Viscerally, I support the death penalty. I think there's such a thing as deserving to die.

I agree. Problem is, somebody somewhere out there thinks the same thing and might well apply their analysis to your stupid ass. In which case, when they decide to act on it, what's your argument? That they are mistaken in your particular case? Try and make that argument, Saletan, and see where it gets you.

Frankly, as a person who most ignorantly justified the invasion of Iraq, I can imagine a lot of folks are dead ass certain that you deserve a one way trip to the bone orchard. Me, being a softy at heart, might give you a pass. But I wouldn't waste much effort dissuading others hell bent on making you, er, hell bent. So where does that leave us? Everyone on a potential death list somewheres, and everyone with a potential death list in their head. Noone believe that they themselves deserve to be on a such a list and nobody really thinking, deep down, that there's a problem with them having such a list themselves.

Humans cannot accurately reconstruct the past with any more than a slight degree of probable accuracy. They cannot fashion, in any real measurable sense, a sanction that is undeniably just. They cannot, in any meaningful way, predict the future. Each of these inadequacies are key elements justifying the imposition of death on any person. In each of them, people and their institutions fall woefully, and demonstrably, short.

So just give it up. Let the potheads out of jail and keep the accused and convicted murderers, child rapists and war criminals in prison for the rest of their lives, or until they are subsequently proven innocent. What is lost by such a policy? The "visceral" satisfaction that morons like Saletan gain by the shedding of blood of someone on their list.

The visceral profit of people who are empirically and demonstrably unable to make a rational, reasonable or remotely just judgment about others. In other words, a cost that is so minute as to defy measurement.