Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Source:Our World in Data, Roser 2016i, graphing an index devised by Fariss 2014, which estimates protection from torture, extrajudicial killing, political imprisonment, and disappearances. “0” is the mean over all countries and years; the units are standard deviations.

How does the curtailment of government power unfold in real time? An unusually clear window into the machinery of human progress is the fate of the ultimate exercise of violence by the state: deliberately killing its citizens.

Capital punishment was once ubiquitous among countries, and it was applied to hundreds of misdemeanors in gruesome public spectacles of torture and humiliation.³² (The crucifixion of Jesus together with two common thieves is as good a reminder as any.) After the Enlightenment, European countries stopped executing people for any but the most heinous crimes: by the middle of the 19th century, Britain had reduced the number of capital offenses from 222 to 4. And the countries looked for methods of execution such as drop hanging that were as humane as such a gruesome practice could pretend to be. After World War II, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights inaugurated a second humanitarian revolution, capital punishment was abolished altogether in country after country, and in Europe today it lingers only in Belarus.

The abolition of capital punishment has gone global (figure 14-3), and today the death penalty is on death row.³³ In the last three decades, two or three countries have abolished it every year, and less than a fifth of the world’s nations continue to execute people. (While ninety countries retain capital punishment in their law books, most have not put anyone to death in at least a decade.) The UN Special Rapporteur on executions, Christopher Heyns, points out that if the current rate of abolition continues (not that he’s prophesying it will), capital punishment will vanish from the face of the earth by 2026.³⁴

Figure 14-3: Death penalty abolitions, 1863–2016

Source: “Capital Punishment by Country: Abolition Chronology,” Wikipedia, retrieved Aug. 15, 2016. Several European countries abolished the death penalty in their mainland earlier than indicated here, but the time line records the last abolition in any territory under their jurisdiction. The arrow points to 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 4–3 of Pinker 2011.

The top five countries that still execute people in significant numbers form an unlikely club: China and Iran (more than a thousand apiece annually), Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. As in other areas of human flourishing (such as crime, war, health, longevity, accidents, and education), the United States is a laggard among wealthy democracies. This American exceptionalism illuminates the tortuous path by which moral progress proceeds from philosophical arguments to facts on the ground. It also showcases the tension between the two conceptions of democracy we have been examining: a form of government whose power to inflict violence on its citizens is sharply circumscribed, and a form of government that carries out the will of the majority of its people. The reason the United States is a death-penalty outlier is that it is, in one sense, too democratic.

In his history of the abolition of capital punishment in Europe, the legal scholar Andrew Hammel points out that in most times and places the death penalty strikes people as perfectly just: if you take a life, you deserve to lose your own.³⁵ It was only with the Enlightenment that forceful arguments against the death penalty began to appear.³⁶ One argument was that the state’s mandate to exercise violence may not breach the sacred zone of human life. Another was that the deterrent effect of capital punishment can be achieved with surer and less brutal penalties.