ABSTRACT
The book, The Death Penalty: A Debate, in which van den Haag argues for the death penalty and John P. Conrad argues against, proves how difficult it is to mount a telling argument against capital punishment. If van den Haag is right and the abolitionist cause depends on proving either or both of these assertions, then it is a lost cause, since I believe they cannot be proven for reasons of the following sort: If people ever deserve anything for their acts, then it seems that what they deserve is something commensurate in cost or in benefit to what they have done. The “Hegelian” and “Kantian” approaches arrive at the same destination from opposite sides. The “Hegelian” approach starts from the victim’s equality with the criminal, and infers from it the victim’s right to do to the criminal what the criminal has done to the victim.
