MQNADOLOGICALJUSTICE A Critique o f the Su p reme Court’s Decision on Racial Prejudice and Ca p ital Punishment By Mark Schoofs Illustration by Stephen Leflar t is one of life’s curiosities, often overlooked but doubtless full of import, that when one steps back and takes a good look at the philosophical assumptions on which people act, one either laughs or gets embarrassed. Or both. Of course, the fact that philosophical assumptions may be laughable or embarrassing does not prevent them from playing a decisive role in matters of life and death—which is exactly what happened when the Supreme Court ruled that it is legally irrelevant that killers of whites are at least four and as much as eleven times more likely to receive the death penalty than killers of blacks (McCleskey v. Kemp). To get an especially illuminating look at the assumptions underlying this ruling, one ought to step back about three centuries, to a time when a man with a name almost as fantastical as the philosophy he would eventually invent had gotten himself into a fix. Clinton St. Quarterly— Winter, 1987 15
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