This chapter and the next (dealing with war) address the moral status of actions done only by the state – not because such acts cannot be done by people acting on their own authority, but because when that does occur it goes by such names as vigilantism and lynching (or privateering and piracy), and such acts are not thought today (as they once were) to be morally defensible practices.

I will set aside the aspects of the issue that make the overall wisdom and justice of capital punishment so deeply divisive an issue in our culture: its asserted arbitrariness, its differential effect on defendants who are poor or belong to disfavored racial or ethnic groups, its financial cost, the deterrence question, its constitutionality, as well as its fundamental moral legitimacy considered from a secular perspective. Our focus will be on the salience of religiously grounded judgments on the morality of laws authorizing execution as a possible criminal sanction.

Obviously, “the state” can act only though individuals, and an inquiry into religiously grounded moral challenges to capital punishment might also address the morality of participation in those practices by many people who are called upon to play a part in its administration: legislators, lawyers, witnesses, jurors, sentencing and appellate judges, doctors, governors presented with death warrants to sign and clemency petitions to consider, and officials who arrange and carry out executions. A great many people, whatever their views as to the moral justification of the existence of capital punishment, would not participate in its administration, and many who do participate struggle with the moral justification of their doing so.