In Shirley Jackson’s 1948 story “The Lottery,” a town selects one resident by chance and stones the victim to death. The killing is arbitrary by design, a ritual nobody can justify beyond the fact that it has always been done.
Much of the modern Western imagination now approaches capital punishment through a similar lens: not as justice, but as officially sanctioned cruelty. That suspicion fits an older philosophical claim associated with Thrasymachus in Plato’s “Republic”: Justice is “the advantage of the stronger.” Rulers make the rules, call them just, and use them to serve their own interests.
A culture that recognizes only victims, never sinners, will mistake punishment for cruelty and forgiveness for an unnecessary apology.
I have been surveying arguments for and against publicly broadcasting the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who murdered 13 people and wounded 32 others at Fort Hood in 2009. The Army has scheduled his execution by firing squad for Dec. 3. The Pentagon announced plans to livestream it, although President Trump has said he will decide whether the broadcast goes forward.
Thoughtful conservatives disagree about livestreaming an execution. To understand the objections, I asked people on X to list the arguments they had heard. What stood out was how often the discussion framed morality in terms of consequences rather than the goodness of justice itself.
The broadcast might make Hasan a martyr. Terrorists might use the footage to recruit. Children might encounter it online. It likely would not deter another crime.
Those concerns deserve consideration. But consequences do not exhaust moral reasoning. Consequentialism judges an action by its results. Utilitarianism, one version of consequentialism, weighs overall welfare against suffering. Under that framework, justice can become merely a tool for producing desirable outcomes.
As a philosophy professor, I want to ask a prior question: What if justice is good in itself?
Consider two tests. Would punishing a guilty murderer become pointless if it deterred nobody? Would punishing an innocent person become right if doing so deterred thousands? If your answers are no, you already recognize a moral standard that consequences alone cannot supply.
Justice means giving people their due. A worker deserves his paycheck because he performed the work. His employer cannot justify withholding it by explaining how much happier the company would be with the extra money.
The same principle applies to wrongdoing. Someone who deliberately murders the innocent deserves punishment. The murdered cannot be brought back. That does not mean nothing remains to be done.
Justice is not personal revenge. It is deserved punishment imposed under lawful authority. Justice requires established guilt, proportionate punishment, and limits on the state. It forbids punishing the innocent even when doing so would be popular or useful.
Justice is good in itself. Seeing justice done is a good thing to behold.
Yet our culture increasingly treats punishment as the villain. We learn the offender’s grievances, childhood wounds, and social disadvantages. The victims fade into the background. Understanding how someone became cruel may be valuable. Explanation, however, does not become exoneration.
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Michel Foucault’s influential “Discipline and Punish” examined punishment through the workings of power, discipline, and social control. That analysis encourages suspicion of institutions claiming to administer justice. But identifying abuses of power does not establish that justice itself is merely domination.
Indeed, if justice is nothing more than power, why condemn the powerful for being unjust? The person demanding recompense for a wrong appeals to something beyond the wrongdoer’s preferences. He expects us to recognize that he was owed better. He is claiming that the oppressor is objectively guilty.
None of this settles the livestream question. The state must justify both a punishment and the manner in which it carries that punishment out. Public accountability and acknowledgment of victims matter. So does the distinction between solemn judgment and entertainment, along with the prohibition against gratuitous cruelty.
The justice of Hasan’s punishment does not depend on how spectators respond to it. But neither does a just punishment automatically make every possible way of displaying it wise. The question is whether the state administers justice rightly.
The debate therefore reveals more than disagreement about a camera. It reveals uncertainty about whether anyone truly deserves punishment and whether it is good to see justice enacted. If justice must always prove its usefulness before we acknowledge its goodness, then justice has already lost its authority.
The effort to undermine human justice may also serve a larger purpose: undermining divine justice. Human courts are fallible and limited to this life. Their imperfection does not erase the idea of judgment; for Christians, it points beyond them to the perfect justice of God.
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When a culture treats every offender as ultimately an innocent victim, divine judgment will appear monstrous. God becomes the angry villain while the sinner is merely doing his best. A story long associated with Bertrand Russell captures the posture: Asked what he would say if confronted by God after death, Russell reportedly complained that God had not provided enough evidence.
Scripture presents a different picture. God’s revelation leaves humanity “without excuse,” and before His judgment “every mouth may be stopped.” It is right to stand in awe and fear of God as the perfect judge.
“The wages of sin is death.” Without that truth, the cross becomes unintelligible.
Christ was publicly crucified. He was innocent, yet Christians believe the sins of his people were laid on him. He paid the debt we owed and canceled the record that stood against us. A culture that cannot see justice as good in itself will specialize in justifying its sin and condemning the Judge. It will also lose sight of what the cross means for sinners.
A culture that recognizes only victims, never sinners, will struggle to understand either justice or grace. It will mistake punishment for cruelty and forgiveness for an unnecessary apology.
Justice is good in itself. Its goodness does not depend on applause, deterrence, or our comfort. Until we recover that truth, we will misunderstand both the courtroom and the cross.