Love, Conscience and Neighbours in the Gallows: The Ethic of Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love Applied to U.S. Capital Punishment

Abstract

This thesis argues that Søren Kierkegaard’s ethics in his Works of Love (1847) can provide the basis for a comprehensive Christian opposition to capital punishment, particularly as it currently manifests in the United States of America.

Read through the wide-angle lens provided by Kierkegaard’s other works (both self-authored and pseudonymous), the first series of discourses in Works of Love outlines an ethic which is grounded in the subjugation of the individual’s will to that of the eternal/God, whose antecedent revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ reveals an uncompromisingly selfless love towards all humanity. This divine love is normative for humanity’s ethics, and subversive to its prior moral frameworks. The second series of discourses in Works of Love expands upon the nature of selfless Christian love and its impact upon how one relates to his/her neighbour. At the heart of this ethic is a moral anthropology which stems from the Christian’s presupposition of the presence of the eternal within his/her neighbour.

Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for this project. The nature of this preparation is twofold. First, I provide a brief survey of recent scholarship on Works of Love and argue that although such scholarship is increasingly receptive to Kierkegaard as a moral theologian of love, there continues to be few substantial attempts to apply his ethic to concrete public issues. The objection to Kierkegaard’s work responsible for this absence is detailed in Chapter 2, while a response to this objection is provided in Chapters 2 and 4. The overall result of these endeavours, it is hoped, is to present Kierkegaard in a new light. Instead of being primarily seen as a “melancholy Dane” and otherworldly thinker, Kierkegaard should be recognised as an unrelenting advocate for a Christian ethic of love which has the potential to engage with issues within the public sphere.

The second background context to this project which Chapter 1 seeks to elucidate is the lacuna which currently exists within moral theology where an absolutist and definitive critique against the death penalty might otherwise be expected. Briefly stated, it is claimed that a primary underlying reason for this absence of critique is the assumption that state execution serves penal goals which are non-religious in nature. Chapter 3 seeks to challenge this assumption and thereby reenvisage the relationship between the ethical debate surrounding capital punishment, and moral theology. Support for the death penalty as a good “secular” punishment, I argue, requires adherence to moral assumptions about the nature of human beings. Having made this case, it is argued that the moral anthropology intrinsic to Kierkegaard’s ethics in Works of Love stands unequivocally opposed to the moral anthropology of capital punishment.

In Chapter 5, I seek to engage Kierkegaard’s ethic with among the strongest of possible arguments against the position arrived at through Chapters 2-4. Drawing upon the thought of Hannah Arendt, this takes the form of asking whether, in the case of those who have participated in “crimes against humanity”, there might not still be a need for execution on the basis that the perpetrators have rendered themselves “intolerable” to human society. Through an exploration of Christian love, reconciliation and offense in the second series of Works of Love and Kierkegaard’s other writings, I aim to provide an adequate response to this most difficult of objections.

In this way, it is my hope that this thesis may provide a prolegomenon to viewing Kierkegaard’s thought as having implications for contemporary ethical issues, including (and perhaps especially) matters of life and death.