Ta-Nehisi Coates wanted to fight. He was having drinks with friends—all, like him, “black men raised in the crack-era inner cities, now thriving in some other America”—when two drunks accosted them. Their instinct, born of a childhood understanding that respect could be acquired only through force, was to meet aggression with aggression. Against their ingrained influences they resisted the invitation to a barroom brawl. Anger lingered through the night; they did not feel like the bigger men in the situation, but like the boys whose reputations depended on rising to a confrontation. I thought of Coates, his friends, and the strength of standing down while listening to William F. Schulz, the Richard and Ann Pozen visiting professor in human rights, discuss torture and the death penalty. A former executive director of Amnesty International USA, Schultz described his opposition to both forms of state-sanctioned violence at a May 7 lecture, “Is Human Dignity Inherent?” Schulz, AM’74, described meetings with condemned prisoners. Some were repentant, some innocent, some mentally ill, and some truly evil. He wanted none of them executed in his name. “I oppose the death penalty not because I believe that every one of those lives carries inherent dignity and worth,” Schulz said. “In some cases their death would be no loss to anyone at all.” Rejecting the idea of inherent dignity, Schulz challenged a common argument against torture and the death penalty. “I need to assign them worth and dignity,” he said, “in order to preserve my own.” To deny those characteristics even to people who have committed the worst atrocities, Schulz suggested, diminishes everyone’s. Not that he possesses superhuman magnanimity or the capacity not to fantasize about retribution when wronged. If one of those death-row inmates had murdered a loved one, Schulz said, “no torture would be too great to satisfy my lust for revenge”—precisely why he abhors it as a tactic. “I do not want the state to indulge me in my worst impulses. Part of the role of government is to save us from our basest passions in order to extract some semblance of worth and dignity.” It’s hard enough to govern our own emotions when threatened in a bar, but in that context restraint feels like the better part of valor. In a political context, a restrained response to provocation often seems to be the opposite. A reflexive call to arms might feel as justified as Coates’s urge to fight or Schulz’s compulsion to torture a murderer, but carries consequences far more grave than any bar fight. Despite addressing such different subjects, Coates and Schulz seemed to be saying the same thing: without a tempering voice on the shoulder opposite the chip, we risk indulging our worst impulses, confusing the sober concept of justice with belligerence that reduces it to vengeance.