I had to look “civilized” up in the dictionary this week. I had thought this was a word that I had used correctly for years, but after a former Georgia prosecutor used it this week to describe the decision to execute Troy Davis I was confused. Former DA Spencer Lawton said, “The good news is we live in a civilized society where questions like this are decided based on fact in open and transparent courts of law, and not on street corners.” And before I pulled a Mandy Patinkin al la Princess Bride (“You keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means.”) on Lawton, I wanted to make sure that it was me who got the word’s meaning right.

It was.

Being civilized pertains to “having an advanced or humane culture, society, etc.” A nation that practices the death penalty should be considered neither advanced nor humane.

Advanced – When I was young, and my brother hit me, I hit him back. What did my mom do? She scolded me. Just because someone hits you doesn’t make it right to hit them back. Likely you had similar experiences. As we advanced from infancy to adulthood, both individually and socially, a knee-jerk response (often predicated on the need to avenge our own real or perceived slights) became unacceptable.

Humane – To act humanely is to have respect for humanity. Not just some of humanity. Not just those people who are nice. Not just those people who are like you. To differentiate is exactly what makes an action inhumane—you are determining who should be treated like a human and who shouldn’t.

The death penalty asks us as a society to diminish both of these concepts.

It is easier in cases like Davis’, where even many who are in favor of the death penalty were outraged by the injustice of the case, to call out the DA for his oxymoronic usage of “civilized.” But it was just as uncivilized when we executed Lawrence Brewer this week. I abhor his actions, and especially the incredible racism that motivated them, but Texas’ decision to put him to death shows how little we have advanced and how limited a value we place on acting humanely.

It is tough to overcome our bloodlust in the face of wrongs, but that is what shows that we are interested in developing: “The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction” (Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents). Based on this week, and a previous GOP debate, it seems many are interested in inverting this logic. The Lawtons of the world want us to believe that aggression is not counter to civilization, but rather the logical output of our legal system. Maybe these folks need a dictionary.