Executions, far from being useful examples to the survivors, have, I am persuaded, a quite contrary effect, by hardening the heart they ought to terrify. Besides, the fear of an ignominious death, I believe, never deterred anyone from the commission of a crime, because in committing it the mind is roused to activity about present circumstances.

Wollstonecraft argues against public executions as a tool of social discipline. Rather than inspiring moral reform, she contends that spectacles of state violence desensitize onlookers—“hardening” the very feelings (pity, fear, conscience) that punishment is supposed to awaken. She also anticipates a modern critique of deterrence: in the moment of wrongdoing, people are absorbed by immediate pressures, passions, or calculations, not by abstract future consequences like a shameful death. The passage thus shifts attention from theatrical punishment to the social and psychological conditions that produce crime, implying that genuine prevention lies in reforming circumstances and character rather than staging terror.