Our regular readers will recall a piece we posted last November titled: “Undetected (and Detectable) Shadows of Positions.” That piece probed a potential paradox hovering over, and lurking within, the advocates for, and against, the death penalty. Yes, over, and within, the advocates, as well as the subject of, the advocacy.

Let’s acknowledge that reduction of the death penalty to a binary debate between supporters and opponents blurs and, indeed, conceals, distinctions that, if made manifest, would create a veritable mix of strange bed-fellows, with contenders for similar positions oblivious, and, if not oblivious then indifferent, to the contradictions at the root of apparent consensus.

Having read Michael Sandel’s recent book on the moral limits of the market, I am hard pressed to escape the ubiquity of activities that, when they become the subject of market transactions (admittedly a concept that cries out for explanation) are thereby transformed in their very essence. Converted, for example, from a civic to a market activity.

Sandel’s observations pull together nicely, through a prism infused with perspectives from moral philosophy, and ranging theologies, a long and lively area researched by economists, psychologists, sociogists and other social scientists. Recall, for example, the findings that blood donations declined when blood banks began to pay for “donations.” Or the decline in the willingness of communities to accept hazardous wastes in their backyards when the state sought to pay the communities for their “hospitality.” Or the increase in (initially) objectionable activities when fines are conceptualized and experienced as (mere) fees. A $1.00 charge to litter; an extra charge for parents who pick-up children late from daycare; a payment to a child to write a thank you letter; a payment to a service company to present a “purchased” apology or a “purchased” wedding toast. The introduction of some “things” into the market transforms the very things that money can buy.

We segued to Sandel’s discussion of the moral limits of markets to frame our supplement to the November posting on the death penalty: when we sanction the death penalty, whatever the circumstances for its imposition and whatever the rationale(s) ushered in support of its imposition, we transform not only our views of justice, fairness, and the role of the criminal sanction in a society, we transform everyone, from the executioner, to the judge and jury, to the governors, officers and “agents” of the state, to each of us who must bear witness because, after all, there is no escape. And why should there be? What would escape look like? Self-renunciation? Or a conscience detached from sensations of ethical dilemma and struggle?