A future pope justified the death penalty by likening it to just-war self-defense

Evidence

Before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger used military self-defense as justification by social comparison for the use of the death penalty. He explained that it is “permissible to take up arms to repel an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment” (Ratzinger, 2004). … This justification is similar to one of the just-war principles except that it permits violent force only after nonviolent means have been exhausted. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1923

Categorization

• XREF: Directly pays off Bandura’s core moral-disengagement mechanism of ‘advantageous comparison’ — framing killing as self-defense rather than retaliation; echoes the just-war tradition discussion in related ethics readings.