ON DEATH PENALTY
(Rodrigo Peñaloza, Feb. 2014)

Deep within, in the imperscrutable holds of our spiritual reminiscences, lie the wreckages of our ancestral struggle against the only pair of forces that crush us from outside in: the destructive force of Nature and the destructive force of Man.

We unfolded Science only to cope with the former or at least to outlive her assaults and make the most out of her for the sake of the common good. We have nevertheless not been capable of rightly making sense of the things we have done to overbear the destructive force of Man. I allude specifically to the battles we have engaged in against tyranny in favour of Right, Justice, and Thruth.

The lives of many women and men of value, mowed off by the cold steel of the jacobine blade, reaped either by the subtile persecution of ecclesiastical tyranny or by the brute force of political dictatorships, were willingly sacrificed on behalf of the greater idea that the Natural Right of Man antecedes the Positive Right of Nation. This is our fundamental fight in the civil field. We fight tyranny because we understand that the State, in its role of organizing and regulating the relations within the civil community and the participation of it in the law of nations, must not, in spite of all, be ascribed the divine power that must be ascribed to Nature herself only. Life is a concession of Nature, hence divine. Life is a natural right and it is not up to the State to dispose of it at will. It is not true that the State may or must enforce the laws it wrote, even if agreed upon by the consensual will of its own citizens in a social contract, since the limits of the Positive Right are to be determined by the Natural Rights, which, diffuse as they are, are nevertheless natural and consonant with the dictates of Reason.

Our fellow idealists of the past moulded the concept of Civilization of which, on the one hand, we are proud of and against which, on the other hand, we throw the stones of our own intellectual incoherence. Civilization is nothing else than the principle that the State is not divine. What is tyranny if not a divinized State? If we accept the divinization of the State, we hand over to it the right to dispose of human life just like Nature disposes of the lives of beings. Our fight put the State down to its right place, the realm of human institutions, and subjected it to the Natural Right, as was beautifully made binding by the men who conceived of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America when they wrote, on the steps of talented thinkers from Socrates to Hobbes to Locke to Edmund Burk: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.

The submission we owe to the laws of the country does not impede us from appraising, with the tools of Reason we are perennially urged to use, its moral value and its correspondence to the higher principles we defend. Therefore, for the man who considers himself a true Liberal, it is definitively not coherent to accept that the State enforce its laws by massacring natural rights, under the argument that the State can write any laws it wishes and enforce them under the applause of citizens, as if these laws should not, from the very beginning, comply with the principle that the State shall not be divine! For the true Liberal, it is not coherent to approve of death penalty levied by the State on the criminal and joke on such despicable death by saying that the criminal knows what he or she does anyway, and that “good criminal is dead criminal”, forgetting, as it seems, that, for the true Liberal, denying the divine character of the State is the most elementary principle. Liberalism is not just the idea of Liberty, it is the idea of Liberty as a Natural Right, and this seems to be something that many self-declared liberals simply do not understand. In a truly Liberal nation, there should be no place for death penalty, for the simple reason that Life is a Natural Right.

The State does not give Life, hence it cannot take it back. It is given to us by Nature and only Nature has a claim on it. If we consider ourselves Liberals, we have to be coherent with the principles we spoused and not give way to the ephemeral emotions of the masses of people who, blinded as they are by the obscure veil of understandable — though instinctive and primitive — revolt and indignation against the destructive force of Man manifested in the criminal, succumb, nevertheless, unthinkingly, to their worse foe of all: the destructive force of Man manifested in the divinized State.