Leftist Moral Confusion, or the Difference Between Justice and Vengeance

The last post, and recent events, have made me want to speak out on this a bit. Yesterday on Law & Order, several episodes in a row dealt with the death penalty and the morals associated with it. One thing I consistently noted was that the self-admittedly liberal legal team kept referring to the death penalty as the state's revenge on murderers. This set off a subconcious alarm in my mind: has pragmatism become so established in our society that we can't even refer to something so bold as the death penalty in terms of moral right and wrong?

To the conservative who views morals as objective universals, this is all wrong. The death penalty isn't revenge; it is justice. We don't legislate that a murderer be put to death because we believe that the people have a right to their vengeance. We legislate that a murderer be put to death because justice demands it! This isn't about what works; this is about what is fundamentally right. Who declares the rules of justice? To Christians, like myself, it is God.

I can finally understand some of the reasons why the liberal masses oppose the death penalty. On a pragmatic scale of statistics, the death penalty may or may not reduce the annual number of violent crimes. It might also fail on occassion and execute an innocent person. If pragmatism were our only criteria for judgment, I can see their side of things. But pragmatism fails to impress me (for many reasons!) and it is only useful as to how we implement the machine of justice, not whether we implement it or not. Contrary to the leftist worldview, we do live within a system of morality that is greater than ourselves and that is delegated to us by a higher power. We don't choose whether or not to execute certain criminals because we did a socio-economic study, we execute murderers because it is right and just.

Take this recent scenario of the Amish school shootings. If this person had not killed himself and was arrested instead, I believe that he should have been put to death for his crimes. Not because it would deter future crimes (although we can hope that it will), not because the families deserve vengeance against their attacker (although we mourn their loss and understand their anger), not because he would kill again if released (although he probably would), but because it is right and just for him to be put to death. Justice demands it whether we like it or not. Our individual desires do not dictate or alter the standard of justice.

Take another topic: abortion. The left side of the argument likes to frame this debate in terms of pragmatic scenarios: "what about rape, incest, or the risk of a mother's life?" The right side of the argument speaks in terms of right and wrong: "it is wrong to kill a child". The left can even justify aborting a "less than perfect" child, such as a child with severe defects, because their pragmatism allows them such a decision.

On top of it all, the two sides can rarely communicate. The left's pragmatism is just as confusing to many conservatives as the right's objectivism is to many liberals. We're talking two completely different languages and living in two completely different worldviews. This dichotomy can be easily applied to a multitude of divisive issues that separate the two camps.

I am pessimistic about the future of this argument. As we are growing to see in our political races, this is going to come down to who has more support. Cooperation between such radically different camps is hard to imagine. No wonder both sides can nearly deify their prospective leaders; the other candidate looks more like a fool from a different world than an equally valid choice.