Captain's Dinner Quotes

“Dudley and Stephens’s main holding, about the need to defend individual rights in the face of utilitarian calculations, is an important moral and legal touchstone. Dictators have, throughout history, sought to justify atrocities through hedonic calculus. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin insisted that their concentration camps, planned starvations, and other forms of mass murder were a step on the way toward building a better world. There will always be tyrants who argue that the dead bodies piling up will promote the greatest good for the greatest number. Dudley and Stephens represents a firm rebuke”
― Adam Cohen, Captain's Dinner: A Shipwreck, An Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History

“Instead of the moral clarity of a prohibition against murder, it allowed people to make their own decisions about whether and when it might be right to kill someone.”
― Adam Cohen, Captain's Dinner: A Shipwreck, An Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History

“The roots of the royal prerogative of mercy lay in the reign of Edward the Confessor, the king of England from 1042 to 1066. The royal prerogative was, according to William Blackstone, the great legal commentator, part of the “power of the Sovereign of his pure grace to show mercy to an offender by mitigating or removing the consequences of conviction.” The power was limited to less serious crimes at first, but over time, it evolved so the monarch could, and often did, use it to overturn death sentences. In some cases, the mercy power was considered to be, according to a legal scholar, “an acknowledgement of the fallibility of the judicial process.”
― Adam Cohen, Captain's Dinner: A Shipwreck, An Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History