Permissibility of Death Penalty as a Hermeneutic Dilemma

Abstract

The notion of moral fairness regarding the application (or not) of capital punishment is stretched between two poles of opposite interpretative meanings. On the one hand, there is an imperative related to maintaining the social order which justifies, in some specific cases, the killing of an individual for the good of the community. On the other hand, there is the message of the Gospel about the holiness of each human life. Thus, in attempting to investigate the fairness of the death penalty, a certain hermeneutic tension arises around the overlapping rights and obligations pertaining to both the criminal and the society that needs to be protected against him or her. This article starts from an outlook on the death penalty that pays due regard to a ‘hermeneutic charge’ that encompasses both the duty to protect the common good and also the value of each individual’s life. Next, the ‘genuine paradox’ was analysed which emerges in a situation where the right to live and the right to protect overlap. All these considerations are finally brought to bear on a question: whether the recent abolitionist interpretation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church should be classified as the continuity hermeneutic or, rather, the discontinuity hermeneutic.