Xiaowen Lu
Professor Evans
English A100
July 30 2012
Farewell, Dear Dale A person presides over court proceedings, either alone or as part of themselves. She is supposed to conduct the trial impartially and in the open court. She hears all the witnesses and any other evidence presented by the parties of the case, assesses the credibility and arguments of the parties, and then issues a ruling on the matter at hand based on his or her interpretation of the law and his or her own personal judgment. Yes, she is a judge. Another group of people, they are from different places, doing different jobs, having different backgrounds. They convene to render an impartial verdict officially submitted to them by a court. These sworn bodies of people are juries. A person who carries out a death sentence ordered by the state or the legal authority is a judicial executioner. Those professionals, who has the same title of the episode -- "Judge, Jury, Executioner"(AMC), are represented the most important roles in the justice system in our society. However, living in the undead world, they seem so powerless, or not even exist. Among the alive survivors, who will replace judge, jury and executioner? How do they continue the justice? What is the real justice in the zombie world? "The Walking Dead", season 2, episode 11, it is about twelve survivors deciding whether or not to execute a young man named Randall. Only one survivor, Dale, is against the execution. He talks to most of other survivors and fails to persuade them. In the end, the execution for Randall is not completed, but Dale is attacked by a zombie. He is ended his life by another survivor named Daryl. As the episode opens, Daryl is beating a young captive Randall. He tortures the boy to extract any information by kicking and even using a knife cut the young boy's wound on his leg. We learn that Randall was in league with some 30 bad men who have plenty of weapons and rape any surviving women. It indicates that the boy has potential danger which he will lead the bad guys to come back and look for troubles. The young captive also claims his innocence, insisting he was taken in by the gang but never party to their most evil ways. Daryl reports to other survivors. They all think Randall is a potential threat. Rick, the leader of the group, announce he will execute the young boy. Everyone agree in the silent except Dale, who manages to persuade Rick to at least have an all-farm meeting before killing anyone. The indiscreet decision of executing a captive reflects a relationship between minority and majority. One of the famous Cartesian decision from Discourse on Method, it says if you are lost in a forest with a group of friends. After some decision, the groups agrees that they should keep walking in a given direction but disagrees between two opinion: going North or going South. The majority votes to go North. What is the rationale for every single member of the group to go with the majority decision? If the rationale for using majority rule is to reach a collective decision. By doing so the group treats every member equally. The fairness is the main justification for majority rule. However, the majority rule maximizes individual's autonomy. Further, the reason for any member of the group to embrace the particular decision produced by majority rule is that it is more likely to be accurate than the prediction of the minority. We can see that this is a very simple judge. And we also can tell this argument is well expressed in the following quotation: “It seems scarcely necessary to prove that, if the decision is not to be unanimous — if the concurrence of all the members of the body is not required — it must be made by a majority, and not by a minority, however determined. If a minority could prevail over the majority, those who were in favor of a proposition would vote against it, or would abstain from voting in order to insure a majority to their side of the
