Many of us will be familiar with the "poophole loophole," the phenomenon of Christian teens who substitute anal sex for vaginal sex, the logic being that, so long as the hymen remains intact, so does the virginity. My reason for bringing this up isn't to poke fun at horny kids trying to get their rocks off while saving their souls from eternal damnation, although the mental gymnastics are something to behold (and probably something to be pitied). Instead, I want to draw attention to another such moral workaround. At least, I think it's a workaround - that's what I'm trying to suss out.
Social media means a deluge of unsought opinions about every topic under the sun, and a person can hardly spend two minutes scrolling through Facebook or Instagram without stepping knee-deep into an argument, usually eventuating in a comment (from the loser) to the effect of: "Yeah, I see your point, but have you considered that I was balls-deep in your mom last night?" Social media isn't just a shit-show, it's a shit-show in a fucking dumpster fire - not the usual stomping grounds of thoughtful and good-faith interlocutors. Just the same, I, like most other people, spend my fair share of time on social media. I do this because, in addition to cynicism and burnout, social media gives me some insight into our culture's socio-political landscape, and personally, I think it's a good thing when reality and I are on speaking terms, however unpleasant that might be.
By most people's standards, I would be considered leftwing, a judgment which is substantiated by the fact that my circle of acquaintances consists disproportionately of leftists, who, as a general rule, can't abide anyone who is further right than left-of-center. (Most days, they scant tolerate each other.) That said, I try not to let my opinions be dictated too heavily by ideological allegiances, and make a point to scrutinize my friends as thoroughly as my enemies. In that vein, I've observed a pattern of commentary emanating from the left in recent years, one which has piqued my interest, if not my approbation: that it is totally permissible, and maybe even more than permissible, to wish ill upon "bad people."
The political left has long been defined by values such as progressivism, egalitarianism, and fraternity, not at all the sorts of values one usually associates with sentiments as vengeful as the one I've just mentioned. Just the same, when Arizona senator John McCain III died in 2018 from a malignant brain tumor, the resounding sentiment among many leftists was not simply "Good riddance!" but "Good," period. John McCain was a warmonger, they reasoned, and he finally got his comeuppance. Similarly, when Donald Trump tested positive for coronavirus after his months-long denial and catastrophic mishandling of the pandemic, many leftists cackled in orgiastic glee. "Serves him right!" they said. "I hope he dies on a ventilator."
Charitable thinkers would likely interject to remind me that a person can wish for someone's death even without the desire for vengeance, and too right they would be to say so. In 1997, the state of Oregon enacted the Death with Dignity Act (the first of its kind, although several more states soon followed suit), which allows competent adults with a terminal illness to end their lives voluntarily, via the self-administration of a lethal medication prescribed by a physician for that purpose. The motivation behind this legislation was not vengeance, surely, but compassion, and a concern for the dignity of terminal patients experiencing intractable suffering. Could there be some analogue, then, between the aforementioned cases and this one?
Doubtless, an analogue is conceivable; just as it may be permissible to wish someone's death for their sake, it may also be permissible to wish someone's death for your own, or for the sake of others, as you might do if that person were holding your family captive and subjecting them to torture. When it came to foreign policy, McCain was a bit of a one-trick pony, for whom "throw some troops at it" always seemed to be the right answer. “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” he once parodied the Beach Boys, when asked how the U.S. should respond to Iran's nuclear ambitions. Indeed, one might wonder, did McCain ever meet a war that he didn't like? And then there's Donald Trump, who used the power of his office to undermine, suppress, and censor government scientists working to combat the spread of COVID-19. Among (many) other things, he admitted to purposefully misrepresenting the threat of the virus early in the pandemic, belittled social distancing policies, and even encouraged his supporters to protest state-issued lockdown orders.
Suffice it to say, both men put people's lives at stake, and since it's unlikely that either was on the verge of a come-to-Jesus moment, the notion that death is the only thing that could have stopped them in their tracks doesn't exactly strain the imagination. With this in mind, I am certain that some people who wished for the deaths of McCain and Trump were really only concerned with the lives that might be saved, were those deaths to come to fruition. I am doubtful, however, that those were the same people who had worked themselves into a sanctimonious froth on social media. Why, you ask? Because, whether we intend to or not, we wear our (sometimes) ugly little hearts on our sleeves.
Consider the following distinction: i) wanting someone dead provided that there are no better alternatives, and ii) wanting someone dead, full stop. In the former case, a person might have wished for the deaths of McCain and Trump on the condition that no better alternatives were available. Something like this happens, say, when vegan groups campaign for 'Meatless Mondays.' The idea here is that, while ethical vegans believe that you shouldn't eat meat, many of them also believe that reaching straight for the top shelf is a fool's errand, and so they urge non-vegans to at least reduce their consumption. What's important to note is that this strategy is compatible with the vegans' wish that people would abstain from meat entirely, just as you can wish someone's death but prefer that they would see reason. In the latter case, by contrast, a person would simply have wished McCain and Trump dead, without the additional wish that rational suasion were still on the table.
The question is, of which sort were the leftists in question: those whose desire for the deaths of Trump and McCain were conditioned on a lack of better options, or those whose desire was unconditional? If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on option two. Even our secret desires are evidenced in our actions, choice of words being no exception, and to my mind, what was revealed in the jubilation over McCain's death or Trump's contracting COVID was not the dual wish that these men would have died, barring them getting their respective shit together. Imagine, for instance, if one of the two had suddenly became a lightning rod for lefty politics - would the people who had been celebrating his untimely demise have felt a sudden relief that it didn't have to come to that? I'm skeptical.
Usually, when someone's death is not our choicest solution to a problem, we experience sadness, because we believe that in a better world, things might have gone differently: your mother's cancer might have gone into remission; your dog might not have been hit by that car; and so on. That sadness derives from our sense of tragedy, the sense that, were it not for some accident of fate, or some moral failure of a person or an institution, someone we love would still be with us. Mind you, I'm not demanding that anyone should love John McCain or Donald Trump, but I am arguing that anyone who desired their deaths only as political expedients, believing that nothing else would get the job done, really ought to have found that situation tragic and reacted with lamentation, or at least not jubilation.
So, perhaps the desire underlying all those death wishes really was something along the lines of vengeance, or a dark hope that Trump and McCain should get theirs. Is that so bad? It's a very human reaction, after all, and right-wingers seem to feel that way all the time! They even build their politics on that feeling...
...And that, right there, should probably set off some alarm bells, at least for those leftists who oppose the death penalty. Of course, plenty of people cite deterring homicide in defense of the death penalty, and a powerful defense it would be, if it worked. (There is no systematic evidence to suggest that it fares any better on this front than a life sentence, but that's beyond the scope of this blog post.) When we get down to brass tacks, retribution is the most commonly proffered defense for capital punishment, according to Pew polling data, and I have no trouble understanding its appeal. Hell, I listen to serial killer podcasts on a near daily basis, and I'm nowhere near saintly enough to refrain from thinking "Kill the bastard" every now and then, at least for the particularly egregious offenders. While this sentiment is no doubt accessible to most leftists, many of them have judged that it's best to oppose the impulse, on the grounds that revenge is not justice.
The usual opposition to punitive justice is either rehabilitative justice or restorative justice - the one aims to "fix" the offender by steering them away from their criminal lifestyle, and the other aims to "restore" the balance between victim and perpetrator by making the victim feel "whole" again. In either case, getting the perpetrator to acknowledge what they've done, and to be remorseful about it, is usually part of the agenda. I'll not get into the shades of grey between these and other, alternative positions, but I will say, if you're the sort who favors a rehabilitative or a restorative approach to criminal justice, including crimes against humanity, then wishing someone dead is irrational at best; just as dead men tell no tales, they also learn no lessons. But what harm is a vengeful albeit irrational wish, really, so long as you have no intention of pulling the retributive trigger?
To answer this question, I'll have to bust out my philosophy chops. (Alright. I don't have to, but I'm a peacock, and I want to.) I'll start by introducing the notion of a 'deontic constraint,' which is a prohibition against performing acts of a certain type, even when performing such an act would prevent more acts of that type from happening in the future. This may sound a bit highfalutin, but a simple example demonstrates the idea quite clearly: if the only way to stop someone from killing two people is to kill an innocent bystander yourself, commonsense morality says you ought not do it, suggesting a deontic constraint on killing innocent people. (Utilitarians, whose criterion of rightness is the maximization of collective happiness, will quibble, here, but whatever their quibbles, they assuredly won't be commonsensical.)
Given their intuitive appeal, deontic constraints have been taken up by many moral philosophers. Notably, however, deontic constraints apply to types of acts, not mere desires. The relevant dissimilarity between acts and desires is that most of our actions are volitional, which means that we do them of our own accord, through the power of our will. (Your "knee jerk" patellar reflex would be an example of a non-volitional action.) Desires, on the other hand, take place at the level of feeling or sentiment, and while we can often reflectively endorse or reject them, or try to habituate new ones, the philosophical consensus is that desires are incitements to volition, not volitions themselves. So, should desires be subject to things like deontic constraint or would that be a category mistake?
Many people find it hard to believe that wishing anything could be morally wrong. Philosopher George Sher, for example, describes the realm of thought as "a wild west of the mind," and argues that, so long we don't put them into action, our innermost fantasies, however dark and depraved, are none of morality's business. Myself, I think there's good reason to extend the range of the morally evaluable beyond what is volitional - the fact that we do make such judgments often and uncontroversially strikes me as a compelling reason to think that there's something morally evaluable there. Deontic concepts, like 'right' and 'wrong,' however, smack too much of moralistic finger-wagging for my liking. I prefer words like 'valuable' or 'admirable,' what philosophers call "evaluative concepts," which have a more palatable, aesthetic flavor; the latter terms deal with appraisals of worth and style, whereas the former deal with rules - mostly how you oughtn't break them. (Zzz...Zzz...)
We can perhaps see the distinction between the deontic and evaluative more clearly by way of a non-moral example, such as writing an undergraduate philosophy paper. The rules of philosophical writing require that all such papers contain a thesis statement, where the author makes an argumentative assertion that captures the paper's purpose. What really sets philosophy papers apart, however, is the clarity of the writing, and originality in both style and content. Thus, we have a deontic norm, namely that all philosophy papers must contain a thesis statement, as well as an evaluative norm, which is that great philosophy has an air of dignity about it. For undergraduate students who procrastinate and wind up burning the midnight oil the evening before a deadline, deontic and evaluative norms can be at odds, and the satisfaction of the former should take priority over the satisfaction of the latter; skipping the thesis statement would be tantamount to not writing a philosophy paper. Who cares, then, if you dispense with formulaic opener, "Since the dawn of time, man has wondered . . ."?
On the basis of this example, it is clear that deontic norms take precedence over evaluative norms. If you want to do something well, in other words, you must first do it right. Thus, in the case of the leftist of the relevant kind (an ORK, if you will), it seems to me as though they are at least abiding a deontic norm that is constitutive of their political commitments: if you're against retributive punishment, say, because you believe strongly in the redemptive power of humanity, or disbelieve the logic of "an eye for an eye," then you cannot abide the death penalty. What about the evaluative, though? Where does it fit into this pyschopolitical puzzle? The obvious answer, to my mind, is that evaluative norms come in where the deontic gives out: a person's way of doing what they do, which extends beyond, and may even come into conflict with, their intentions or rational will.
Oftentimes, what is most morally noteworthy about us is not our behavior but the complex play of energies - modes of thinking, feeling, seeing, and responding - that are quintessentially us, from and through which the dominion of our will flows. These might include a streak of meanness and a sadistic gratification from the suffering of others, or a deep and abiding sense of love, an openness to the world and all its inhabitants that isn't marred by petty smallness. What is at issue, then, in the vengeful desire of the ORK, as I see it, is the character of life from which that desire springs. You can reject the death penalty, but in lusting for blood, you seem to flout a certain evaluative norm that comes with your political commitments; you've done the right thing, but your heart isn't all in it.
In light of these considerations, we might say that it's wrong to be an ORK, but again, wrongness is deontic, and my goal here is not so much to dress down as it is to illuminate how this way of being is non-ideal, in comparison to other, alternative ways of being alive in and to the world qua leftist. Thus, I find myself reaching for a secondary moral vocabulary that is less to do with censure and more to do with the desirability of those configurations of self that human beings variously realize, what they enable and what they disable. Laying it on somewhat thickly, I'd rather say that, if you're an ORK, you're a bit of a hypocrite (zug-zug, indeed), and that should unsettle you.
The political left often stakes a claim to some kind of religion-free moral high ground, which, in this instance, strikes me as being rather funny, because the earnest desire for one's political opponents to be struck down by the forces of nature reminds me of nothing more than the imprecatory prayers of Christians, who ask God to smite their enemies.
Psalm 69:22-28
(28) Let them be blotted out of the book of the living; let them not be enrolled among the righteous.Of course, whereas Christians believe that God answers prayers, only woo-woos believe that nature does. The point remains, however, that although the individual, in each case, may not feel entitled to do the dastardly deed, both the Christian and the ORK are moved by the fervent hope that something strong and powerful will give their enemies their just desserts. The only real difference, here, from death penalty proponents, is that the latter regard the state as a legitimate vehicle for such punishment, which is probably too little difference for the kind of moral high-horsery that characterizes the left, especially when many of those death penalty proponents (to their credit and my horror) are exercising temperance in relinquishing that job to the state.
As Simone de Beauvoir observed in The Ethics of Ambiguity, the best way of evading other people's grievances against you is to simply pin the problem (e.g. patriarchy, white supremacy, whatever) on nature, because, while it may be red in tooth and claw, nature has no will, for good or for ill. And nor, moreover, does it represent the will of a constituency; people, on the other hand, do, and the state (allegedly) does. Thus, the question floating in my periphery is whether, deep down, ORKs oppose retributive punishment as wholly as they believe that they do, or whether they're just too squeamish to get their hands dirty, and so they hope for nature to do by accident what they cannot bring themselves to do deliberately. Might this be some bizarre form of psychological buckpassing? And if so, is it really "totally fine"? As one of my very best friends is apt to say: I'm not mad, I just want you to have better taste.