We have been on quite a run of Confucian commentary here at The Useless Tree; so, it is about time for a Taoist post.  And we have the perfect story: the death sentence of Saddam Hussein. 

    A simple notion of justice would hold that killing the killer is fair and right.  Saddam was obviously a brutal and bloody tyrant and, on the face of it, deserves the fate he has been handed.  Conversely, another simple notion of justice, one that holds "thou shalt not kill," would warn us off an eye for an eye.  Yes, he may have killed many, but killing him in turn only reproduces his own brutality.  That is what the Catholic Church is saying, at any rate.

     Taoists would come down on the side of the Catholics, though for different reasons.  Where a Catholic ethics would hold that "every life is sacred," Taoists would avoid such categorical statements (there would be no appeal to an external, divine notion of "sacred" for Taoists), and would question whether mere human beings should take life, which is the province of fate and Tao.  Here is an excerpt from Passage 74 of the Tao Te Ching (from the Ames translation) that gets at this idea:

To stand in for the executioner in killing people
Is to stand in for the master carpenter in cutting his lumber.
Of those who would thus stand in for the master carpenter,
Few get away without injuring their own hands.

    The "executioner" here is generally understood to be "Tao," or the natural unfolding of things.   Thus, the passage is telling us that if we take up killing, thus disrupting the natural rhythms of life and death, we will most likely create more problems than we solve. It is a sort of consequentialist argument.  We cannot stand in for a master carpenter, and if we try, we will come away with bloody hands.  An apt image when considering Iraq.  What will be the effect, the TTC is asking us, of Saddam’s execution?  Will it help reduce the horrible violence that has consumed Iraq?  Or, will it inspire more killing? 

    It will almost certainly spur on more killing:

"What happened today at the court gives us the resolve and the power
to go ahead on the road of holy war," said Marwan Hakam, a teacher in
the city of Tikrit, not far from Auja. "All must now carry arms to
fight the Americans."

"I have sworn by God that I shall not go
home and will detonate this explosives belt on American forces," said
Yahya, the Tikriti shopkeeper.

Samarra and other predominantly
Sunni cities and towns also saw protests, with crowds at times shooting
at or setting fire to government buildings. They revived a chant that
had dominated their lives during Hussein’s 24-year authoritarian rule:
"Our blood and our souls we sacrifice for you, Saddam."

   The TTC would in no way condone such violence.  Rather, it encourages us to see the ways in which our actions can produce the opposite of what we intend.  I have to believe that most Iraqis want a more peaceful life.  But the path to that peace cannot be built on killing, whether it is the horrific violence of sectarian civil war or the state-sanctioned violence of judicial execution.  Either way, we only injure our own hands.