Melville's Commentary on Capital Punishment

Hannah Frances Ford

Mrs. Patricia Perdue

Honors English 11

9 November 2014

Melville’s Commentary on Capital Punishment

Capital punishment has been an extremely controversial issue in the matter of ethics for centuries. There are some people that look at it as an efficient way to deal with criminals and to prove the government’s superiority to the common people. These are the people that look at criminals as delinquents who are unable to be anything else. Another group of people, however, sees this form of punishment as a complete injustice to the fact that every person should have the opportunity to get a second chance. This group believes that no matter what a person has done or will do in their lifetime is not anything worthy of taking their life from them. Herman Melville writes in Billy Budd, Sailor about the difference in laws of nature and laws of society and how in certain times it is hard to distinguish between the two. Capital punishment has been proven to be an action that can defy the laws of nature, society, and the laws set by man himself.

The laws of nature are possibly the set of laws that are the easiest to get confused on. They are the laws that are generally understood and are never really questioned because there is no one to question about them, no one ever really put them into place to begin with. One understood law of nature would be that it is wrong to take advantage of a person because of his or her level of innocence or lack of understanding of evil. An event similar to this took place on the ship when Claggart turned Billy Budd in for something he did not do, simply because he was not fond of Billy. Melville writes, “and the insight but intensified his passion, which assuming various secret forms within him, at times assumed that of cynic disdain, disdain of innocence – to be nothing more than innocent. Yet in an aesthetic way he saw the charm of it, the courageous free-and-easy temper of it, and fain would have shared it,...