Let the Executioner Kill — Do Not Usurp the Great Carpenter's Axe
This chapter argues against rulers taking capital punishment into their own hands, comparing it to an amateur reaching for a master craftsman's tools.
The chapter opens with an unsettling political observation: if people no longer fear death, threatening them with execution accomplishes nothing, and asks what a ruler thinks he is achieving by killing people who have already stopped being afraid to die. Laozi then names an idea distinctive to this chapter — there is always a proper "Executioner," a figure or principle whose charge it is to kill, associated with a larger order beyond the ruler, and a ruler who kills in that figure's place is committing a kind of usurpation. His image for this is the Great Carpenter: someone who tries to hew wood in the master carpenter's place, he says, rarely escapes injuring his own hand. The chapter functions as a warning against rulers appointing themselves the arbiters of who lives and dies, treating that role as belonging to an order they are not entitled to substitute themselves for.
Whoever hews wood in place of the master carpenter rarely escapes injuring his hand.
Tao Te Ching