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Death Penalty

I think society and government and law should be above the simple emotional instinctual urges I indulge, it should be based on the ideal, and what is rational.

The very idea that anyone deserves anything is a construct, a satisfaction of human abstract idealism. It's mired in the chimpanzee who stings itself while fishing for termites and in a rage smashes the entrie mound in, hooting, hollering, running in and out and wanting to see whatever hurt it to be hurt also.

When I am wronged I get the urge to wrong them back. But I want the law to be above me and my primitive desires.

When I decide that killing is wrong, it's not just because I think people don't deserve to be killed and it's a shame they are in lieu of not deserving it, I think killing is wrong because I feel killing is wrong. I don't make sudden allowances for me to delight in the death and suffering of another when they happen to do something that I decide suddenly allows me to enjoy the same lust and desire for pain and suffering in another thing that I condemn them for, just because they deserve it and their victim did not.

I find it odd to hear people make these comments, as if there are suddenly times when skinning a human or raping them to death is to be celebrated. I find all violence disgusts me. I grew up surrounded by it, and will avoid it at any cost. But I also have a temper that can go off without warning, I literally black out, see red, and wake up flailing about in an effort to annihilation my target. But I want the system of law to be better than me and to be free from my urges and desires. I think the highest romanticized notion of justice and freedom is about what is rational as much as what is ideal.

I understand removing a threat to society, but I don't feel a government should have this authority over the life of it's citizens unless forced.

I can imagine some very difficult puzzles in lieu of who should die and why they should not, it's not as easy issue for me, but I know that revenge is petty and should evolved beyond, and I don't want a system that deals with revenge. I don't think there is ever a special window or zone where you can suddenly enjoy murder.
 
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I'm fine with the death penalty. To me it's as effective as life imprisonment, and therefor is not an act of vengeance that we are above. If we find it okay to imprison a man for life, then I'm just as fine outright killing the same man. It doesn't bother me, though I'm sure others will find that awful. I do not seem to sympathize with them however. Is the death penalty codifying instinctual and emotional desires? No, but it's an easy argument to make and isn't dismissed as easily as I just made it out to be (I said "no" only because I've already wrestled with it before and came to a conclusion)


That being said, it's absolutely awful that the wrong people get executed. The penalty is fine, it's the process that has its problems.

EDIT: I see you also want to extend the arguments to militants and terrorists. Allow me to sidestep the issue: The death penalty is for due process of civilians. Terrorists and active combatants seldom get such niceties. Are they "more deserving" or at least comparable? Only if they submit themselves and argue a case can it be comparable. On the battlefield? No, they are not comparable.
 
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Everybody dies, many people kill... themselves or others, slowly or quickly, deliberately, negligently, or by accident... objectively or emotionally.


When people whip out the broad spray can and start trying to paint deaths in general as moral/immoral, lines get obscured.
 
mike3 said:
What's the middle? I must've "excluded" it because I didn't see it.
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Obvious logical fallacies are obvious.

So is the sophistry in asking what's the 'difference' between moral and immoral deaths, and then pretending to have no idea what you've excluded.... right after it has been spelled out.


Applying subjective labels and specious logic to real life (or death) accomplishes what exactly?
 
crimresearch said:
Obvious logical fallacies are obvious.

So is the sophistry in asking what's the 'difference' between moral and immoral deaths, and then pretending to have no idea what you've excluded.... right after it has been spelled out.


Applying subjective labels and specious logic to real life (or death) accomplishes what exactly?
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But in your post, you only said I excluded the middle -- you didn't "spell it out". I'm perfectly willing to admit I might have missed something, but I need to know what it is first.

I guess it accomplishes nothing, thus why I want to find out what the error is. What I've missed.

Was this the "spelling out": "Because war is different that criminal justice. " (because it was "right after that" that I asked my question, then "right after that" I got your response saying I missed the middle, which didn't say what the middle was, and "right after that" I asked what the middle was.). But that doesn't spell out the details of the difference and how it applies to the morality of the killings in question.
 
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crimresearch said:
Everybody dies, many people kill... themselves or others, slowly or quickly, deliberately, negligently, or by accident... objectively or emotionally.


When people whip out the broad spray can and start trying to paint deaths in general as moral/immoral, lines get obscured.
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But does this mean the labels "moral" and "immoral" are entirely useless, then? Is a murder death "moral" or "immoral"? As I'd think it immoral, but that could be wrong. If so, how is it? What _can_ we say about a murder death, then? And I didn't say all deaths were moral or all were immoral, but rather I was asking about what the moral difference is between launching a war to kill terrorists and punishing a criminal. Why you can kill the bad guy in one but not in the other.
 
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Lowpro said:
I'm fine with the death penalty. To me it's as effective as life imprisonment, and therefor is not an act of vengeance that we are above. If we find it okay to imprison a man for life, then I'm just as fine outright killing the same man. It doesn't bother me, though I'm sure others will find that awful. I do not seem to sympathize with them however. Is the death penalty codifying instinctual and emotional desires? No, but it's an easy argument to make and isn't dismissed as easily as I just made it out to be (I said "no" only because I've already wrestled with it before and came to a conclusion)


That being said, it's absolutely awful that the wrong people get executed. The penalty is fine, it's the process that has its problems.

EDIT: I see you also want to extend the arguments to militants and terrorists. Allow me to sidestep the issue: The death penalty is for due process of civilians. Terrorists and active combatants seldom get such niceties. Are they "more deserving" or at least comparable? Only if they submit themselves and argue a case can it be comparable. On the battlefield? No, they are not comparable.
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So the difference is that the terrorists aren't just killing, but that they're engaging themselves in an act of war, which Dogg is not doing?

Is this the middle that I excluded?
 
I certainly can think of many people who I feel don't deserve to live. I can think of some that I personally would have no moral qualms about killing. I can think of circumstances where killing would be the right thing to do.

I oppose the death penalty.

Why? Justice.

What I mean by that is that any justice system is necessarily imperfect. The death penalty is irrevocable. You see where I'm going with this.

In your example Dogg is clearly and provably guilty. Fine, I have no problem with him not being alive anymore. The problem is, the guy in the next cell on Death Row will probably have slightly less overwhelming evidence against him. Inevitably in the real world there will be a fuzzy, subjective and arbitrary cutoff point where we decide which side of the "overwhelming evidence" line a defendant is on. Inevitably in the real world, sometimes we will make the wrong call.

Everything I have ever read on the subject convinces me that any jurisdiction which practices capital punishment will eventually execute an innocent person.

It doesn't matter how professional the players in the justice syetem are or how high the standards of evidence. As sure as gravity, eventually will come the perfect storm of misunderstanding and misinterpretation that leads to a wrongful conviction for a capital crime.

This is the only reason I will ever need to oppose the death penalty.

I've met people who say: "But Carnivore, you fat yet strangely sexy beast, is this really a problem? If the standards of evidence are high enough in capital crimes, mistakes would be extremely rare - enough that they could safely ignored."

To which I can only reply that they've just made it clear they don't care about Justice. Also, Kobayashi Maru.

If murder - the wrongful killing of an innocent - is so heinous that it must be punished by death it behooves us to ensure that we never do it ourselves as part of our justice system. And therein lies the Kobayashi Maru situation. A proportion of the people we execute will not be guilty of the crime they were convicted of. One in a thousand, one a hundred, one in fifty. We won't know.

Very occasionally we will find out in time to release the innocent prisoner. Very occasionally we will discover his probable innocence too late.

"So what?" some have said to me. "The price of doing business," said others. "A message must be sent that we will not tolerate this behaviour in society, and may I just quickly touch your glossy fur?" still more have said.

These people are confessing to murder. The wrongful killing of an occasional innocent is necessary in order to kill those guilty of the wrongful killing of innocents.

When the wrongful killing of an innocent person - the entirely avoidable, needless killing - is done in our name by our state we all become party to that murder.

I have met people who became angry when I put it in those words.

"How dare you compare the majesty of due process with premeditated murder! When a crime is commited Society has a responsiblity to examine the facts as impartially as possible and to respond to wrongdoing with retribution."

Fine , I growl. Forget the "M" word. What I care about is Justice.

Fun with hypotheticals: Take your fifty or a hundred or a thousand convicted murderers. Tie them to each to a stake in a field with a hood over their face. You are given a powerful and reliable handgun, and sufficent ammuntion to dispatch them all.

You may walk among them at your leisure, shooting them in the head through the hoods. Any you choose not to shoot will be returned to prison for the remainder of their natural lives.

You are not told anything about them except that each has been given due process. You may not know their identities or specific crimes.

You are told there is a very good chance - almost a certainty - that at least one of them is innocent. Maybe more. Consider their families. Consider the possibilty that one of the prisoners is someone you know and love.

Would you shoot them?

To me, this is the death penalty in a nutshell. To me, anyone who would choose to kill the prisoners wouldn't know Justice if it bit them on the bum.
 
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@Carnivore: Thanks for your argument. I understand what you're saying, but I'm still hung up on how the whole war thing fits in now. Namely, how does it change when you have the location of some terrorists, and you can initiate a military strike to kill them. You also know that in the terrorist compound, there's innocents. What do you do? If you strike and kill, then what is different in this circumstance versus the one you outlined? Is it because of the purpose of the two killings is different? What exactly would the purposes be in these two situations?
 
mike3 said:
@Carnivore: Thanks for your argument. I understand what you're saying, but I'm still hung up on how the whole war thing fits in now. Namely, how does it change when you have the location of some terrorists, and you can initiate a military strike to kill them. You also know that in the terrorist compound, there's innocents. What do you do? If you strike and kill, then what is different in this circumstance versus the one you outlined? Is it because of the purpose of the two killings is different? What exactly would the purposes be in these two situations?
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Well, the biggest difference is the consequence of doing nothing.

It costs you nothing not to kill your convicted murderer in prison. He is not a threat to society. (In fact in the real world it saves money, as it costs less to convict a murderer and support him for life in prison than the process of capital trial and appeals to get someone executed.)

Wars can be justified or unjustified but individaul soldiers in war must kill in self defence, or to protect their comrades.

With regards to the hypothetical strike on the terrorist compound the question is "What happens if we don't bomb the compound?"

If this is your only opportunity to strike at a terror cell before it carries out an attack that will kill many more innocents, then yes, the strike is justified. If it is a meeting a senior leaders whose deaths will disrupt guerilla attacks around the world, yes, again I think it is justified.

On the other hand, if the terrorists are in hiding, not communicating on a tactical level with their organisation and we just want them dead for their past crimes, then they are not an immediate danger to others and we can afford not to bomb them. In that case bombing that would kill innocents is unjustified.

In the real world, when Team Six went after Bin Laden, they did it with boots on the ground and separated the harmless from the terrorists.
 
Carnivore said:
Well, the biggest difference is the consequence of doing nothing.

It costs you nothing not to kill your convicted murderer in prison. He is not a threat to society. (In fact in the real world it saves money, as it costs less to convict a murderer and support him for life in prison than the process of capital trial and appeals to get someone executed.)

Wars can be justified or unjustified but individaul soldiers in war must kill in self defence, or to protect their comrades.

With regards to the hypothetical strike on the terrorist compound the question is "What happens if we don't bomb the compound?"

If this is your only opportunity to strike at a terror cell before it carries out an attack that will kill many more innocents, then yes, the strike is justified. If it is a meeting a senior leaders whose deaths will disrupt guerilla attacks around the world, yes, again I think it is justified.

On the other hand, if the terrorists are in hiding, not communicating on a tactical level with their organisation and we just want them dead for their past crimes, then they are not an immediate danger to others and we can afford not to bomb them. In that case bombing that would kill innocents is unjustified.

In the real world, when Team Six went after Bin Laden, they did it with boots on the ground and separated the harmless from the terrorists.
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Thanks for the explanation. This is what I was looking for.
 
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mike3 said:
So the difference is that the terrorists aren't just killing, but that they're engaging themselves in an act of war, which Dogg is not doing?

Is this the middle that I excluded?
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I don't know what you mean by the middle. What I'm saying is that you cannot compare combatants with criminals. The processes and ethics involved are completely different; you're making two paintings using the same brush. Bob Ross would be so ashamed!
 
Lowpro said:
I don't know what you mean by the middle. What I'm saying is that you cannot compare combatants with criminals. The processes and ethics involved are completely different; you're making two paintings using the same brush. Bob Ross would be so ashamed!
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He said I "excluded a middle", and I was wondering what the "middle" was I excluded.

Where can I find out more about the "processes and ethics" involved in each, and about the reasons for the existence of those ethics and why reasons applying in one circumstance do not carry over to the other?
 
Caper said:
What about 11 guilty men?
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Or a thousand men or a million men? It's a quote about a basic principle of justice not a numerical guideline on how many guilty equal one innocent. If you're asking my opinion on where the line is, I'd say it's infinite. The injustice of any innocent person executed outweighs an infinite number of non-executed mass murderers.

Carnivore basically laid out my arguments as well (or better) than I could have myself. If we have the death penalty innocent people will suffer.
 
ronin688 said:
Or a thousand men or a million men? It's a quote about a basic principle of justice not a numerical guideline on how many guilty equal one innocent. If you're asking my opinion on where the line is, I'd say it's infinite. The injustice of any innocent person executed outweighs an infinite number of non-executed mass murderers.

Carnivore basically laid out my arguments as well (or better) than I could have myself. If we have the death penalty innocent people will suffer.
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But the only way to prevent a miscarriage of justice is to have no justice system.
 
But the only way to prevent a miscarriage of justice is to have no justice system.
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But since we're not talking about preventing all miscarriages of justice...
 
Safe-Keeper said:
But since we're not talking about preventing all miscarriages of justice...
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Exactly. The death penalty is final, there is no way to rectify a mistake. While horrible, wrongfully convicted people can at least get out of jail and sue or settle with the state for some sort of resolution.
 
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