Moral Reasoning and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day every year, lots of people performatively cite Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech in order to present the image of being good on issues of race and justice. Even more troublingly, far too many people have become accustomed to using Dr. King as a moral mascot—sometimes for bad ideas that he did not even promote. If people are going to be serious about logical argumentation, using Dr. King as a mascot and simply pretending that all that needs to be satisfied to establish the morality of a position is that he would have supported it is daft. Although Dr. King was considered the conscience of the nation, it does not mean his pronunciations must be treated as dogma. It is important to be able to reason independently.
Yes, there are ideas that Dr. King supported that are righteous and make a lot of sense. However, there are other ideas that one can disagree with him about and still be perfectly moral. One such example is the issue of the death penalty. Dr. King was someone who opposed the death penalty. He is quoted as saying, "I do not think that God approves the death penalty for any crime. Capital punishment is against the better judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God." While Dr. King was well within his right to have this belief—and he was correct that modern criminology was (and still is) largely opposed to the death penalty—it is also perfectly rational for a Christian to believe that the death penalty for the most serious murderers is warranted and not a violation of Christian conscience. In the same way, it is perfectly rational for a Christian to generally oppose killing people, but also make the exception for killing someone in self-defense.
It is very important to note that Christianity is not designed as a framework for public policy in a pluralistic society. It is a framework for personal morality. Granted, a Christian who is in office can decide that his or her personal faith precludes him or her from exercising the state’s death penalty power, but the point of Christianity is not to provide public policy prescriptions; it is to provide personal prescriptions for behavior. It is vital to cognize that the same God of love is also a God of justice. The God who loved the world is also the same God who instructed the children of Israel to drive out people from the land of Canaan. God’s love and justice can (and do) coexist. God’s love complements His justice; it does not supplant it.
One of the principal reasons why modern criminology does not support the death penalty is because the evidence shows that it does not deter. However, it is imperative to highlight that deterrence is just one purpose of punishment. Other purposes of punishment include retribution, rehabilitation, and incapacitation. While some people reject the necessity of retributive justice, the fact of the matter is that when life is taken wantonly and callously, it makes sense for the state to send the strongest possible message that such a crime cannot be tolerated, and imposing the death penalty sends that message. Does this mean that the death penalty ought to be used carelessly? Absolutely not. One can support the death penalty and still, for example, question the rash of killings that Donald Trump has signed off on in his final days as President of the United States. One can support the death penalty and also be aware of the racial disparities that are involved in its implementation. If there is any doubt whatsoever about the guilt of the people allegedly involved in reprehensible murders, then life without possibility of parole should be used instead. However, the idea that someone like Dylann Roof—the white supremacist mass murderer, who on June 17th, 2015, killed nine black people who were attending Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina—deserves any other punishment than death does not seem to be a moral argument.
While Dr. King was clearly opposed to the death penalty, people also put their own ideas in his mouth. For example, people over the decades have made Dr. King a mascot of colorblindness. The idea that King supported colorblindness can only be believed if one thinks that the only thing King ever said (or wrote) in public life was his now iconic 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. Fundamentally, even a cursory look beyond that speech will reveal a Dr. King who was very much someone who saw color, and advocated for race-conscious public policy in order to redress the impact of centuries of anti-black, white supremacist public policy. One of the keys to colorblindness is that the only way to get over racism is to stop seeing race, meaning that public policy should be blind to race. We know that Dr. King completely opposed that. In one of his final speeches, he said:
At the very same time that America refused to give the Negro any land, through an act of Congress our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, but not only did they give the land, they built land grant colleges with government money to teach them how to farm. Not only that, they provided county agents to further their expertise in farming. Not only that, they provided low interest rates in order that they could mechanize their farms. Not only that, today, many of these people are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies not to farm, and they are the very people telling the black man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. And this is what we are faced with, and this is the reality. Now, when we come to Washington in this campaign, we are coming to get our check.
Even if it were the case that Dr. King were a supporter of the sophomoric fiction of colorblindness, which is the idea that centuries of white supremacy bolstered by specific governmental policies could be remedied by having colorblind public policy, the idea would not be any less nonsensical simply because he advocated it. Dr. King was a great moral leader and was definitely someone to pay attention to, but simply outsourcing one's moral reasoning to a deceased public figure is not how to assess right and wrong. Dr. King was not Jesus Christ, and it would be deeply unwise to form a religion around every single one of his proclamations, as though they were God-breathed utterances. It is also problematic when people make deceased leaders moral mascots because it is easy for demagogues and charlatans to deliberately put words into their mouths in order to advance bad ideas.
Authentic moral reasoning necessitates possessing an independent moral framework, and doing the often difficult work of deciding what one thinks on a particular issue. Sometimes, one's position may change as one is exposed to more evidence, better arguments, or one simply evaluates a position more carefully. For instance, the position on the death penalty expressed in this essay may change in some years. However, simply saying "Dr. King thought differently!" is not an argument that suffices for a person devoted to doing one's own moral reasoning. Dr. King rightly has a holiday in the United States named after him. His leadership was indescribably influential on matters of race and justice, but he was not an oracle. All attempts to make Dr. King into a moral rubric via which every single person must judge themselves is fundamentally flawed. Dr. King was a Christian, and while Christians agree on many basic issues of the faith, there is room for debate on myriad issues. Christianity is a thinking man’s faith. Dr. King’s words cannot be the official Christian position, nor should anybody try to form a religion from his words.