You almost make good points...almost
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That is also true for kids being taken in the cars by their parents, so the choice for them isn't voluntary, thus the analogy stands. Also when you live far from your workplace, you pretty much forced totravel by car,bus,etc.
(A) Parents consent on the kids behalf. Parents have all the rights to make decisions for kids, including what risks they may, may not, or will accept. That's why when little Billy goes on a field trip, his parents have to sign the permission slip. So the analogy fails. Kids in cars are there because the decision maker, their parents, have accepted the risk for them. The are other cases of "deemed" consent as well. If you've been shot and are unconscious, we as a society assume that you consent to the ambulance ride. That's why putting an unconscious person in an ambulance and driving away to the hospital is not "kidnapping."
(B) "Pretty much" forced to is not the same thing as "forced to" you can quit your job, sell your car and live on food stamps and welfare checks. You can always not live so far away too...that's what people did in the age before automobiles, they lived relatively closer to work. That people *choose* to live further away does not make their use of a car involuntary in the broader sense, by choosing to live far away and decising to keep a job that is far away you are also choosing to be committed to drive.
it is the price of living in a society. Let's say you don't even travel by car, but one day a semi comes through your door and kills you. Price of living in a society and not out in the woods.
Yes, but again the reason we pay this price is that it is worth it. having semis on the road lowers the cost of goods that truckers transport and that, in turn, leaves you better off, there is no real debate on that point.
Killing Billy who turned to crime after his parents refused to sign any permission slips, may or may not leave anyone better off, that point is eminently debatable. What is clear is that Billy may be innocent, even if the chance is very small.
It is the same (or should be) with CP. No dead man killed again. If I prove it to you that more lifes are safed because executed people don't kill again versus the accidentally executed, than would you be for CP?
First, I am for capital punishment in the abstract, I am just opposed to bad argumentation. The reason that I support capital pubishment is *not* that it leaves us any safer, because it does not. A man locked away for life is not going to threaten society (he might threaten other criminals in his prison, but that doesn't bopther me). A dead man is not going to threaten society. Jail breaks are sufficiently rare that the two are indistiguishable from the standpoint of the risk they pose to me. I support capital punishment because there are a certain percentage of friends and family members of victims out there who *would* feel better knowing that revenge was had.
Some people say that revenge "never" makes the pain go away, but I think that misses the point. The pain of loss is still there, but there is also a new satisfaction, that partially offsets that pain for some people. It's like eating ice cream after your girfriend dumps you. You still feel sad about your girlfriend, but, hey, this ice cream is kind of good.
There are some who say that we shouldn't indulge revenge because it's a negative emotion, but I think that denies human nature—some of us are vengeful creatures. Why deny that reality? Is the value of a convicts life greater than the satiety that might come from the sense of vengeance fulfilled? By what calculus? It's easy to see why slightly happier law abiding people on the outside might be a net boon as compared to living criminals on the inside who will never be released.
The one argument that potentially works, to me, is that by eliminating state sanctioned revenge we may send a stronger message that revenge is "wrong" and reduce violent crime overall, as that message achieves greater penetration. I think a lot more study is needed to prove that proposition true, but it strikes me as potentially plausible.
Second, because I do not think the incarcerated are likely to kill again, I seriously doubt that you could prove that the incarcerated will kill more people than the inniocent that we would accidentally execute. Neither number is known. You may be able to estimate the number of people incarcerated murderers kill, but (a) those deaths would either be after very rare escapes or committed while in prison and so of other dangerous criminals and (b) the number of innocents executed is virtually unknown. Once someone is killed, people generally stop trying to prove them innocent, because it becomes pointless. I know that the Innocence Project has cleared a number of people though, so we can find conviction errors when we look for them.
That is not true in every country, only in the fucked up US justice system.
The reason it's trrue in the U.S,. is that we allow people on death row every opportunity to prove their innocene you could "fix" the problem, but teh result would be that even more innocent people would be executed for crimed they did not commit. Granted that the costs of execution in places like China is low, but that's because they don't give a shit whether you did it or not. In places where they care, the costs of punishment increase. In the U.S. we care about such things and we *especially* care when itc comes to people on death row, so costs disproportionately riose for people on death row.
Also if we would use the executed people's organs, the gain by society would be well worthy te price. But here is an idea: Instead of starting illegal wars and saving money on that, we could use that money for perfecting the justice system. Sounds good?
The organ idea is interesting, though one wonders whether you'd want the liuver of a man executed by lethal injection, poison gas or electrocution. You'd better limit that to those killed by hanging and firing squad, which is not many states.
There is no perfect justice system. You could devote a trillion dollars to the system and there would still be errors. The only change would be that there'd be errors and corruption, as people tried to get a piece of the pie. There are always two types of errors, alpha and beta, in a court system. Alpha risk is the possibility of an innocent person being convicted. Beta risk is the risk of a guily man being acquitted. There is no amount of money you can throw at the problem that will let you minimize both at the same time. You can by increasing one decrease the other, but it's very difficult to decrease them both simultaneously. Nominally, we claim that we only care about minimizing alpha risk, but in practice we are willing to tolerate a certain amount of aplha risk in our efforts to convict.
Tell me again, what is the gain for society by keepig a young criminal locked up for 60 years????
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