentiments to serve as an impediment to committing such atrocious behavior.  (We should really say "serial murderers".  While every murder is a killing, not every killing is a murder.  The 5 year old child who kills her sibling by accident while playing with a loaded gun that she found most certainly did not murder her sibling.  It is much more difficult to commit a murder by accident, though in murdering someone, it is easy enough to make the mistake of killing the wrong person.)

In any case, the fact about serial kilklers to which I have drawn attention tells us something rather profound, namely that if a child is raised in a loving parental environment, then the child’s emotional and psychological development will pretty much make it very difficult for the desire to murder to obtain a purchase upon her or his life.  But if this is true, then there is in fact a non-trivial connection between not having the desire to murder and psychological wholesomeness. 

There is, of course, a straightforward sense in which people, as free moral agents, are free to murder.  But freedom admits of many levels.  It is equally true that I am free to eat dog meat, but the odds of me just waking one morning and exercising that freedom is about as close to zero as one get without actually being zero, precisely because I am so psychologically disposed not to consume dog meat (given my upbringing in Western culture).  It would in fact take an awful lot to get me to eat dog meat.  Obviously, if the choice is between eating dog meat or (say) seeing my child murdered, then I will surely manage to eat the dog meat.  The point, though, is that it would take something of great magnitude.

An analogous claim about exercising the freedom to murder human beings holds for persons who as children were raised in a loving parental environment.  It would take something of great magnitude before the desire to murder could obtain a purchase upon their lives. 

At first glance, it might seem that the rise of murder in the world counts against the argument.  I suspect, though, that it is the other way around, namely that this unfortunate statistic counts in favor of the argument.  This is because you can probably count on your one hand and not move a single finger the number of people who were moved to murder someone simply because murder is on the rise.  That is, people do not approach murdering others rather like people approach trying a new food or item: “Well, so many people are eating or buying such-n-such, I might as well give it a try”.

I have picked one kind of very horrendous wrongdoing, namely murder and I have pointed out that there is congruence between being psychological whole and not being moved to commit murder.  This strikes me as a very, very good thing.  It would be most disconcerting if human beings generally had to struggle mightily in order to refrain from committing murder.   On the one hand, it strikes me as implausible that there is a like congruence between psychological wholeness and refraining from all wrongdoings.  On the other, it is far from insignificant  that this congruence obtains between with respect to psychological wholeness and not wanting to murder.

But why does anyone murder?  There are, atlas, too many reasons.  Just so, let me say this.  Human beings are quite fragile; accordingly, psychological wholeness is more difficult to come by than we are inclined to suppose.  Nor does it sustain itself no matter what, as the Nazi doctors of the concentration camps so poignantly illustrate.  As to the first point, parenting is a task whose difficulty far surpasses the ease with which human beings can find themselves in the situation of being parents.   Finally, it is possible to be functional in the sense of exercising means-end rationality and not be psychologically whole.  Indeed, the serial killer is a paradigm example of just this reality. 

For the record, I have not argued that all people become murderers if, as children, they were victims of vicious and sustained child abuse.  That is clearly false. 

In Living Morally (1989), I employed the notion of "being favored".  That horse A is favored to win over horse B does not entail that A will win the race, but only that given the conditions that pertain to horse racing, there is reason to believe that horse A is more likely to win than horse B.   All sorts of unforeseen variables can bear upon which horse in fact wins.  Persons who as children were raised in a loving environment are favored to be psychologically whole.  In turn, they are favored to be such that the desire to murder cannot obtain a purchase upon their lives.  By contrast, people who as children were the victims of sustained and vicious abuse are disfavored in this regard.    

I have a white student, whom I shall call Josephus, who has got me entirely beat when it comes to being culturally black.  Put the two of us in the middle of Black Street USA, and his “You know what” comes out smelling like a rose, whereas everyone would probably be wondering what on earth happened to me.  There is every indication that Josephus has both the respect of and the acceptance from blacks.  Yet, this remarkably bright guy noted that when he is in a car with blacks and they all singing a song, he will press the “racially sensitive” pause button if the word “nigger” is mentioned in the song.  That is, Josephus goes silent and then picks up the song again immediately after the word “nigger” has been uttered.  He mentioned that he does this out of respect for blacks.  I believe him, of course.  I am also deeply troubled by this reality.  For the record, not once did Josephus say the word "nigger".  Rather, the expression that he used was "the N-word". 

For all of its drawbacks, age gives one an extraordinary repertoire of memories.  Once upon a time, the word “black” when addressed to blacks—then referred to as Negroes or colored people—was tantamount to what the Supreme Court has referred to as a “fighting word”.  Suppose that you called a Negro a “mother f---ker”.  Well, you upped the ante considerably if you called the person a “black mother f---ker”.  The one thing no Negro wanted to be was black.  So whites who wanted to be verbally abusive of blacks had a choice: nigger or black. Thus, the transition from the terms “Negro” and “colored” to the term “black” is most impressive.   If, nowadays, a white wants to be verbally abusive to a black, the word “black” is simply not available to the person.  The very force of the word “black” as applied to black people was turned upside down, making it impossible for anyone to offend by using it; American blacks went from being ashamed of being called black to having pride in being called black.  An appropriation of the word "black" had taken place, which is one of the brilliant outcomes of the Civil Rights Movement.  Blacks wanted whites to use the word “black” as the term of reference, a point to which I shall return below.

This brings me to the word “nigger”.   With very rare exception, this used to be quite the offensive word, though the move from “nigger” to “black nigger” still upped the ante.  Time was when people wanted the word entirely expunged from the vocabulary.  With RAP, though, the term “nigger”, or this or that variation thereof (such as "nigga"), has been making a comeback.  The idea is to appropriate this word, and so to undermine its status as a racial invective.  Needless to say, I quite like that idea.  And this consideration brings me back to the student I am calling Josephus.

In recounting his story about singing along with blacks in a car, the one thing he did not say is that everyone asks him why he goes silent when it came to singing the word “nigger”.  Better: He gave no indication whatsoever that the blacks he is with think it silly of him not to sing the word “nigger” when it occurs in the song.  And therein lies the problem.  This is proof par excellence that blacks have not in their own minds succeeded in taking the sting out of the word “nigger”, no matter how many times this word appears in a song RAP. 

For if the goal is to eviscerate a word of its negativity with respect to blacks, then the very thing that one needs is for whites of known good will to use the world in its new sense.  If, for instance, the word “nigger” now means nothing more than “bad-ass” when said in certain contexts, then it has to turn out that in those contexts whites can use the word to mean precisely that.  True, it sometimes happens that a context is notoriously ambiguous between an acceptable use of a term and an objectionable use of a term.  But that cannot be true all the time.  It has to be that there are some clear well-defined uses of the term that are good.  So it is if blacks indeed are appropriating the term “nigger”.  If there are instances when one can be proud of being a “nigger”, then it has to be the case that a white does nothing wrong—indeed, the white does what is positively good—in acknowledging publicly that a black is a “nigger” in that particular context.  In fact, until whites can use the word “nigger” in that way, the appropriation has not succeeded.  For it has always been possible for blacks to use the word "nigger" in a positive way, as with the expression "my sweet nigger" said by a woman to husband.   

I remarked earlier that the transition from “Negro” and “colored” to “black” worked precisely because blacks wanted whites to use this as the term of reference.  White were encouraged to use the word “black”.  Alas, there cannot be a different track for the word “nigger”. 

Josephus, of course, was right to go silent on the first occasion that he was with blacks and the word “nigger” came about in a sing.  But the fact that he was not encouraged to sing along, and so to embrace the new way of using the word “nigger”, is dramatic proof that blacks are not as committed as they think they are to appropriating the word “nigger” and endowing it with a positive meaning.  Accordingly, it is no surprise that the word “nigger” can still very much be a very potent invective when used by blacks with respect to one another.  By contrast, whereas the term “black” was once upon a time an unequivocal invective when applied to blacks as a label, it is no longer that now.  To be sure, there are still awkward ways of using the term.  But anyone who really wants to insult a black these days would be far more successful using another term. 

The transformation that took place with the word "black" could take place with the word “nigger”.  So why isn’t it?  The answer, I am afraid, is a rather painful one, namely that far too many blacks still hold on to using the word in its pejorative way.  Thus, the expression “You mother f---king nigger” is still far too commonly used by many blacks to express rage towards one another.  Every black knows this; every white sufficiently familiar with the black culture knows this.  Josephus knows this.  What is more, his black friends in the car know this. 

It is not possible to have it both ways.  There is no such thing as partial appropriation.  Either the term "nigger" has a new clear and distinct meaning that anyone can use correctly and any such person can be seen as using correctly.   Otherwise, there has been no appropriation of the term.  Now, the most interesting question on the face of this earth is this: Why are so many blacks—blacks who claim to be at the forefront of black culture and advancement—not willing to allow a successful appropriation of the world “nigger”?  There is no more vividly racist word in the vocabulary of American English than this word.  Yet, the malleability of English is such that the word does not have to stay racist.  Proof par excellence is that there is an unequivocally positive use of the four-letter word beginning with “s” and ending in “t”.  The utterance “Man, you know something.  You are really the s---t” is nothing other than a complement.  If you want to criticize someone a difference utterance is necessary.  Just so, this utterance would simply have made no sense to my parents.  There is absolutely nothing I could have possibly said that would have put a positive spin on it in the eyes my parents.  Nothing!  But here we are with that utterance now having a clear and unambiguous positive spin.  So surely the word “nigger” can change for the better.  But, alas, whites will have to be a part of that change.  To think otherwise is to labor under a delusion.   

Harry F. Harlow’s classic and now controversial study of monkeys indicated that human beings are not the only social creatures on the face of the earth.  Monkeys deprived of warmth and social interaction become psychotic.  But human beings are social in a much more profound way.

A child who was treated morally in all the right ways, but who went unloved, is a child who would not, and could not, come to value herself or himself properly.  Nothing more fully bestows a sense of worth upon a new-born child than parental love.  As infants, we are born into this world without a sense of self and so without a sense of value.  And it is parental love, and nothing else, that at the outset makes it possible for us to have to have a proper sense of self.  Anything else will invariably miss the mark.  It is in virtue of being the unmistakable object of manifest parental love that we come to have a positive sense of worth, that we come to value ourselves as human beings.  Indeed, in the absence of parental love, no sense of worth could easily obtain a purchase upon our lives, including moral worth.  Thus, while there is no denying that morality is an intrinsic good, it is not first among intrinsic goods.  Parental love is.

Parental love and only parental love that generates in the child what I shall call a sense of cherished uniqueness not tied to invidious comparisons.[1]  When things go as they should, the child’s conviction that she is profoundly loved by her parents does not in any way require the belief on the part of the child that she is more loved by her parents than other children are loved by their parents.  Nor does parental love engender the sentiment that the child is better than other children.  Parental love does not engender these sentiments notwithstanding the fact that parents privilege their children and not the children of others.  Thus, the very nature of parental love is that it privileges without entailing invidious comparisons. 

Significantly, it is in virtue of parental love that the child experiences being treated morally not as a duty, but as an act of love.  Although every loving parent is deeply motivated to treat her or his child in all the morally right ways, the springs of that motivation are most surely not morality itself.  Most assuredly, it is not for the sake of duty, to use Kant’s own language, that good parents do what is right by their children.  Thus, parental love challenges Kantian morality in a very deep, deep way.  For there is at least one category of the person, namely that of a child, who should be treated morally where the ultimate motivational basis for such treatment should not be morality, but love itself.  To the child’s question, “Why do you love me so,” there is simply no satisfactory way to complete the answer with “It was my moral duty to do so”.  Again, the majestic power of parental love lies in its giving rise to a sense of cherished uniqueness in the child without invidious comparison.

I remarked above that parents privilege their children.  Morality, by contrast, does not privilege one person over the other.  That is from the standpoint of morality, we all stand as equals vis à vis one another.  Morality, by its very nature, is not person-specific.  Everyone should be treated properly.  Not just tall people or people who do not need to wear eyeglasses or wealthy people.  Not just so-and-so next door or up the street or across town.  Even unjust people should be treated properly. 

Morality is about how any and everyone should be treated in the relevant circumstances.  Accordingly, if a given feature makes a difference for one person, then morality requires that this very same feature make a difference for all other persons similarly situated.  For example, if being near death owing to starvation morally excuses Rachel’s act of stealing a bit of food in order to stay alive, then this consideration morally excuses everyone so situated from so behaving.  Indeed, morality cannot privilege a person as such, but only the particularities of a person’s circumstances.  Thus, insofar as Rachel is justified in stealing, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that she is Rachel, but with the fact that she is near death owing to starvation. 

Recall Thomas Nagel’s remarkable essay, The Possibility of Altruism.[2] He reminds us that according to the moral point of view, each person counts for no more than one among others.  The egoist, Nagel observes, wants to count for more than one among others.  That is, she wants to hold that her concerns are more important than the concerns of others because and only because the concerns are hers.  Nagel argues that a person is guilty of conceptual confusion if she thinks that her concerns count for more than the concerns of others just because they are his concerns.  A person cannot have any rational grounds for thinking this.  Each person counts, but no more than any other person.  Hence, as a purely structural matter cherished uniqueness has no place in the moral point of view.  Indeed, a conception of morality that embodied the view that cherished uniqueness holds for some individuals would not on Nagel’s account be a conception of morality at all.

The preceding remarks might shed some light on the universal appeal of becoming a parent.  For parenting allows for the very real hope of doing something morally majestic whatever one’s station in life might be, just so long as the bond between parent and child remains stable and wholesome.  The poor or uneducated person can have this hope as much as the wealthy or the scholarly.  Indeed, even if we take it as a given that God exists, it remains true nonetheless that not even God’s love, nor therefore God’s law, can be a substitute for parental love.  If there are any sublime truths in this world, this is surely one of them.  Alas, this is also a reason why parenting should be taken so seriously.  For as Sigmund Freud observed in his work Civilization and Its Discontents (albeit with a different aim in mind): Insofar as human beings have the opportunity to approach being God-like, there is no gainsaying the truth that parenting is it ! ! ! 

_______

These remarks are an except from chapter 1, entitled “Uniquely Valued,” of my forthcoming book The Family and the Political Self (Cambridge University Press, December 2005).  In my first book, Living Morally (Temple University Press, 1989) I referred to parental love as transparent, because parents are disposed to love their children regardless of the intellectual and physical features that their children possess. 

The contemporary mindset that is associated with liberal thought seems to be of the view that if something is enjoyable and it does not harm anyone, then there is nothing morally wrong with doing it.  And where two people are involved, the only addition is that there be mutual agreement between them.  So while I may not like S & M sex, the idea seems to be that if two people are comfortable with it, then there is nothing to be said against their engaging in such behavior.  Let me refer to this line of thought as the no-injury thesis.  I shall challenge the validity of this thesis.  It is despicable that people do some things even if ne’er a person is harmed.  Needless to say, this line of thought is very Kantian.  However, I also think that Mill would subscribe to it as well.  He distinguished sharply between what the law should proscribe and what good-minded people should aspire to do.  On the one hand, Mill thought that human beings should aim for excellence; on the other, he thought that there were limits to what the law should require in this regard.  Holding the latter view is compatible with not embrace the no-injury thesis.  Mill did not think that anything a person does is morally acceptable just so long as no one was harmed by the behavior. 

It wasn’t too long ago when very few accepted the no-injury thesis.  Once upon a time, the following remarks had considerable force “Have you no shame?”  Invariably, this utterance meant that there was something morally unsavory about the character of what one had done or what one was contemplating doing.  One did not diffuse the charge with the retort: “No body is harmed”.  So, for instance, parents could say to their child “You ought to be ashamed of dressing like that,” without supposing for a moment that injury to anyone followed in the wake of the attire the child adorned.  The child understood the from the outset that it was irrelevant that the attire did not harm anyone.  While it may be true that, in the past, dressing like a tramp applied more to women than men, it was certainly possible for a man to dress like a tramp. 

Nowadays, of course, the charge of dressing like a tramp seems all but completely out of place; for it is intoned that a person has the right to dress as she or he wishes without any form of harassment from others, it being understood that how a person dresses cannot be said to cause injury to anyone at all.  So the words “You ought to be ashamed of yourself for dressing like that” stand as nothing more than a social relic of a past era—at best a cute anachronistic phrase.  The no-injury thesis now enjoys widespread acceptance. 

But the possibility of virtual reality scenarios reveals that the no-injury thesis is far less defensible than is commonly supposed these days. 

Suppose that Opidopo likes virtual reality scenarios of pedophilia or virtual reality scenarios of rape (or both).  And suppose further that he has considerable self-discipline; hence, it is absolutely out of the question that he himself would ever commit an act of pedophilia or rape.  Indeed, he rightly thinks that it is wrong for anyone to behave in these ways.  Yet, he cannot wait to get home in order to set back and enjoy a cold beer and view virtual reality scenarios of pedophilia or rape.  Since we are talking about virtual reality scenarios, then it is a conceptual truth that there is no one being harmed in these scenarios.  Furthermore, since Opidopo is not at all inclined so to behave, then he is not making himself worse off from the standpoint of exhibiting the right sort of behavior.  Opidopo’s watching these virtual reality scenes has no spill over into his life at all. 

My examples thus far have pertained to sex.  But we need not limit ourselves to examples of this nature.  Suppose that Opidopo really enjoys virtual reality scenes of ethnic oppression.  He truly enjoys watching one ethnic group oppress another in all sorts of ingenious ways.  To be sure, in his daily life Opidopo is one politically correct individual.  Ne’er an ethnic slur issues from his lips.  Nor would he ever think to treat individuals of this or that ethnic group unjustly.  But once more: he just loves downing a cold beer and viewing a virtual reality scene of ethnic oppression. 

This brings us back to the no-injury thesis, which reads thusly: anything a person does is morally acceptable just so long as no one is harmed by the behavior.  Well, if anything is true, it is true that there are some virtual reality scenarios that a person should find utterly repulsive.  I should that it manifestly obvious that it is absolutely appropriate to say to Opidopo “Have you no shame in taking delight in virtual reality scenarios of this sort?”  I hold that Opidopo is morally disfigured with respect to imaginative empathy.  And this truth is not in any way vitiated by the other truth that no one is harmed by his viewing the virtual reality scenarios that I have described. 

Now, I must acknowledge that moral disfigurement with respect to imaginative empathy is a kind of injury.  Interestingly, though, defenders of the no-injury thesis do not have this sort of injury in mind, precisely because the behavior does not have any spill over in terms of having a deleterious impact upon social interactions.  Precisely my point, however, is that the utterance “Have you no shame?” can be appropriate even when there is absolutely no adverse spill over whatsoever in terms of social interaction.   

The death penalty excites much debate.  Of course, as everyone knows, the application of the death penalty has been very arbitrarily applied in the United States—being applied more to the poor than to the rich and more to non-whites than to whites.  It is a given that no law should be applied arbitrarily and capriciously.  It is not a given, however, that the death penalty must be applied arbitrarily and capriciously.  So this line of attack is not an in-principle objection to the death penalty; whereas the two objections that follow are in-principle objections.

Another line of attack is the charge of inconsistency.  It is said that by invoking the death penalty the state is committing precisely the wrong that its citizens are asked refrain from committing.  But if one takes seriously the difference between innocence and non-innocence seriously, as surely we all should, then this objection cannot be quite right.  Whether it is the state or the citizens of the state, we should all refrain from taking innocent life.  A person that willfully murders another person thereby ceases to be an innocent person.  It is further understood that no criminal should be put to death without a fair trial, which is another reason why citizens should not take the matter into their own hands.  So there is inconsistency in having the death penalty for criminals and asking citizens to refrain from killing innocent individuals.  None whatsoever.  And the importance of a fair trial serves as yet a further restriction. 

The third objection to the death penalty that I wish to consider is the claim that all human life is sacred.  But let’s see: if the only way that the parents could stop a 260 pound man who is a master at the martial arts from raping their 13 year old child is to kill the rapist, I cannot imagine that the parents would refrain from doing so.  Their killing the rapist would at least be excusable, if not in fact justified.  The example is crass.  However, the point of it is to show that the thesis that life is sacred becomes absurd if we understand the thesis to mean that there are never any conditions under which a person may be killed owing to criminal behavior.  I could have relied upon self-defense, but that would have been too easy.  Not only that: if life is sacred, then a person does what is wrong in choosing to end her or his own life owing to being infirmed.  I mean no one would dare say either that being infirmed makes life less sacred or that the sacredness of life does not apply when one takes one’s own life. 

I understand all too well that rarely is it necessary to kill a person in order to stop the individual from committing a heinous crime.  But the thesis that is unlikely that one should ever have to kill in order to prevent a heinous crime such as rape is not to be confused with the thesis that should that possibility arise it would be wrong to kill the culprit. 

I have not established that the state should enforce the death penalty.  Rather, I have considered three objections against it: one practical objection and two in-principle objections; and I found them wanting.  Various forms of these arguments can be at the blog site “Abolish the Death Penalty”, which is the offical blog of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP).  David Elliot (delliot@ncadp.org) is a key figure in the organization.

Undoubtedly, the more powerful in-principle objection to the death penalty is the view that all human life is sacred.  Significantly, though, this very powerful thesis does not do the work that people want it to do.  One can think that life is sacred and still hold that there are circumstances under which it is appropriate to take the life of a criminal.  Insofar as the thesis is defensible, the very idea that life is sacred has to mean that there are very severe restrictions that apply when it comes to the permissibility of taking human life. 

This brings me to Michael Ross (rapist and murderer of at least 4 young women) and Jerry Hobbs (the alleged murderer of his own 8 year-old daughter and her 9 year-old friend).  I see nothing dehumanizing about applying the death penalty to these two individuals.  Vigilante justice might very well be dehumanizing.  But insuring that these two individuals are given a fair trial and then applying the death penalty to a verdict of guilty does not incline me to think of a society of individuals driven by rage and vengeance.  Quite the contrary, there is something quite majestic morally about insuring a fair trial for individuals reported to have behaved so heinously.  A society whose citizens insure this shows itself capable of considerable moral excellence that is not at all tarnished by the application of the death penalty.  To deny this is to be utterly disingenuous. 

Once more, I have not established that the death penalty should exist.  On the other hand, I have shown that being for the death penality does not, on that account alone, make a person the moral monster that opponents of the death penalty are disposed to say that such an individual must be.   The death penalty is neither a conceptually nor a morally incoherent response to heinous wrongdoings.