Social Dimensions of Evil – Week 9

This week in class we spent very little time talking about our texts, as the majority of the class time was focused on presentations. Despite this however, we still managed to make a small amount of time at the end to wrap up our thoughts about the main theme. We came up with the idea that ultimately, it comes down to the situation and given a certain situation, we all have the potential to become evil or do evil things. This theme is a heavy one as it can certainly weigh on us as we tend to think of ourselves in a sort of optimistic way, as if we can do no wrong and the idea that we potentially could is hard-hitting.

The presentations this week encompassed the ideas of the death penalty, the blue code of silence, psychopathy and cultism. In focusing on the topic of the death penalty otherwise known as capital punishment, it is interesting to look at attitudes surrounding it regarding the severity of the case, and taking an eye for an eye. In class we discussed the question of whether it is moral for the state to kill someone given the fact the individual in question had killed one or many. In this case, we questioned whether it would be moral to commit the same act that the person is on trial for committing. If someone kills, would it be moral to also kill them? Ultimately the presenter decided that no, it is not moral and should be considered evil, and I must admit that I agree with her. This topic of conversation is one that always seems to get different attitudes and debates started, but to me the question is as much about moral integrity as it is about the actual decision-making.

In a study by Rogers, Sharf, Myers, Drogin and Williams (2019), the focus of research was to understand the attitudes of undergraduate students in the context of being in a capital jury deciding whether or not to give the death penalty. They wanted to know how often misrepresentations (described as denials or outright deception, either concealing one’s views or dissembling the opposite viewpoint) would be present in a jury trial. In giving the participants capital jury questionnaires to fill out that were used in actual death-penalty cases, the results from two studies indicated that they were both very susceptible to misrepresentation and this did not differ between those who supported capital punishment and those who did not. This would indicate that despite personal values, there is still a large possibility that misrepresentation could be happening in juries that are deciding the ultimate fate of a criminal. With this, it can be understood that opposing the death-penalty can come not only from a place of it being immoral, but also from a place of it being impractical. There are many individuals who are mistrialled and who have been accused of crimes they did not commit who are put on death row and many are sentenced to death without proper evaluation of their case. Some of this will have to do with needing closure to the situation, not wanting to “waste” resources of keeping the individual in prison, and some of it will blatantly have to do with race. Everyone in a crime is ultimately looking for the reason why, and unfortunately many people still show a blatant bias.

In an article by CTV News, the main focus was to highlight the discrepancies in trialling individuals who are african-american. In noting several different cases, the majority of them all demonstrated situations in which the individual on trial, being african-american and mostly being tried by an all-white jury, were given unjust treatment throughout their trial and were tried unfairly. In states where the death penalty is present, this can be extremely problematic. In the case of this article, all of the trials took place in Tennessee, where the death penalty is present and racism is very prominent. This piece speaks of the ingrained injustices to african-american individuals dating all the way back to slavery, and the fact that these attitudes are ever-present in today’s juries as well despite the moves forward that have been made. In these circumstances, african-americans can and will be tried more harshly and will likely have issues of misrepresentation by the jurors in their trials, furthering the reasons for the death-penalty as being immoral and evil. If those who are deciding the ultimate fate of an individual are overtly racist towards them, it would be similar to placing someone from the victim’s family on trial. There is a conflict of interest in the situation and while those individuals on the jury may not go out and directly murder and individual with whom they have a racist bias towards, giving them the power to do so in a court where the individual may even be wrongly accused seems absurd.

This again comes down to the possibility of one being able to do evil things given the situation they are placed in. In the situation of being placed in a jury, ultimately the jurors are given power that they may not be worthy of. If someone brings their own bias to the situation in which they are in power, it is easy to assume that given the research we have done, they would act on their biases. This further explains the fact that the death penalty is problematic, as jurors may be bringing their own biases, they may be misrepresenting themselves, the individual may be tried incorrectly and finally, as our parents always told us, “an eye for an eye makes all the world blind”.