Wheaton is a school of many political views, so I hazard a guess that many may not understand the necessity of Saddam’s execution. One of, if not my first, favorite authors has written on this very subject. Here are some excerpts from C.S. Lewis’ “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment.” Lewis takes a different, somewhat more abstract and curious, philosophical stance when it comes to looking a crime and punishment.
“According to the Humanitarian theory, to punish a man because he deserves it, and as much as he deserves it, is mere revenge, and, therefore, barbarous and immoral. It is maintained that the only legitimate motives for punishing are the desire to deter others by example or to mend the criminal. When this theory is combined, as frequently happens, with the belief that all crime is more or lesspathological, the idea of mending tails off into that of healing or curing and punishment becomes therapeutic. Thus is appears at first sight that we have passed from the harsh and self-righteous notion of giving the wicked their deserts to the charitable and enlightened one of tending the psychologically sick. What could be more amiable?”
“My contention is that this doctrine, merciful though it appears, really means that each one of us, from the moment he breaks the law, is deprived of the rights of a human being… when we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether; instead of a person, a subject of rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a ‘case’…But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we ‘ought to have known better’, is to be treated as a human person in God’s image.”
Source: American Thinker