Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

The Will and Its Responsibilities 67
the second—because it depends on certainty, not severity—would be possible
only at the cost of ignoring the rights of the innocent, and the third is
inconsistent with the first two. The only thing left, for Shaw, was to abolish
prisons altogether, rehabilitate those who are capable of rehabilitation, and
then acknowledge your failures as failures. If they cannot be either reformed
or tolerated in free society as they are, they should be killed, humanely
and anesthetically, as are rabid dogs. One thing that unites persons
on both sides of the capital punishment controversy is the belief that the
worst thing you can do to a person is to kill him. Shaw did not share that
conviction.
Many of Shaw’s admirers, who generally oppose the killing of convicted
criminals, are apt to pass over his view on this subject as a forgivable if
disturbing eccentricity. It is not; it is an essentially Shavian position, one
very close to the core of his ethical faith. There is more to his lifelong
advocacy of the euthanasia of the criminally unfit than a simple conviction
that death is more humane than life imprisonment.
A realist preference for death over imprisonment can be better understood
after looking at some of the arguments presented in the current
American controversy by the opponents of the lethal chamber: capital
punishment is racist; it discriminates against the poor; it discriminates
against the powerless and ignorant generally; innocent people will almost
certainly be executed; death costs more than life imprisonment. All of
these arguments are fallacious. Of course, the arguments for the death
penalty are just as faulty, and there is one sound and unanswerable argument
against capital sanctions: the profession of a conviction beyond reason
that killing is so terrible we should never do it for any reason. That is
just the sort of nonrational argument Shaw used against vivisectors and
sportsmen.
There is no other genuine reason; the rest are just rationalizations. The
real reason for Shaw’s unusual position may be his reaction against a disturbing
implication of the fallacy that underlies all four arguments. If
there is racism, discrimination, and unequal treatment generally in the
application of the death penalty, then it is inequity that is the problem, not
the death penalty. It is childish or worse to pretend that a racist system of
justice will cease to be racist when the death sentence is eliminated. As for
poverty and powerlessness, the rich and powerful will never be treated by
any social system the same as the poor and weak; that is what being rich
and powerful is all about. Abolish the lethal chamber and nothing significant
will change. To assert that the possibility of executing innocent per-