When the people do not fear death, how can they be frightened by the threat of death?
If the people constantly fear death, and someone does evil, I can grab him and kill him, and then who will dare to imitate him ?
Heaven has a dedicated magistrate who inflicts death.
If one wants to replace this supreme magistrate, and inflict death himself, it is as if one asks an unskilled man to cut wood in place of a carpenter. When you want to carve wood in place of a carpenter, it is seldom that you do not injure your hands.
When normal, decent people don’t fear death, how can you use death to frighten them? Even when they have a normal fear of death, who of us dare take and kill the one who doesn’t? When people are normal and decent and death-fearing, there’s always an executioner. To take the place of that executioner is to take the place of the great carpenter. People who cut the great carpenter’s wood seldom get off with their hands unhurt.