"My opposition to the death penalty does not stem from an anodyne commitment to non-violence in the abstract. It stems from my understanding that if we give the state or any abstraction of commensurate scale, the right to decide matters of life and death, whether for punitive or for any other reasons, then we have actually ceded away our own sovereignty and autonomy as individual human beings. The phrase ‘collective conscience’ troubles me profoundly because it is based on a conceptual sleight of hand. Conscience can only be an individual matter, the fiction of ‘collective conscience’ means nothing. The proof of this is simple, my conscience does not permit a justification for the state taking life away, so no ‘collective conscience’ argument can accommodate my individual conscience, hence, it cannot have the legitimacy to act on my behalf. And yet it is precisely this legitimacy to act on my behalf and your behalf that is invoked in arguments that begin and end with the alliterative ring of ‘collective conscience’."
Posted on: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 16:48:18 +0000