between the Ten Commandments and the narrative adumbrations of the theme in the book of the Israelites shows that ambiguity attends capital punishment. That is the case with modern history just as much as with ancient history.
The argument in favor of capital punishment links ethical behavior of the state to the ideal of social order and security: "The ideal of equal justice demands that justice be equally distributed, not that it be replaced by equality" (van den Haag 285). Injustice is suffered by many, in this view, if capital criminals do not have to pay for their crimes against social order.
The argument against capital punishment is that society's moral outrage is not reason enough "to warrant the inference that [the criminal] and his conduct are appropriate objects of our unqualified hostility" (Bedau 294). This argument rejects the validity of government power over "moral bookkeeping" (Bedau 296), on the theory that in a free society the government should have less, not more power over its citizens. This is especially complicated in the case of crimin
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