Making the Executed Virtuous?

In life, they were bastards. In death, can they be redeemed?

My colleague Graeme Wood makes the case that we ought to harvest the organs of convicts slated for execution. There turn out to actually be two separate issues here. One, though we do sentence people to be executed, we never force them to give up their organs. But more interestingly, it turns out that those sentenced to death aren't even able to volunteer to serve as organ donors post-execution.

This last bit doesn't seem defensible to me. On the other hand, it's just very hard for me to know how to conduct moral reasoning about what is and isn't a permissible modification of a practice that should not be permitted. In other words, given that we shouldn't be executing prisoners at all, I don't really know how to respond to ideas about what things it is or isn't a good idea to do with their organs. -- Matt Yglesias

Graeme is one cool dude, but it strikes me that a utilitarian approach to executed dead bodies makes for a creepy version of humaneness. There are a lot of problems with the way we do executions, but unlike Matt I don't have any reason why executions as such should be prohibited. And a portion of that posture includes the notion that part of the social punishment that goes along with execution -- part of the 'lesson to us all' that execution purports to supply us -- is 'wasting' the body of the executed, i.e., just burying it. Harvesting the organs raises the executed in our estimation -- if as 'renewable resources', if for no other reason. But nothing good should come from executions, I think. It helps keep their number down and their gravity solemn.

That said, I recognize this could strike a lot of people as weird too, and certainly there's no legal obstacle to retroactively squeezing some virtue and/or social utility out of capital offenders whom we march to their deaths. It does seem to me a hot ticket to warping and confusing the dreadful finality that ought to figure into any execution. But that's what politics is for.

Comments

[Matthew Stinson]

Gah. I would assume that unlike China, which has an organ-harvesting policy, people won't start advertising all over Texas for organ sales from the soon-to-be-deceased.