hi there! gutsssee wrote a well-articulated post. i invite everyone who's interested in gyro's personality to read it
i wanted to agree with the main idea and add a couple of thoughts on the topic. like gutsssee, i think that in canon gyro would stay an executioner as long as he could
the first thing is that heβs fully dependent on it. all his contacts, family, social support, income, education and other different benefits are connected with it. all the eggs are in one basket β and the basket owns the man, not the other way around. it is rare for people with such a centralised system of personal resources to leave their position, regardless of the moral side of it, because it would literally ruin every aspect of their life. so i donβt think gyro would even seriously consider changing anything
the second thing is that executioners' families were historically socially isolated because people informally treated them as "dirty". i assume that gyro lived inside his own small social bubble, and outside of it he probably wouldnβt have been welcomed very warmly, at least in napoli. so friends inside, enemies outside. why quit?
(UPD read the comment section!)
the third thing is that at that time (in the late 19th century) there wasn't any public discourse around the permissibility of executions. that kind of discourse only became widespread relatively recently, approximately 70 years ago or so. and even today many people donβt see anything wrong with executing murderers or other people if they did something truly evil. just read the comments on youtube, or talk to your neighbours (or watch death note...) people genuinely donβt understand. they start discussing it from gyro's perspective: "is the crime evil enough to kill the criminal?"
without even noticing that the question could be "who am i to decide who should live and who shouldn't?" without realising that they're operating within a framework that takes the role of a killer for granted
so back in the 19th century, gyro probably never encountered much support for an alternative point of view. no any ethical discourse around it, no widely known literature, and so on. let's remember that he is a conformist. social norms and the concept of honour within the larger group he lived in were important to him, and he genuinely wanted to live up to them (let's call it the eldest son mindset). and that society didnβt openly criticise executions, at least not in any widespread way. i doubt even political dissidents thought much about the ethical side of it. it just wasn't really articulated or reflected in the broader public consciousness
so i'd say that gyro is an average man who doesnβt reflect on things all that much and simply does what other people expect him to do, even if it involves some killing. his spirit awakens during the race, but it's still weak, and i don't think it would be enough. "if executions are socially accepted and i can justify them to myself, then why not?" that's the logic. maybe he even thinks he's doing something necessary or good by punishing bad people. and who would dare throw the stone at him?