One of the most important problems confronting American civilization currently—one not getting the attention it should locally, nationally, and internationally—is nitrogen hypoxia.

Nitrogen hypoxia is an abominable method of execution where the condemned are forced to inhale pure nitrogen gas via a bespoke mask affixed by sadistic executioners. Only two states, Louisiana and Alabama, have experimented with this method of execution thus far.

Why has Louisiana and Alabama’s gassing of human beings to death caused such little outrage despite mountainous evidence the men tortured this way—gasping, writhing, choking, and convulsing—cruelly and unusually suffered for several minutes before eventually expiring?

One reason is unlike with other plainly barbaric ways of killing—say, for example, burning at the stake, the guillotine, “drawing and quartering,” crucifixion, and so forth— advocates against nitrogen-gassing and death penalty abolitionists generally have been unable to persuade the public, lawmakers, and judges (including enough members of our Supreme Court) that this method of execution is, in a word, disgusting.

Many arguments have been made showing the death penalty itself, by any means, is disgusting, and those arguments should undoubtedly continue. But there is an opportunity, one getting smaller with each passing nitrogen-gassing execution in this country, to paint a picture of nitrogen-gassings as something base, something below us, something unquestionably un-American and unacceptable—and yes, something that’s disgusting.

Recently the science writer Shankar Vedantam explored the power of disgust on his popular podcast “Hidden Brain.” As his staff summarized about Vedantam’s show “Yuck! The Science of Disgust”: “Disgust is a strong emotion, one designed by evolution to protect us from danger and diseases. But disgust also spills into other areas of our lives, influencing our morals, our intuitions about right and wrong, even our politics.”

In keeping with this scientific truth, disgust unsurprisingly also plays an integral role in determining what execution methods are deemed acceptable—if any. This is so even though as law professor Dan Kahan wrote in 1998, in an article published by the Michigan Law Review called “The Anatomy of Disgust in Criminal Law,” a “defect in the dominant theories of criminal law” is “the absence of how disgust does and should influence legal decisionmaking.”

Kahan’s recommended tonic was a book published by the Harvard University Press one year earlier, in 1997, by law professor William Ian Miller, fittingly called “The Anatomy of Disgust.”

About Miller’s book, Kahan opined: “Drawing on a rich variety of sources in psychology, history, literature, and philosophy, Miller paints a vivid picture of disgust as ‘a moral and social sentiment.’ By ‘mark[ing] out moral matters for which we can have no compromise,” disgust, [Miller] convincingly argues, plays an indispensable role in our evaluative life.” And not only that, disgust is “an indispensable member of our moral vocabulary” because “‘[i]t signals seriousness, commitment, indisputability, presentness and reality.’”

At this juncture it bears noting that despite the gruesome details of all of the nitrogen-gassing executions that have taken place in this country so far which have not sparked enough societal outrage for nitrogen-gassing to be outlawed, disgust is so powerful according to Miller—as highlighted by Kahan’s cogent and compelling review—because disgust is capable of identifying “harms that sicken us in the telling, things for which there could be no plausible claim of right.”

Relevant to lawyers, civil rights activists and the like who are looking to push back against the cruel and unusual use of nitrogen hypoxia, Kahan highlights: “For Miller, disgust is not an instinctive and unthinking aversion but rather a thought-pervaded evaluative sentiment. Disgust embodies the appraisal that its object is low and contaminating and the judgment that we must insulate ourselves from it less it compromise our own status. By feeling and expressing disgust, we thus reinforce the hierarchical social norms that give disgust its evaluative content.” Saliently Kahan observed Miller’s book “suggests that no abstract theory, and no other moral sentiment, can reproduce the work that disgust does in voicing our opposition to moral atrocities.”

The disgust of nitrogen hypoxia where human beings flop around on execution gurneys like fish out of water asphyxiating in front of select media witnesses—who only have so many adjectives to describe the horror of what they’re observing—has not yet been adequately articulated by today’s decisionmakers, legal and political, nor by our celebrities and other societal “influencers.”

In a letter to The New York Times published in January 1997—synchronistically the same year Miller published his “Anatomy of Disgust”— a letter The Times aptly titled “Death Penalty Disgust,” New York denizen Lena Holub wrote “To the Editor: I can now define what causes that feeling of loathing in my chest while reading articles like the transcript of the death-watch logs kept by prison guards in Arkansas (Week in Review, Jan. 12) and other reports of executions in your pages. It is the absence of humanity evidenced by all participants: the lack of humanity shown both by the murderer toward his victim and by the state toward its inmate.”

Gassing human beings to death with nitrogen is disgusting. The absence of humanity in such vile acts should cause a feeling of deep loathing in all of our chests. What we need in Alabama, in Louisiana, and every other state—as well as worldwide—is for this sentiment to be universal.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)