A Humanist Perspective on The Death Penalty, Authoritarian Authority, and Universal Human Rights

The contemporary geography of the death penalty reveals a striking pattern. Capital punishment is increasingly concentrated in a small minority of states, many of which have political or religious institutions that place extraordinary authority in rulers, ruling parties, religious establishments, or ideological systems. At the same time, most of the world’s states have abolished capital punishment in law or practice.

The most useful distinction, therefore, may not be between religious and secular societies. It may instead be between systems in which governmental or religious authority is regarded as superior to individual rights and systems in which even the most powerful institutions are constrained by rights understood to belong inherently to human beings.

This distinction helps explain why radically different societies—Islamic theocracies, secular Communist states, monarchies, authoritarian republics and a small number of democracies—can retain capital punishment despite having little else ideologically in common.

1. Remarkable concentration of executions

Amnesty International reported that at least 1,518 executions occurred in 2024, the highest recorded figure since 2015. That number excludes the thousands of executions believed to have occurred in China, where execution statistics remain a state secret.

Yet executions were known to have occurred in only 15 countries.

Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia alone accounted for approximately 91 percent of known executions. Iran executed at least 972 people, Saudi Arabia at least 345 and Iraq at least 63. China is believed to have executed thousands more, although reliable figures cannot be independently established.

At the same time, 113 countries had abolished capital punishment completely, while 145 had abolished it either in law or practice.

The subsequent trend reinforced rather than weakened this concentration. Amnesty reported at least 2,707 executions across 17 countries in 2025, again excluding the thousands believed to have been executed in China. Iran alone accounted for at least 2,159 executions.

Thus, the modern death penalty is increasingly not a punishment routinely employed throughout the international community. It is a practice concentrated within a relatively small group of states.

That raises an important question: What distinguishes the political and institutional cultures that continue to execute people from the much larger number of societies that have abandoned the practice?

2. Revealing distinction: constrained authority versus superior authority

The geographic distribution initially invites explanations based upon religion. Many of the world’s most active execution states—including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Yemen—are predominantly Muslim.

But religion by itself cannot adequately explain the pattern.

China, probably the world’s largest executioner, is governed by an officially secular Communist Party. North Korea is an extraordinarily authoritarian secular state. Vietnam is governed by a Communist Party. Singapore is religiously pluralistic. Meanwhile, numerous predominantly Muslim societies have abolished capital punishment or ceased carrying out executions.

The more revealing distinction may therefore concern the relationship between authority and individual human rights.

Some political and religious systems locate ultimate authority outside the individual. That authority may be understood as divine: God, sacred revelation, religious law, or religious institutions claiming authority to interpret divine commands.

Or it may be entirely secular: a supreme leader, monarch, dictator, oligarchy, revolutionary ideology, ruling party, or state claiming overriding authority to define the interests of society.

These systems can be radically different in their theology and political philosophy. Nevertheless, they may share an institutional characteristic—certain sources of authority are placed beyond effective challenge by the individual.

Iran illustrates the religious version. China illustrates a secular version. North Korea represents an even more extreme secular concentration of political authority.

The common characteristic is therefore not belief in God.

It is the absence or weakness of an institutional principle that says:

No ruler, government, political ideology, or religious institution possesses unlimited authority over the fundamental rights of an individual human being. This is a Humanist perspective. This distinction is important because universal human rights principles reverse the traditional hierarchy between ruler and subject.

Under an authoritarian conception, rights ultimately exist because legitimate authority recognizes them.

Under the modern human rights conception, individuals possess fundamental rights that governments themselves are obligated to respect.

That philosophical transformation places limits on punishment even when governments believe severe punishment would promote social order.

Comparative research supports an important relationship between democratic institutions and abolition. Research covering 164 countries over six decades found that democracy, separation of powers, democratic transitions, and established democratic institutions increased the likelihood of movement toward abolition.

The mechanism is understandable. Independent courts, constitutional rights, appellate review, opposition parties, civil society, a free press, and international human rights institutions all create competing centers of authority capable of challenging the state’s decision to take a human life.

Authoritarian systems characteristically weaken precisely those constraints.

3. Capital punishment can become an assertion of sovereign authority

This institutional distinction becomes particularly important when governments impose death not merely for murder but for conduct perceived as threatening political, religious, or social order.

Capital punishment can then serve purposes extending well beyond ordinary criminal justice. It can become a demonstration of sovereign power.

Amnesty documented examples in which Iran and Saudi Arabia employed capital punishment against individuals connected with political protest or dissent. Iran executed individuals associated with the Women, Life, Freedom movement protests following proceedings that Amnesty and other human rights organizations criticized for unfair trials and torture-tainted confessions.

Saudi Arabia has also imposed death sentences in cases involving political dissent and members of its Shi’a minority.

Here capital punishment potentially performs two functions simultaneously. It punishes an individual offense, but it can also communicate a broader message:

The authority of the state—or the political or religious order represented by the state—cannot safely be challenged.

The same underlying institutional principle can exist without religion. A secular authoritarian state can similarly treat challenges to the ruling party, revolutionary ideology or supreme leader as challenges to the legitimate order of society itself.

The crucial variable is therefore not necessarily whether the source of ultimate authority is God or government.

It is whether authority is sufficiently constrained by enforceable individual rights.

4. Retribution, authority and universal human rights

The deeper philosophical divide concerns the relationship between punishment and human dignity.

Death-penalty systems commonly justify execution through some combination of retribution, deterrence, social protection and preservation of moral or political order.

A human rights approach, humanism, begins from a different question:

Are there things the state should not be permitted to do to a human being regardless of how seriously that person has violated society’s laws?

That question represents one of the fundamental transformations produced by modern human rights philosophy.

Historically, sovereigns possessed enormous authority over their subjects. Governments could execute people for religious heresy, political disloyalty, theft, sexual behavior, and challenges to governmental authority.

Modern human rights doctrine (humanism) progressively reversed that relationship.

Government became subject to rights rather than the source of all rights.

That principle appears throughout the post-World War II international human rights system as framed by the principles of the enlightenment (humanism) and has contributed to the worldwide movement toward abolition of capital punishment.

The trend is particularly significant because abolition does not necessarily follow public opinion. Democratic societies sometimes abolish capital punishment even while substantial portions of their populations continue to support it.

Constitutional rights can therefore operate precisely as they are intended to operate: as limitations upon what political majorities may authorize governments to do to individuals.

5. Drug executions expose the conflict especially clearly

The conflict between state authority and international human rights standards becomes particularly visible with executions for drug offenses.

In 2024, at least 637 known executions—approximately 42 percent of recorded executions worldwide—were for drug-related offenses. Such executions were particularly associated with China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore, with Vietnam also believed to employ capital punishment extensively for drug offenses.

International human rights standards sharply restrict capital punishment and increasingly favor abolition. For states that retain capital punishment, the United Nations Human Rights Committee interprets the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as restricting it to the “most serious crimes,” meaning crimes of extreme gravity involving intentional killing (although humanism doesn’t endorse the death penalty even under these circumstances).

Drug offenses do not meet that standard.

The persistence of executions for drug crimes is therefore especially revealing.

Governments employing capital punishment in these circumstances are not simply responding to homicide. They are asserting that preservation of a particular conception of social order justifies the state’s taking of human life.

The question consequently becomes larger than whether execution deters drug trafficking.

It becomes a question about the permissible limits of governmental authority.

6. The United States is an important counterexample

The United States demonstrates why authoritarianism cannot provide a complete explanation.

The United States has competitive elections, constitutional protections, independent courts, extensive appellate procedures, and a vigorous civil society, yet it remains an execution state.

It is also an extraordinary outlier among comparable Western democracies and has been the only country in the Americas regularly carrying out executions. American capital punishment therefore demonstrates that democratic institutions alone do not necessarily produce abolition.

Scholars have identified several possible explanations for American exceptionalism: federalism, highly decentralized criminal justice, historically elected prosecutors and judges in many jurisdictions, traditions of retributive punishment, racial history, political responsiveness to public attitudes about crime, and the relatively weak influence of international human rights institutions upon domestic American criminal law.

The American experience therefore modifies the authoritarianism hypothesis in an important way.

The relevant continuum may not simply be:

democracy ↔ dictatorship

It may instead be:

strong institutional protection of individual human rights, humanism↔ strong governmental authority to impose irreversible punishment.

Countries can occupy different positions along that continuum even while remaining democracies.

7. Common denominator may be limits placed upon authority

This framework produces a different way of understanding the global death penalty map.

The relevant division is not:

religious societies versus secular societies.

Nor is it simply:

Western societies versus non-Western societies.

Instead, a more promising hypothesis is:

systems in which political, religious, or ideological authority is comparatively difficult to challenge versus systems in which fundamental individual rights impose strong institutional constraints upon authority.

That hypothesis accommodates otherwise puzzling combinations:

• Iran can derive ultimate authority partly from religion.
• China can derive it from the Communist Party and state.
• North Korea can concentrate it in a ruling dynasty and political ideology.
• Saudi Arabia can combine monarchy, state authority and religious law.

Yet the underlying institutional question remains similar:

When the asserted needs of the political, religious or social order conflict with the fundamental rights of an individual, which takes precedence?

The international movement toward abolition increasingly answers that question by placing limits upon governmental power.

8. Trump, Hegseth and the rhetoric of governmental violence

This distinction between a human dignity-centered conception of government and a power-centered conception of government also provides a framework for examining contemporary American political rhetoric.

President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have repeatedly emphasized “military lethality” (the warrior ethos), destroying enemies and the government’s power to kill people characterized as dangerous.

It is important to distinguish rhetoric from the legitimate function of a military. Every government has a responsibility to protect its population, and armed forces necessarily train to defeat opposing military forces. Neither military preparedness nor the lawful use of force is inherently incompatible with humanism.

The relevant question is different:

What values does a government place at the center of its conception of legitimate power?

Hegseth’s own official statements provide unusually clear evidence of the administration’s rhetorical emphasis. On taking office in January 2025, he announced that the armed forces would emphasize “lethality, meritocracy, accountability, standards, and readiness,” describing Americans in uniform as “warriors” and declaring that, when necessary, they would “defeat and destroy our enemies.”

At the Naval Academy in April 2025, Hegseth described the military’s purpose as being prepared to “close with, destroy, and defeat the enemies we must.” He told midshipmen that they would bring “lethality and violence on the enemy” and described the military as being “in the business of lethality.”

There is an important counterpoint within Hegseth’s own rhetoric. He has also repeatedly described this military strength as a means of deterrence, arguing that overwhelming capability makes adversaries less likely to initiate wars. At the  IISS Shangri-La Dialogue 2025, for example, he explicitly connected military strength to making opponents less likely to challenge the United States on the battlefield.

Trump’s rhetoric nevertheless extends this conception of governmental power beyond conventional descriptions of battlefield necessity.

In January 2025, he ordered the federal government to pursue capital punishment more aggressively, describing it as an “essential tool” of deterrence and punishment and directing the attorney general to pursue death sentences in specified circumstances where legally available.

More recently, Trump has employed explicitly lethal terminology concerning drug cartels. In his September 2026 address to the United Nations, he said his administration had “unleashed the United States Armed Forces to eliminate them” and said cartel members “should be killed, exiled, or detained as enemy combatants.”

The administration’s official communications surrounding military operations have likewise repeatedly celebrated overwhelming destructive power. During the 2026 conflict with Iran, White House communications described American forces in terms of “overwhelming power,” “crushing dominance,” and “devastating force.”

Those statements do not by themselves establish authoritarian government, nor does aggressive military language establish that unlawful force has occurred. Military organizations necessarily discuss defeating adversaries, and the Trump administration argues that overwhelming military strength prevents wars through deterrence. Hegseth has explicitly made that argument.

The humanist criticism is therefore narrower and more fundamental.

The concern is what happens when lethality, domination, destruction and the elimination of people designated as enemies become prominent symbols of governmental strength rather than tragic instruments whose use must constantly be justified and constrained.

A humanist framework reverses the emphasis. The starting question is not:

How completely can government destroy its enemies? It is:

What exercise of governmental power is necessary to protect human beings while causing the least avoidable destruction of human life and dignity?

That distinction does not require pacifism.

A humanist government can maintain armed forces. It can defend its population. It can imprison dangerous criminals. It can use force against an imminent threat. Soldiers may sometimes have to kill enemy combatants in lawful armed conflict.

But the moral presumption remains different.

Human life retains value even when the human being is an offender, an enemy soldier, a foreigner, a dissident, or a person whom political leaders regard as evil.

The state may sometimes have compelling reasons to employ coercion against such a person, but it does not thereby acquire unlimited moral authority over that person’s humanity.

This is precisely where the death penalty and the rhetoric of military lethality intersect philosophically.

Both force us to ask whether the government’s possession of overwhelming coercive power becomes its own moral justification—or whether government remains accountable to a prior principle:

Power exists to protect human beings; human beings do not exist to demonstrate the power of the state.

Conclusion: Humanism and the limits of legitimate power

The worldwide movement away from capital punishment can be understood as part of a much larger historical transition—from the presumed authority of rulers and institutions toward the dignity and rights of individual human beings.

For much of human history, kings, governments, religious authorities, and ruling elites possessed enormous power to determine what individuals could believe, say, and do—and ultimately whether they could live.

Modern human rights philosophy progressively challenged that hierarchy.

Humanism provides an especially useful philosophical foundation for understanding that transformation.

Humanism does not replace an infallible God with an infallible government, political leader, ideology, or majority. It subjects all of them to critical examination through reason, evidence, human experience, and concern for human flourishing.

Its fundamental moral orientation is therefore from the institution toward the human being, rather than from the human being toward the institution.

That distinction illuminates both capital punishment and governmental violence.

A government unquestionably possesses legitimate powers that individuals do not possess. It can imprison criminals, enforce laws, maintain armed forces and, under appropriate circumstances, use force to protect human life.

But possession of power does not establish the morality of every exercise of that power.

The central humanist question is always:

Does this exercise of power protect human beings while respecting, to the greatest degree possible, their dignity and fundamental rights?

That question becomes especially important when political leaders celebrate governmental power through the vocabulary of lethality, domination, destruction and killing.

Trump and Hegseth argue that military lethality produces deterrence and ultimately peace. That argument deserves to be evaluated on its evidence and consequences rather than dismissed merely because military force is involved.

But the humanist framework introduces an equally important warning.

A society changes morally when violence ceases to be regarded primarily as a regrettable necessity requiring extraordinary justification and instead becomes a public demonstration of governmental strength, righteousness, or national greatness.

That is the connection between the death penalty and the broader subject of political authority.

The fundamental question is not merely whether governments can kill. Governments plainly possess that capacity. The deeper question is what moral principles restrain them when they possess overwhelming power over another human being.

The contemporary death-penalty divide suggests one possible answer. Most nations have increasingly accepted that there should be profound limits upon the state’s authority to take human life. Executions have consequently become concentrated among a relatively small number of countries, many characterized by powerful political, ideological or religious institutions.

The United States remains an important exception and therefore an important test of the principle.

A constitutional democracy does not become authoritarian simply because it possesses a powerful military, executes convicted murderers, or uses force against an enemy. The more revealing question is whether its political culture continues to treat human dignity, constitutional constraint, due process, proportionality, and the preservation of life as limitations upon governmental power—even when the people affected have been characterized as criminals or enemies.

Humanism ultimately proposes a simple reversal of the ancient relationship between authority and the individual: The human being does not exist to serve the power, glory, ideology or righteousness of the state. The state exists to serve human beings.

From that proposition follows a demanding principle for both criminal justice and military power.  The strength of a government should be measured not merely by its capacity to punish, dominate or destroy, but by its capacity to protect human beings while restraining its own enormous power over them.

That may ultimately be the deeper philosophical issue underlying the global movement away from capital punishment—and the reason rhetoric celebrating governmental lethality deserves careful scrutiny in any democracy committed to human dignity.