UPDATE: Eugene has recanted this position. Kudos to him.

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A few weeks ago, in my post about Ed Cone's Newcomer's Guide to the Blogosphere, I suggested Eugene Volokh as a good place to visit for a conservative take on the news. I'm going to yank that recommendation after reading this post -- in which a highly intelligent, supremely rational, well-educated man expresses his happy support for the deliberate infliction of bloody cruelty entirely for its own sake.

Lest you think I'm being unfair, here's what Volokh actually says, and what he goes on to defend in a number of updates and never even half-recants:

I particularly like the involvement of the victims' relatives in the killing of the monster; I think that if he'd killed one of my relatives, I would have wanted to play a role in killing him. Also, though for many instances I would prefer less painful forms of execution, I am especially pleased that the killing — and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging. The one thing that troubles me (besides the fact that the murderer could only be killed once) is that the accomplice was sentenced to only 15 years in prison, but perhaps there's a good explanation.

I am being perfectly serious, by the way. I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness. I think it slights the burning injustice of the murders, and the pain of the families, to react in any other way. [emphasis mine]

He's saying the deliberate and cruel infliction of pain is a good in and of itself.

I'm devastated to see someone I respected -- even if I didn't always agree with him -- wallowing so unrepetently in humanity's absolute darkest impulses. Even in our worst moments, there must be some check upon our bloodthirsty rage. That way lies Lord of the Flies. That way lies madness and utter devastation.

Matt Yglesias has quite a bit more to say about this:

A society that encourages bloodthirsty behavior is going to become a society composed of bloodthirsty individuals.

Volokh notes that even torturing and killing a man who raped and killed dozens of children is, from a certain point of view, "ridiculously inadequate." Which is quite right and entirely part of the point. Unleashing excess cruelty on serious wrongdoers doesn't, in the end, solve anything, or balance out any sort of scales. Dead kids aren't revived and they're not really avenged, either. Family members pain and loss doesn't go away. You're merely telling people that they can and should try to fill the void left in their souls with the suffering of others. These are impulses that can and will easily become misdirected, turn into casual disregard for the interests of third parties, and spill over into all manner of contexts. There are real questions posed by what one might term "purposive cruelty" that's supposed to accomplish some worthy end other than mere indulgence of a desire for cruelty. But of the sort of thing we're contemplating now, there's no real affirmative case. Indulge the desire for cruelty for cruelty's sake and all you'll get is cruelty.

So does MetaFilter. So does everyone. But the words I really think of are Umberto Eco's:

Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, "I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares." Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances — every day, in every part of the world.

Evil is evil, even when it wears a mask and froths about justice and "the greater good."

Poisonous ideas like this are extremely difficult to combat, because the only sane response is to recoil in horror. After all, how do you begin to argue with someone who sees nothing wrong with brutally torturing a person solely for another's pleasure?

It just astounds me that a conversation about whether or not we should deliberately torture people we're about to put to death to sate the bloodlust of the victims' families can even be on the table.

Some days I think the human soul is not a soaring bird but an abyss.