On October 18, 2016, Saudi Arabia executed a member of the
royal family for committing murder during a brawl. Prince Turki bin Saud bin
Turki bin Saud al-Kabeer was put to death most likely by beheading in a public
square—as this was the usual method at the time. As horrific as such an
execution is, the point that law applies to everyone is laudable—especially “on
point” for countries in which the rich can “get away with murder” by hiring the
best (and most expensive) lawyers. The
atrocious means of execution coupled with the dictum that the law really does
apply to everyone renders this case particularly difficult to analyze from an
ethical perspective.
“The greatest thing is that the citizen sees the law applied
to everyone, and that there are not big people and other small people,” Abdul-Rahman
al-Lahim, a prominent Saudi lawyer wrote.[1]
In other words, the verdict and sentence sent the message that no one is above
the law. To be sure, thousands of people are in the Saudi royal family enjoying
perks not available to the rest of Saudi Arabia’s 20 million people; yet that
the member executed was from a prestigious arm of the family sufficiently makes
the point that no one is above the law.
This lesson is a valuable one for the United States, as
financiers got away with fraudulently mislabeling the risk of sub-prime
mortgage-based bonds before the financial crisis of 2008. Yet, interestingly,
the Saudis could look to the United States for a lesson on how to execute
people humanely. I submit that this combination of lessons demonstrates that a
country can be very ethical in one sense yet abysmal in another. This point in
turn impedes claims that some countries are more humane, or advanced ethically,
than others. Within a culture, insistence
on justice in one sense can coexist with toleration for injustice in another
sense. Put another way, the human mind seems able to compartmentalize justice,
without realizing the cognitive dissidence involved.
1. Ben Hubbard, “Saudi Prince Is Executed for Murder,” The New York Times, October 19, 2016.
