Capital Punishment: Should the Death Penalty Still Exist In A 'Civilised Society'?

had a think about this on the cycle home.

first to nickb, I agree of course that lots of/all economic&financial decisions have moral implications, I just think that an economic argument /= a moral argument, and if something is unjustifiable the price is irrelevant

to mordy, I don't think authority is a synonym for power, there is a suggestion of moral justification. but having thought about it more I don't think a group or institution can possess or embody moral authority. whatever authority moral arguments have comes from their nature as being commonly intelligible, transparent and, to some extent, self-evident. they operate at the level of the minds of individuals, and that's where they get their legitimacy from

restating my suspicion of stated-authority, I could say that what underpins my objection to the death penalty is my belief in individual over group rights. I could refine this but my instinct is that individual lives are the primary moral unit, because that's where experience and consciousness reside. rights work best on that level and it causes the least issues wrt authority. that personal autonomy is only/primarily manifest through relationships with others and wider communities does not change that imo. an individual has a moral worth that a group can never have, and a group's claim of authority over an individual is ultimately practical rather than moral and concerned with mediating conflicts between individuals and can never extend to the point of killing those individuals. individuals can want to kill people, but groups can't (I would quibble with deemsian notions of cost and incentive here), and through executions groups lay claim to collective authority over an individual's mortality, which I don't believe they can ever have

if you don't think killing people is fundamentally different to imprisoning them though then none of this really applies

dignity imho

if we could find a more dignified way to rape people as punishment would that make it an acceptable eye an eye-style punishment?

that seems odd to me. but you're probably onto something with the dignity thing. i think that people reject rape as a form of punishment because it's so visceral and reprehensible. we can't imagine ourselves carrying out the punishment. there is no dignified way to rape someone. but people accept capital punishment because we have found so many different ways to dignify murder as a form of justice. the socially identified dignified way to kill someone is quickly and without pain, and we have ways to do that (which often fail) but i don't think that there is a dignified way to kill someone. there are ways to make it more palatable but it's still the ultimate penalty. it's been used as a form of punishment since humans became humans so we've all come to accept it as an acceptable component of being human, but that doesn't mean that it's not completely fucked up, and i'm sure we can all think of prominent examples of things that were perceived as common sense since the dawn of time but were later realized to be completely wrong and unacceptable.

as an aside, the fact that the use of the death penalty has killed so many innocent people deserves far more than a "yeah that's the best argument against the death penalty! but..." response from people who support capital punishment. yes, the documented killing of a disturbingly large number of innocent people is a great argument - it is a winning argument. it means that we should not support the death penalty. supporting the death penalty as an option only for clear-cut cases of guilt like dylann roof means that you also support leaving it open as an option for all the innocents that will be executed because it's not banned. i honestly don't understand why this isn't THE winning argument, since supporting it only for clear-cut cases is an idea based on magic, like we have a method to determine only the most clear-cut guilty people, and that we won't occasionally get it wrong and execute an innocent person. we don't have that method. so let's save some lives of innocent people by banning the death penalty.

really interesting post ogmor

disagree fundamentally about the group/individual worth dynamic but its def there where one of the core positions lies imo

xp declaring yr argument the winning argument is a singularly.... unwinning...behaviour

lol, probably true. but hey, following the same logic, we should allow the torture of political prisoners - but only the ones that we know that it'll work on. right?

no, fuck that. no torture, not for anyone, even if occasionally it results in useful information, because it also results in the torture of so many innocent people.

although that, too, seems to be the winning argument to me, but given that so many people are cool with torture and waterboarding, some disagree

torture is another thread were talking about dignified and dispassionate state executions itt please

what kind of a position can be built around only applying capital punishment to (suitably certain) cases of 'crimes against humanity' rather than mundane old top-level felonies? would that be sufficient to admit, say, school shooters and nightclub bombers and breiviks?

The one where, in a fit of Clintonian triangulation, we then go ahead and redefine those top-level felonies as "crimes against humanity." This stuff nearly always ratchets upwards.

develop it from there but fairly safe to include those omes yes

would have to conduct a full audit of victims to ensure they were all "innocent" and their deaths were a net loss to humanity

i mean if you shoot enough school children some of them were bound to grow up to be murderers or something

torture is another thread were talking about dignified and dispassionate state executions itt please

http://i.imgur.com/9US8qej.png
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/some-examples-post-furman-botched-executions

anyway, i'll never understand supporting killing people despite the acknowledgement that the death penalty leads to the deaths of innocent people.

I mean, if a school shooting is a "crime against humanity," isn't being a drug kingpin also a crime against humanity? Aren't hate crimes a crime against humanity?

yep, to nv, but wpuld be willing to forego this is defending legal team didnt pull the piss if they felt their man was guilty

some sort of points-based system like the new UK immigration model

https://frinkiac.com/meme/S12E01/295253.jpg?b64lines=IFVILi4uIEknTSBQUkVUVFkgU1VSRSBTSEUKIFdBUyBHT0lORyBUTyBCRSBUSEUgTkVYVAogSElUTEVSLiBIRUxMTz8=

"that kid was a Facebook bully, we'll take him off, that one had multiple sclerosis so maybe a half"

surely everyone else has changed their original positions by now after all these posts but I myself remain convinced of my original assertion that there isn't a serious conversation to be had about the death penalty, v unimpressed by mordy's form after his initial appeal to authority literally contained --as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world-- I was primed for bantz but since, it's as though thatcher never died

well, try this. being a drug kingpin seems very bad but aside from the constant accompaniment of homicides and violence and such which could be dealt with on its own, the insidious way they have of exploiting vulnerabilities and base needs and such seems hard to ding as 'against humanity', after all they're just ~playing the game~, they're indistinguishable from titans of industry in principle.

but i'd like to be able to distinguish that from like, human enslavement and exploitation for purposes of financial gain, which seems to sort better with smaller-scale crimes of extreme depravity like where the offenders keep strangers or family members locked in a cage and abused for years. that, and targeted/indiscriminate lethal violence against numbers of people. they seem like good candidates for 'crimes against humanity' perpetrated by non-state actors.

smaller-scale crimes of extreme depravity like where the offenders keep strangers or family members locked in a cage and abused for years.

So, like sex trafficking? Which usually also involves drug-related actors seeing as how, much like "titans of industry," they are p much always looking to expand into new and profitable types of crimes against humanity.

This whole discussion is so arbitrary and ridiculous. karl otm and ogmor definitely interesting.

surely everyone else has changed their original positions by now after all these posts but I myself remain convinced of my original assertion that there isn't a serious conversation to be had about the death penalty, v unimpressed by mordy's form after his initial appeal to authority literally contained --as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world-- I was primed for bantz but since, it's as though thatcher never died

ok it was not an appeal to authority. i thought arendt stated the case in an eloquent way and i was pushing back on the idea that it's as clear-cut a conclusion as the original posters were suggesting. idk what even you're objecting to in that quote - that it's hypocritical? i think we can understand the difference between eichmann designing an industrial murder machine to kill millions of people and the state of israel executing him, and if you cannot implicitly understand the difference that's maybe a failing in yr own moral comprehension and not a problem in arendt.

I am a death penalty opponent (for a whole host of reasons). That said, not all anti-DP arguments are equally sound.

E to the G, on deterrence. I think most ppl agree that yr Roofs and Mansons are probably not deterrable. However we will never know about murders that didn't happen because a prospective badguy feared consequences. If anyone anywhere has ever said to himself, "yeah I'd really like to kill my co-workers, but I fear the hangman," that would constitute effective deterrence.

Of course, nor are all pro-DP arguments equally sound! For example, to revisit deterrence, if you believe in it then guilt or innocence may not really matter. Provided a baseline level of public trust in the justice system, killing the wrong guy should be just as deterring as killing the right one, and therefore just as societally healthful. And almost no one is comfortable with that conclusion, so you end up with an awkward mix of deontological argumentation and consequentialist argumentation.

i think we can understand the difference between eichmann designing an industrial murder machine to kill millions of people and the state of israel executing him

it's good to hit the nail on the head as much as possible though, so why don't you lay it out

you're joking right? i think you can figure this one out without me.

So, like sex trafficking? Which usually also involves drug-related actors seeing as how, much like "titans of industry," they are p much always looking to expand into new and profitable types of crimes against humanity.

yes, i was thinking of those as related in their depravity despite what could be the overridingly profit-seeking motives (abetted by indifference to humanity but no particular wish to exterminate it) in the former cases. and i suppose i am thinking of them in connection with mass murder cases on the premise of looking for crimes whose reasons we put beyond the pale, versus crimes we might like to but cannot (because they involve 'rational' incentives to harm others or undermine their welfare). so basically i'm asking about putting certain cases of loss of life/freedom on one side, and certain cases tending more to involve crime-for-gain on the other. but you're right that sex trafficking is a problem there. i don't know how but i'd like to say that some cases would be more like enslavement, others would be more like exploitative sex work (supposing for the moment that we could identify 'non-exploitative' sex work), and the former would be the candidates for 'crimes against humanity'. if the distinction doesn't hold up then so be it, mass murders by themselves seem like a fair candidate for such crimes if any are.

Wow. Stop.

xxp there are lots of differences but idk which you think are salient or what your argument is

that arendt quote is just eye for an eye, adopting eichmann's logic in order to justify killing him. eichmann can't argue with it, but if you don't already agree it's not persuasive. perhaps arendt means you can actually gain the right to determine that someone should not inhabit the world, but only if they themselves first, illegitimately, try to determine the same thing. but that seems odd and fraught. if eichmann was wrong to think it was up to him to decide who inhabits the earth, then why is the israeli state right to think the same thing?

My reaction to the parts of this conversation that I've read is entirely emotional and not rooted in reason but it mostly goes like this:

"The people who would call themselves my allies are lining up to save the life of a man who would cheerfully murder me. It feels more and more like black people don't actually have any allies."

quote should be understood in the context of the rest of my post, I just thought it was funny that a pro case should contain an unreconstructed con argument

if I may be half serious for a tick this position of "I support dp but only for your eichmanns and this one guy just now" is more deemsian commonsense than actual coherent argument, like if you nod along to all the stuff about wrongful conviction and rehab and deterrence but then start in on karmic retribution for such a tiny proportion of cases I just have to question whether it's worth the cost

ultimately tho (and this is my thing all along) you are never ever going to remove moral absolutism from this particular debate, even the attempts to ~argue the merits~ are like joe's intuitive desire for revenge vs jim's intuitive revulsion towards killing, received OT principles vs received NT principles so why not just bantz

that was an xp to mordy

ha

Of course we're all overlooking another possibility here.

http://edushyster.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/thunderdome.jpg

genuinely considered starting a thread similar to the 2nd thoughts thread but just for when threads are going fast and the zing xpost bug makes you want to slit your throat

xp ffs

Wow. Stop.

i don't know what it is you think i'm saying, but i'm just asking questions to probe the sense it would make to reserve capital punishment for crimes against humanity if we understood that to cover more than, like, war crimes. what i hear you saying is 'don't discuss anything', which is, well, a funny contribution to a thread discussing capital punishment, but ok.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEI_udV88i4

""if I may be half serious for a tick this position of "I support dp but only for your eichmanns and this one guy just now" is more deemsian commonsense than actual coherent argument, "

i believe that i may safely take this as a criticism, sirrah

thing about yr strain of protest here that maintains that all murderers are the sammme mmmannnn is that yep it is the oolar opposite of deemsian commonsense and in this instance deemsian commonsense is so blatantly correct that the attempts to blur the lines are p ridiculous

if eichmann was wrong to think it was up to him to decide who inhabits the earth, then why is the israeli state right to think the same thing?

it sounds like the argument you're making is something like who are we to sit in judgement of anyone otherwise you're asking how is the courtroom different from the concentration camp or how is the judge different from eichmann or how is the death of millions of innocents different from the death of a mass murderer and all those questions make me wonder what the fuck is going on here. so i'm going to assume you're asking the initial question in which case the answer is equally obvious to me tho you may disagree - we are civil society tasked w/ keeping man from devolving back into amoral animals and when we can prosecute such disintegration of the laws of humanity we are obligated to do so.

i almost respect the radical catholic case more for its consistency of vision even if i cannot accept that the life of an eichmann is equal to the life of an innocent but if you do believe life is this i guess divine thing that exists beyond considerations of society + chaos + humanity (whereas I think the OT subjugates life to the community + society i mean ffs pinchas is rewarded for extra-judicious skewering cozbi + zimri just for fucking) then i understand why you might think even a mass murderer's life is too valuable to extinguish. but i definitely don't think it's obvious.

on that note tho i assume we're all in agreement that if you can stop a murderer by killing him - like by assassinating hitler or whatever - you should do it, right? or would you be tasked to step aside because what right do you have to kill even to stop killing?

I don't think it's divine per se but like I say I do think individual lives are the root of all/any moral authority, so you can't draw on that to kill them. I think the real reason people support the death penalty is a desire for revenge and punishment but no one is making a case for those being moral ends in themselves

there is no telos to any society, and in any case you can keep things going just fine without killing anyone.

i think punishment can be a moral end. revenge obv has negative connotations but there's an argument to be made that by having the state take on the role of vengeance it disarms the individual's desire for vengeance, putting a halt to vigilante blood feuds & ceaseless back-and-forth vendettas.

imo that view on punishment is what it comes down to, as well as your conception of personhood, luck/contingencies and how they inform your idea of responsibility/causality

possibly, tho catholic radical pro-life position is not incompatible w/ good/evil

and pro DP pov is not incompatible w/ causality (pragmatic for the better of society arguments) so

"The people who would call themselves my allies are lining up to save the life of a man who would cheerfully murder me. It feels more and more like black people don't actually have any allies."

i can understand why you might feel that way, but being against the death penalty has nothing to do with being against the victims of charleston or any other terrible crime. in the strong form of the anti-DP position, which i hold, the relative egregiousness of the crime doesn't matter: it's wrong to execute people.

if it helps (it won't), i believe that i would also be against the execution of someone who did terrible things to me or my close family and friends, but that brings us into the silly realm of hypotheticals and the "but surely you'd want to see the person who murdered your wife face the death penalty?" discussion and that never ends well. i'm sure it's possible that if something awful like that happened, all bets would be off and i'd call for their head on a stick, but i'd hope that i would be merciful.

i think that allowing the death penalty for a monster like dylann roof opens the door (or rather, keeps the door open) for other monstrosities to happen, like executing many, many innocent people. that's part of why i oppose it. if every 25th execution included a side-execution of a person known to be innocent, and then a tv graphic popped up saying "btw about 4% of executions are innocent people" (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/28/death-penalty-study-4-percent-defendants-innocent), the connection between the implementation of justice in the form of execution and the unnecessary tragedy of murdering an innocent person might be stronger and resonate more with people. but that's not how it is, and that's part of why the death penalty persists.

but like i said, i understand why you would look at it through a more emotional perspective. i hope you don't think i'm a terrible person and an enemy because of it, but i don't think that killing more people provides "justice", no matter who it is and who the victims are.

only 4%

thats not bad that

Missed most of this thread tonight but how did Israel become a talking point here wrt death penalty?

mordy quoted arendt on the morality of eichmann's death sentence

to mordy - yes of course you can oppose it in terms of abstract values too, I suppose I was looking at this in terms of wondering about the positive reasons for it rather than seeing retributive/moral killing as the default norm that doesn't need to be explained

to conclude - I think having an abstract, inhuman concept that you will kill for is a good place to draw the line.