Death penalty argument
- Thread starter Norsefire
- Start date
Simon Anders
Valued Senior Member
Can you forgive yourself and us for being human and not forgiving people - either right away, or if they continue to do whatever it is or if they deny it was important?
Yes I can, and I will, now forgive others likewise.
Simon Anders
Valued Senior Member
Can you imagine that perhaps telling people they need to forgive might end up seeming like and perhaps even being a judgment that they are not all right the way they are?
Forgiveness can come naturally or it can be a mental ideal that causes splits.
And? The innocent person would still be forced to waste 40 years of his life in prison. Point is, the innocent can suffer regardless of the punishment.
But this isn't about lowering anything. It's just a punishment.
Q.E.D?
It's simple. People who commit barbaric acts against Humanity, can they be allowed to live? Of course not!
What seperates the death penalty from life in prison? Life in prison is like a death sentence.
Jesus has arrived to Sciforums... Instead of jails, we should build Forgiveness Centers....
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
No, it is cruelty.
For criminals.
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
Yes, but still cruelty. The only objective should be to prevent the criminals from doing society any harm in the future.
Pandaemoni
Valued Senior Member
Quod Erat Demonstratum
It's a term that is put at the end of a logical or mathematical proof to indicate that you've reached the end of the argument and demonstrated the truth of the proposition you set out to prove.
Of course they can. Your statement is illogical. Go to any State or any country that does not have the death penalty and you will discover that they can and do in fact allow heinous criminals to live. Sometimes they are not even tried for their crimes. The Soviet people allowed Stalin to live despite his barbaric acts, untii he eventually died of a stroke, a perfectly natural death.
What you seek to prove, it seems to me, that by committing barbaric acts one forfeits the right to live. Simply saying "of course" or calling the opposing proposition (that one does not forfeit the right) "silly" doesn't prove anything. Watch:
2+2 = 3. Of course. It's obvious.
2+2 = 4? Silly. It equals 3.
In your case the argument is non-trivial (unlike my example), but the thing you find so obvious is impossible to establish as anything other than a subjective /personal opinion or feeling.
That you believe barbaric acts lead to the forfeiture of the right to live is clear, but those who believe that it does not are not being "silly." Sure, there are states that kill barbarous criminal (suggesting that their "innate" right to live doesn't mean much if it does exist, and I have seen some argue that this suggests that the right therefore does not exist for such criminals), but there are plenty of places where the innocent get killed too.
There is no ironclad proof of your proposition. One can set forth a definition of what a "right" is and argue on that basis, but establishing that definition will itself be a moot point, as many different definitions of "rights" exist. Some believe God establishes rights. Some belief they flow from pure Reason. Some believe we have only those rights our legal system recognizes and that rights are a legal fiction or a shorthand describing the generally agreed upon limits of state power under the social contract.
With one crucial difference: you get to keep living. Perhaps I am just someone who loves books too much, and not to downplay that life in prison is a hardship, but I can imagine that, were I spending a lifetime locked in a prison (all of which have libraries), at least I'd have a lot of time to read. The dead don't read, so far as I know. I am told that in prison you get to have visitors to whom you can speak, conjugal visits if you can convince a partner to come to the prison, some even say that there is exercise equipment and television. You're not just dropped into a darkened hole.
If nothing else, you can spend your life hoping for your chance to escape. Again, so far as I know, the dead do not hope for anything.
If one believes that prisons are the rape-festivals that television portrays them as, it could even be *worse* to be imprisoned for life than to be executed. Personally, I'd rather die than face years of unrelenting torture.
So to me, there seem to be some salient differences, good and bad, between death and life in prison.
That's the idea. And criminals are cruel, so who cares if they suffer. They made others suffer.
Simon Anders
Valued Senior Member
But once you have killed them you cannot then release them from prison. An innocent person can be discovered to be innocent if they do not get the death penalty. In some countries they are released AND get some form of monetary compensation.
That is beside the point, which is that the innocent can suffer regardless. However, the punishment itself is righteous for those that are guilty.
Pandaemoni
Valued Senior Member
That point is not provable, and not obvious to those who do. Not to mention the fact that your definition of "barbaric" and at what point an act is sufficiently so to warrant death will be different from that of other people.
Many people sincerely believe that no act can be so barbaric that it warrants death. You can say, "They shouldn't feel that way, they should be just as wrathful and judgmental as me," but they're not. This , by the way, includes some people who have been victims of crimes or known victims, though victims and those close to them are more likely to feel as you do.
I agree, but then your prior post makes no real points. One can't really defeat an emotion or a moral intuition with a simple "Silly. That's wrong." All one can say is that he he or she feels differently, even though both sides' feeling are valid.
They do, in your moral intuition...and mine and most people's, but do they forfeit the right to life? People's moral intuitions vary widely on that point.
First, you did not limit the definition of "barbaric" to murder. Rape is barbaric, but your victim lives.
Second, again, what you say is valid as an opinion, and I might agree with you in particular cases, but different people will feel differently. Killing a murderer will not prevent his victim from rotting, nor will depriving the murderer of prison privileges.
Third, and more fundmentally. your point that I was refuting was "life in prison is like a death sentence." It is far more enjoyable than a death sentence, imo.
In no way, shape or form. Again, you said life in prison is like a death sentence, so I was pointing out the ways in which your simile fails to capture the salient differences. Mostly, my point is that life in prison seems to me to be better than a death sentence.
If that is true, then there is also not a single "good" argument in favor of the death penalty. You admitted above that it is all a matter of emotion and morality, as to which we all have our subjective beliefs. If "I feel the death penalty is wrong" is not a"good argument", then "I feel the death penalty is right" is not a good argument either.
That would also be an unavoidable flaw. You will never, ever, have a 100% perfect conviction rate, where the innocent are always released in any practical system of justice. There is always the possibility of error, or bias.
The question then becomes, "what rate of error is acceptable?" and that again will vary from individual to individual with no objectively correct answer.
The answer is "the social contract gives the government that power" which is to say that the power of the state is determined based on a consensus view of the people as a whole. If the people say "death is warranted in cases of murder" then executions will follow in cases of murder. If the people say "imprisonment, but not death, will follow in cases of rape or sexual molestation of children" then imprisonment will follow in those cases, and the death penalty will not.
Your argument above boiled down to "no death penalty for child molesters? That's stupid, of course they should be killed because child rape is barbaric." I agree that child rape is barbaric, but disagree that death should "obviously" follow it as the appropriate punishment.
If the people as a whole want the death penalty for those crimes, I don't have an issue with that, but whether they want that or do not want that, their position is not "silly" and not obviously wrong.
Is murder always immoral? Is it immoral to murder a murderer? If one feels that murder is *always* immoral then it is easy to see that one can feel that the death penalty is immoral. We don't "call" the death penalty murder, but that's just semantics because it is such a long standing and easily grasped exception to the principle of "thou shalt not kill."
On your broader point I agree that emotion and subjective morality have a place in the justice system, *but* I disagree that your personal view of it is what matters. It is a consensus that matters and comes into play, and simply rejecting and dismissing the beliefs and feelings of those who disagree with you is not an effective argument for why your feelings should be more widely adopted by the society as a whole.
The point of prisons is in theory both to punish *and* to rehabilitate. The reason we invented "pentitentiaries" is so criminals could come to be "penitant" for their crimes. In the olden days, pre-19th century, prison was not a punishment, "jails" were used to hold criminals pending trial, but it was rare for incarceration to be the sentence of a trial. Punishments before then were in the nature of fines (both monetary and in the form of forced service or labor, shaming punishments (like, depending on the severity of the crime, whipping people in the streets, locking them in stocks and letting people throw things at them, branding them with a hot iron as a sign of their crime, maiming them (cutting off a hand or an er, for example)) or death.
It was in the 19th century that reformers decided that punishment was not the sole goal of criminal convictions, that improving the criminal morally was also a goal, and that's when penitentiaries were invented and incarceration became a standard punishment for crimes. Prisons rehabilitate, that is their (supposed) goal.
That is a practical argument for the death penalty. The first one you've offered in the threads I've read. That is not a *moral* argument for the death penalty, necessarily, but it's a strong practical one. Many people would say that those locked up in person for life also don't so the things you mention in any troubling numbers, and that incarceration costs less the death penalty is so expensive. That expense might not be something we can eliminate unless we are happy seeing the number of innocent people killed skyrocket. The added costs come from what amounts to the "error correction" process in the justice system, and that process is especially robust in cases of the death penalty. Eliminate the expense, you also elimiate the error correction.
That's one counter, at least. In the end, I don't think the practical arguments come down obviously in favor of either side. Instead everyone comes back to the question of their equally valid emotional reactions: "Killing rapists is good because they are rapists" versus 'Killing rapists is bad because it's killing human beings."
Simon Anders
Valued Senior Member
If the only point is should a murderer suffer the death penalty, perhaps.
If we are looking at the death penalty as good or ill for society, then it is not beside the point.
superstring01
Moderator
I'm okay with the death penalty for things like murder, rape, war crimes, treason and insurrection.
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