 But perhaps things are not quite this simple. Suppose we agreed that the goal of the Eighth Amendment’s authors was to ban cruel and unusual punishments, and that they, along with virtually every other American of the day, believed that hanging did not fall within the extension of that phrase. In other words, what we might call their concrete understanding of the abstract notion ‘cruel and unusual punishment’, was such as to permit the use of hanging. If so, and if a contemporary interpreter believes that all forms of capital punishment, including hanging, is in actual fact cruel and unusual, then she might fashion an argument of the following sort, one which has, at least superficially, an originalist flavor. Respecting the general intentions of the authors—to ban cruel and unusual punishment—actually requires that hanging be deemed unconstitutional, even though the authors (and those on whose authority they acted) would have rejected this claim. Recognizing the fallibility of their own moral views, the intentions of the authors of the Eighth Amendment might have been that government bodies observe an abstract, partly moral standard forbidding governments from acting in a manner properly characterized as cruel and unusual. This might actually have been their purpose in framing the Eighth Amendment in the way that they did, as expressing an abstract principle as opposed to a more detailed provision listing the specific kinds of concrete practices they wished to forbid, that is, their concrete understanding of ‘cruel and unusual punishment’. This is a concrete understanding they fully realized could be wrong, and their aim or intention was not to enshrine this possibly erroneous understanding but to prohibit what truly is cruel and unusual. Respecting their intentions under these conditions would, therefore, require holding as unconstitutional whatever truly does come within the extension of the relevant provision, that is, whatever truly does constitute penal behaviour that is cruel and unusual. Imagine now that one could bring the authors of the Eighth Amendment to life and that one could convince them, via sound empirical and moral argument, that capital punishment in all its forms is in actual fact cruel and unusual. How might they respond to the claim that the only way to respect their intentions is to continue to accept, as constitutional, the practice of hanging? Their likely response would be to say: “We meant to ban punishments that are in actual fact cruel and unusual, not what we can now see that we, along with virtually everyone else at the time, incorrectly understood that ban to entail. If we had wanted specifically to ban only the things we thought at the time constitute cruel and unusual punishment, we would have chosen our words differently. We would have explicitly banned those things.” Whether appeal to intentions in this way is enough to render one an originalist—if only a faint-hearted one—is perhaps questionable, however. Such an appeal may well transform the resultant theory of constitutional interpretation into something very close to a form of living  constitutionalism.[21]