PROFOUND moral arguments are rarely resolved by statistical proof, and when an academic claims to have done just that I cannot help but raise a sceptical eyebrow. So you can imagine my reaction earlier this year when Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, two law professors at the University of Chicago, published a paper in which they claimed that the death penalty was “morally obligatory” because it had been proved statistically that it deterred people from committing murder. Each execution, they said, saves 18 lives, so “a refusal to impose the death penalty condemns numerous innocent people to death”.
I have…
