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By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed book cover
By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed
A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment
2017
First Published
4.27
Average Rating
423
Number of Pages
The Catholic Church has in recent decades been associated with political efforts to eliminate the death penalty. It was not always so. This timely work reviews and explains the Catholic Tradition regarding the death penalty, demonstrating that it is not inherently evil and that it can be reserved as a just form of punishment in certain cases. Drawing upon a wealth of philosophical, scriptural, theological, and social scientific arguments, the authors explain the perennial teaching of the Church that capital punishment can in principle be legitimate—not only to protect society from immediate physical danger, but also to administer retributive justice and to deter capital crimes. The authors also show how some recent statements of Church leaders in opposition to the death penalty are prudential judgments rather than dogma. They reaffirm that Catholics may, in good conscience, disagree about the application of the death penalty. Some arguments against the death penalty falsely suggest that there has been a rupture in the Church's traditional teaching and thereby inadvertently cast doubt on the reliability of the Magisterium. Yet, as the authors demonstrate, the Church's traditional teaching is a safeguard to society, because the just use of the death penalty can be used to protect the lives of the innocent, inculcate a horror of murder, and affirm the dignity of human beings as free and rational creatures who must be held responsible for their actions. By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed challenges contemporary Catholics to engage with Scripture, Tradition, natural law, and the actual social scientific evidence in order to undertake a thoughtful analysis of the current debate about the death penalty.
Avg Rating
4.27
Number of Ratings
74
5 STARS
49%
4 STARS
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3 STARS
8%
2 STARS
3%
1 STARS
3%
goodreads

Author

Edward Feser
Edward Feser
Author · 12 books

Edward Feser is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California. He has been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California at Santa Barbara, an M.A. in religion from the Claremont Graduate School, and a B.A. in philosophy and religious studies from the California State University at Fullerton. Called by National Review “one of the best contemporary writers on philosophy,” Feser is the author of On Nozick, Philosophy of Mind, Locke, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, and Aquinas, and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Hayek and Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics. He is also the author of many academic articles. His primary academic research interests are in the philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. Feser also writes on politics and culture, from a conservative point of view; and on religion, from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective. In this connection, his work has appeared in such publications as The American, The American Conservative, City Journal, The Claremont Review of Books, Crisis, First Things, Liberty, National Review, New Oxford Review, Public Discourse, Reason, and TCS Daily. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and six children.

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