Capital Punishment and Women's Rights

While reading the "Social Contract" by Rousseau, one section that particularly stood out for me was chapter five, "The Right of Life and Death." In this section Rousseau discusses the legality of the death penalty, specifically as the punishment for killing another man. Rousseau contends that, since man gives up some of his "natural" freedoms when joining the social contract (the contract that basically gives order to society), and acknowledges this fact by living in a society governed by law, he similarly acknowledges the punishments set out for breaking the laws of that society. It Rousseau's time, fact the penalty for murder was capital punishment. Therefore, by committing murder, the murderer has broken the social treaty agreed upon by the sovereign (the people as a collective) and has become an enemy of the state. Rousseau believes that an enemy of the state and the state itself cannot coexist, and so the only reasonable solution to resolve this problem, other than the dissolution of the state, is to exterminate the enemy.  Given the fact that the murderer understood the societies' punishment for murder, before he committed the crime, it is logical and fair for the killer to be executed by the state. 

The reason I was particularly interested by this section is because of the current debate going on now about the use of the death penalty, specifically in the United States. In light of a couple of capital punishment executions last week, there has been an international backlash against the use of such punishment, especially in a so-called "first-world" country. Personally, I have always been against capital punishment simply because I think it is almost a gentler to punishment to kill someone and put them out of their misery, rather than to subject them to a life-long sentence in a maximum security prison, where they will be treated incredibly harshly for the rest of their miserable lives. That aside however, after reading Rousseau's understanding of the legality of capital punishment, I was almost convinced to change my opinion. For me, Rousseau's explanation of the use of capital punishment makes complete and logical sense. If the known penalty for murder is state execution, and someone commits first degree murder anyway (I'll limit this argument to the case of first degree murder), it seems reasonable for the state to convict the criminal and sentence him to death. Punishments are in place to deter people from breaking laws. If a society decides that they want their punishment for murder to be capital punishment, that is their right as a sovereign society. That is the social contract they are entering into and agreeing upon and it is therefore the right of the government to execute a murderer, as they are adhering to the common will.  Therefore, if a person knows the consequence of breaking a law, and yet does so anyway? Society has every right to punish them, in the way they agreed upon when creating and agreeing upon their social contract.

Another document that was intriguing to me, as I'm sure it was to many others simply because it is so unlike anything we have read thus far, was the "Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen" by Georgia de Goughes.  The feminist document was quite interesting to read because it is the first time we see a woman sticking up for our rights as equal human beings. What was most interesting to me however was the fact that, unlike all of the documents which prescribe strictly to the rights of man, de Goughes does not exclude the opposite sex in her Declaration of Rights, but merely surmises that men and women should be equals. Rather than writing a vindictive diatribe against men as payback for being left out of centuries of rights documents, de Goughes is the bigger person and includes, perhaps for the first time, both sexes in one document. Furthermore, she doesn't believe women should get preferential treatment (as say, every other document written before hers did with reference to men). Rather she is merely campaigning for utter equality in all matters of the law-- "No woman is an exception; she is accused, arrested, and detained in cases determined by law. Women, like men, obey this rigorous law." I greatly appreciate and respect de Goughes document and cannot imagine the courage it must have taken for her to put out such a radical and progressive statement, at a time when women were still regarded as secondary citizens.  We owe the success of the women's rights movement to de Goughes and others like her that kicked the status quo in the butt and demanded equality in an unequal world.