Capital Punishment and the Social Contract

Something struck me in this Eric Zorn blog entry, and it was this sentence:

I can't make a persuasive moral case that, say, Timothy McVeigh or John Wayne Gacy deserves to live; that it is wrong for a society to hang a Saddam Hussein.

If you don't have time to read the whole entry, he's arguing that his opposition to capital punishment is pragmatic, as opposed to on moral grounds, in that he admits there are criminals so heinous and obvious they should be executed (but that in most case, we can't know guilt with enough certainty that execution benefits society).

I don't see these things as necessarily following from one another. I wouldn't argue that the most awful tyrants, terrorists, mass murderers and genocidal maniacs have abused their right and privilege to breath the planet's oxygen. But I would argue that a society should not execute any one of them. The question in my mind is, "At what point can a group of individuals, bound by social contract, perform an action that it is wrong for any one individual to perform?" And I would argue that, no matter how duly constituted the social body, it does not have the right to terminate the life of a human being.

The entire justice system, of course, is an illustration of that question; it allows a means for determining and punishing guilty actions where an individual would be a vigilante for doing so; the civil system provides a means restitution where individual retribution would be no more than self-justified theft. But I'm not comfortable with the justice system ending life in my name. (And it is in my name, in part, in this government of, by, and for the people.) So I guess I seem to hold the contradiction in my head that there are those who have so wronged decent society that they don't deserve to live, but they should continue doing so anyway.

I guess that makes my objection principled.