ABSTRACT
In a review of Matthew Kramer’s book The Ethics of Capital Punishment: A Philosophical Investigation of Evil and its Consequences (Kramer 2011), Carol J. Steiker contrasts Kramer’s response to learning of the horrors of the Holocaust as a child with her own. As an eight-year-old, Kramer started to develop what ended up as a “purgative” rationale for the death penalty as a moral duty in the face of extreme acts. It seemed obscene to Kramer that the rest of humanity should have to devote resources to keeping leading Nazi perpetrators alive indefinitely. Steiker’s own response as a “standard American Jewish teenage girl” was to wonder “how many Germans (and others) could have come to see an entire people (my people) as not really people at all – as something less than human” (Steiker 2015: 367). She would later explain her work as a public defender in law:
I viewed the representation of (allegedly) heinous criminals as an extreme civil rights work – the championing of the rights and dignity of exactly those people that right-thinking folks are inclined to view as “not really people” at all. I argued that by zealously representing those whom we are most inclined to hate, I was keeping the world safe for whoever else might at some point fall into that category – Jews, blacks, gays, etc. I hoped that by contextualizing my clients’ offenses and giving voice to their stories – especially when they were in fact guilty as charged – I was working against our collective tendency to “dehumanize” others, by combating this propensity in its most compelling form.
(Steiker 2015: 367–8)