Chapter 74

The chapter is the book's argument against capital punishment as an instrument of government, and it makes it in two moves.

The first is about efficacy. If the people are not afraid of death, how can you frighten them with death? A penalty works by being feared, and a population that has been driven past fear is one for which the ultimate sanction has no purchase left. Chapter seventy-two names the conditions that produce such a population, which is why the two chapters belong together.

The second move is a conditional and it is more uncomfortable. If they were always afraid of death, and I could seize and put to death those who behaved strangely, who would dare? The sentence entertains the policy rather than refusing it outright, and its force is that even in the favourable case, where fear is intact and the executions are effective, something is still wrong.

What is wrong is stated in the chapter's second half, and it is a question about authority rather than about deterrence.

The chapter is one of a small number in early Chinese writing that address the death penalty directly, and it does so at a time when penal law was expanding and states were competing in the severity and precision of their codes. Chapter fifty-seven had already claimed that publishing more law produces more thieves. This chapter takes the argument to the end of the scale.

The second half of the chapter answers the question of who may kill, and it does so with a workshop image that is one of the most effective in the book.

There is always the one in charge of executions who does the killing. To do the killing in his place is to hew wood in place of the master carpenter. And one who hews wood in place of the master carpenter rarely escapes cutting his own hands.

The argument works on two levels at once. Read plainly, it is about jurisdiction: there is an officer whose function this is, and a ruler who kills outside that channel has usurped a role and will be injured by the tools. Read as the chapter's point, the one in charge of executions is not a human official at all but the ordinary process by which things come to an end, and a ruler who takes that work on has stepped into a position that was never vacant.

The book supports the second reading elsewhere. Chapter twenty-five puts heaven and the way above the king in its sequence. Chapter twenty-nine says the world is a sacred vessel and that acting on it spoils it. Chapter thirty-two says the way is nameless and nobody can make a subject of it.

The image of the amateur at the workbench is also exactly right for the argument. The danger is not punishment for presumption; it is the plain physical fact that an unskilled hand on an edged tool is injured by it, and that the injury is self-inflicted and immediate.