Tags: death penalty | justice | Singapore

People around the world responded with compassion to Mr Nguyen Tuong Van's execution in Singapore...

They have also rejected judicial execution as a legitimate instrument of state policy. It is easy to understand why Mr Nguyen and his plight have aroused such sympathy and outrage.

We have seen the face of a young man, have heard the story of a life, and knew that on a day fixed beforehand he would most certainly die.

Although we may not have known him personally, we have heard, too, of his family and of the pressures that drove him to smuggle drugs to pay his brother's debts.

We have also been allowed to enter his inner journey - how in prison he had grown to be more generous and reflective. Seeing a youthful face and hearing of a life touched by grace, we naturally refuse to accept that such a promising life should be ended abruptly.

We can also visualise in advance the manner of his dying. The details burn away the mist surrounding abstractions like capital punishment and judicial execution. Killing is something human beings do to one another. One will tell him when he is to die.

Others will escort him from his cell and bind him. Another will weigh him to adjust the drop, put the rope around his neck, and pull the trapdoor open. We can imagine the face of the hangman, and ask if we could look ourselves in the face after engaging in his trade.

It is no wonder that many people are revolted by the killing of Mr Nguyen. The sentiment is generous. But is sentiment a reliable guide to judging the rightness of issues like capital punishment? After all, every appeal against any government policy that looks to the common good is supported by moving stories of hard cases. How then do we weigh the story of Mr Nguyen against the good of a drug-free society, to which the Singapore Government appeals?

Sentiment may not be reliable as a lone moral guide, but every ethical judgment must begin with human faces and human stories. To talk about policies and principles that touch human beings, we must begin by imagining the full human reality of these policies.

In contemplating the face of Mr Nguyen and the relationships involved in his killing, we are confronted with the reality, the mystery and the precariousness of what it is to be human. We crystallise this recognition of human dignity in such axioms as these: we should treat other people as we treat ourselves; we may not use human beings as means to ends, and so on.

It is difficult to reconcile that intuition and those axioms with killing an unprotected human being. We may not trade the life of one human being for the good of society. There can be no proportion between Mr Nguyen's life and any social good that may be secured by his killing. Nor may we say that a malefactor's life is forfeit. We need only ask to whom it is forfeit to appreciate that this claim is presumptuous. We may test the justice of our rejection of capital punishment by asking whether we could, without diminishing our own humanity, take part in the deliberate killing of an undefended person.

The consequences of basing our moral argument in human faces and stories are large. We shall also find it difficult to justify using lethal injections in hospitals, experimenting on embryos and making war for any reason but immediate self-defence. Such a morality, of course, is vulnerable to the charge that saints may choose it, but politicians must reject it. But the face and story of Mr Nguyen will haunt such an argument and those who propose it, as surely as his face and story have aroused the compassion of so many people.