Society may preserve a legal penalty nobody wants to enact

Evidence

If public support for the death penalty continues to wane, society may well end up with a constitutionally permissible lethal punishment that no one wants to carry out any longer. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2100

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A legal regime that is formally permissible but socially unexecutable — a liminal state where law and moral sentiment fully diverge, and the institutions mediating between them (courts, governors, executioners) all refuse to act.
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘the unexecuted law’ — what happens when a society keeps a punishment on the books it no longer wants to apply, from the death penalty to sodomy laws to debtors’ prisons. The legal form survives as a ghost of abandoned moral authority.
• BMF: The phenomenon of a law whose practitioners have all quietly refused to enact it echoes the We — the One State’s execution of its citizens happens through bureaucratic, anonymized machinery where no individual feels responsible — a society that keeps lethal punishment legally available but morally unmanned.