Justice In Billy Buddd

What is seen as the right thing to do is not always the lawful thing to do. This concept as a whole is explored deeply in the conclusion to Herman Melville’s novel Billy Budd, Sailor, as Captain Vere executes foretopman Billy Budd for what seems like a justifiable crime to the reader, under an undiscriminating law. The idea of capital punishment for laws that do not take into account anything but pure facts has long been debated on moral and ethical grounds, and Melville explores both sides; the side of justice, which would have let Billy live, and the side of the law, which condemned Billy to death. Through the character of Captain Vere, “Billy Budd, Sailor” reveals the conflict between law and justice, and how Billy’s execution by Captain
Vere reflects on the absoluteness of capital punishment for unjust laws. To understand fully how Billy’s demise is a questioning of the death penalty, one must first examine the relation between Captain Vere and Billy Budd.
To begin, Captain Vere as a character is a complex depiction of a man who wants nothing else but to obey his duty to his country, but is conflicted by the fact that he is a virtuous, moral person who believes in doing what is just.
In this way, he represents the ideal system of justice; lawful, but also taking into account ethical and emotional factors that laws alone can’t resolve. When Billy strikes Claggart, killing him, Captain Vere faces a moral dilemma in how to proceed with Budd; knowing that under the Mutiny Laws, Billy committed an act that requires capital punishment, but at the same instant knowing that the blow could be justified. His internal conflict can be seen as he cries out, “Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!” (49) knowing that his duty to the law requires Billy to
die.
Furthermore, subsequent events after Billy’s death raise some major ethical questions about whether or not Vere’s decision was justified in its entirety. When Vere condemns Billy to execution, he is putting the law and what he sees as the ‘greater good’ before his and the crew’s personal feelings for Billy; knowing that leaving Billy alive could “awaken any slumbering embers of Nore” (52) possibly reviving mutinous feelings within some of the crew. Vere also rejects the other members of the drumhead court in their defense of Billy, stating, “It is Nature. But do these button that we wear attest that our allegiance is to Nature? No, to the King.” (56) However, knowing that Billy was acting without anger towards Claggart and did not mean to kill, Billy Budd, Sailor, as H. Franklin writes, “does not absolve them from being murderers.” Captain Vere realizes his mistake as he lays dying after a battle, whispering “Billy Budd, Billy Budd…” (73) to his attendant, haunted by the fact that he wrongly executed a morally innocent man under the guise of doing what is right by the law.
Finally, the main question raised by the series of events leading up to Billy’s death involved the absolute legitimacy of the death penalty for crimes such as Billy’s.
Law, in it’s ideal form, would be completely just, and people would only commit crimes with bad intention. However, this is never the case, as laws are designed to deter merely the act of the crime, not knowing the intentions or circumstances. When Vere acts on Law rather than Justice, it is a larger statement about the death penalty in general. Believing that killing those who commit crimes of a high enough significance is the right thing to do is what Billy Budd, Sailor, rejects as an absolute, painting a statement that shows how the law is not one hundred percent correct in its judgment of only facts; therefore, the death penalty is not entirely justified as the means of punishment for a crime.
Overall, Captain Vere, by enacting the death penalty required by law against Billy, symbolizes the question Melville asks of the reader; if Billy killed without bad intention, yet is killed for it, how is Captain Vere killing Billy for the greater good any
different?