bruenig on the death penalty

 This morning, I read Elizabeth Bruenig's NYT article on capital punishment: https://nyti.ms/3gTQPhy.

Bruenig does an excellent job detailing the moments leading up to two very different men's executions: Alfred Bourgeouis brutally murdered his wife and infant child, while Brandon Bernard played a minor role in a robbery that led to the murder of a married couple. Our intuitions suggest different kinds of condemnations for these two men. Bourgeouis' brutal murders cry out for the most extreme kind of punishment possible, whereas Bernard's crime calls for something lesser. Still, Bruenig is staunchly committed to the wrongness of capital punishment. On her view, the system is too fallible to render just executions. This means that, regardless of her intuitions, she is ideologically committed to the view that neither men should be executed. 

The sort of dissonance between intuitions and moral commitments Bruenig admits to brings up a really interesting issue in how we form our moral judgments: how much should our intuitions guide our moral judgments? There are many good arguments for capital punishment, but what if my intuitions about its wrongness keep me from accepting them? Am I acting irresponsibly here?

I'm not sure. If the view that we should have arguments for every moral judgment we have is true, then Bruenig is in trouble here. But surely this is false because it's way too demanding. If I see a man mug a woman, I don't have to consciously reason out why theft is bad; I just immediately form the judgment that the man is doing something terribly immoral. So it's probably not the case we need an argument for every moral judgment we have.

But then this could lead to other sorts of worries. If we don't need arguments for moral judgments, then we might risk a kind of vicious emotivism in which most of our moral judgments are just expressions of how we feel about things. If this is the case, then when Bruenig expresses her view that capital punishment is categorically immoral, she might just be expressing her distaste for capital punishment. Some might argue that Bruenig's protests only matter once she appeals to some kind of Kantian principle like "murder is always bad" as the reason for her distate for capital punishment. 

I'm still not sure what I think about the place of intuitions, emotions, and reasons in forming moral judgments, but I at least think that none of these have a monopoly on how such judgments are formed.