All rise. The Sandbox Court, is now in session, the Honorable Judge Parudoks presiding. Members of the Jury, your duty today will be to determine whether the Death Penalty should be abolished. The defendant, Death himself, believes himself to be just when it comes to the punishing of criminals. This court case will last from May 14th to May 20th
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it is the same tangible benefit as the prison system. you should know, you just argued for it
you could only ask this to be a valid question against the death penalty alone (and not the whole p*nal system) if you didn't expect me to follow your hypothetical to its conclusion: that you're assigning arbitrary value that biases the argument, and even with your values applied to a real society it supports mine
first of all, in a larger society (which society is) you have, for instance, 2,902 people on death row out of 325,000,000 (both us statistics). even if the entire population was totally neutral, it would take 100,000 hypothetical "happiness points" from each person on death row to come close to affecting universal well-being
the chart is also a false correlation. if your chart were to be believed to show a positive correlation between the death penalty and murder on the absolute face of it, you would be arguing to me that people are more inclined to commit murder under the death penalty. i don't think punishment by death is a motivator, that would be pretty absurd
this isn't an argument against the death penalty; in contrast, this is an argument for the death penalty. the death penalty is highly utilitarian, especially when you factor in the well-being of the prison population as well (since they will be the most threatened)
Now let's suppose that you have the option of putting those 100 criminals to death. You'd be taking away all 1000 happiness points from those unlucky people. However, it makes little difference to Joe Q Citizen whether those criminals live or die, so long as their lives are not impeded by crime, so their happiness is still only 10 points higher.
It is not at all hypocritical in this case to be against the death penalty without being against the concept of prison. This is why I continue to ask--what is the tangible benefit of the death penalty?
I might believe, for example, that there could be some utilitarian benefit to the death penalty if you could make up the difference by deterring enough people from becoming criminals in the future.
Sure you can. If you're utilitarian, you care about what benefits society the most. (I assume you are debating from this perspective, because otherwise we have to jump back into the morality of the action.)
Suppose you have a town of 10,000 people with 100 violent lawbreakers. Suppose a normal person has 1,000 happiness points.
If you incarcerate those 100 people, you increase the safety and happiness of the other 9,900 people by 10 happiness points each. You also decrease the freedom of the inmates by 700 happiness points each.
Utility is the sum of all the benefit from an action, minus the sum of all suffering.
In this situation, your town would lose 70,000 happiness points and gain 99,000 experience points. This is a net gain for society, so you should do it.
This was an oversimplified illustration, but its point is to illustrate. Incarcerating criminals absolutely works on a utilitarian plane.
deletedover 7 years
I think a factor that people are neglecting to mention here is how the existence of the death penalty creates an object of fear that can potentially deter crimes in the future. Criminals that see other criminals getting the death penalty may have reservations of committing their crime and thus lives can be saved. However, because there is no way to complete isolate the two variables from lurking variables, statistics are wonky and are thus not very usable to support one way or the other. Another aspect that everyone seems to mention is the supposed hypocrisy of “trying to tell people not to kill by killing killers”. The flaw in this argument is the fact that the killer/criminal is not being killed simply by another person, they are being killed as a result of a punishment laid down by the government. Since day 1, the criminal has abided by the contract between him and his governing body, and in turn the governing body has allowed him to survive and exist. After all, the governing body is what allowed his/her parents to meet and have him in the first place and give him a place to live. This criminal then violates the societal contract by taking lives, and as a result the government enacts a punishment of death. The hypocrisy that is described is more along the lines of “vigilante justice”, in which one kills a criminal. However, an individual executing vigilante justice is not comparable to a government enacting the punishment of death upon a criminal. Another way that the supposed "hypocrisy" of the death penalty is non-existent is that all punishments dealt out by the government are by the same logic hypocritical. At its core, any punishment dealt by the government is government removing certain rights to someone that has taken the rights of another person. By the logic that the death penalty is hypocritical, are not all punishments given by the government hypocritical in nature?
and before a strict, literal quote comes up, i did clarify several times including here. the context (not included in your post) should have made it obvious what i was saying though
i did address the point. you said that to abolish the death penalty you must also abolish prisons. i showed you otherwise by giving the example of the country i live in, where jail works fine without capital punishment.
1. you oppose the death penalty since it is imperfect, evidenced by the emphasis on "possibly" making your argument a matter of an imperfect system, since this would be irrelevant under a proper system
2. you support prisons under a supposed ideal system, as it would be necessary to prevent prisoners from breaking out or bringing unjust harm to other prisoners. if we held this to the same standard as we just established, it would not be a valid argument. otherwise, the first argument would not be valid
i don't believe i did and i don't believe this addresses my point either
missed the point
it would also work fine if you replaced the concept of fines, settlements, paroles, etc. with more jails. as it would if you cut off the hands of thieves and as it would with capital punishment in tact. you didn't address the point at all
deletedover 7 years
While I see your point, considering prison escapes are rare, the defense is weak but your are not presenting a utilitarian reason to abolish the death penalty, only what I assume must be a moral one.
Let me present a fictional hypothetical between Batman and the Joker. The Joker repeatedly escapes from Arkham Asylum and murders hundred with chemical weapons. Yet Batman refuses to kill him. This refusal costs innocent lives. Now Black Gate prison is an adequate prison that may house him with little chance of escape. But why risk keeping him? Why not just kill him? We're talking about the Joker here. The only arguement I see Batman's moral one about killing being wrong, but then we get into moral arguements which is entirely subjective to ethics beliefs.
you've cherry-picked the one thing i was saying that wasn't about the death penalty...and have made it about the death penalty. good job.
yeah, no. this doesn't make sense. i live in the uk, we haven't had capital punishment for 52 years and our prison/criminal justice system works absolutely fine.
The key word for me here is 'possibly'. Killing someone and saying we are 'possibly' saving lives seems quite weak to me personally. With an adequate prison system we could ensure that no further lives are lost. There is no need to execute someone to achieve the same end.
The argument seems to be made here that should someone be sentenced to the prison system there is a guarantee that they will cause more hurt and suffering, which I think is flawed. I'll highlight again here that I am Australian, so things may certainly be different here, but it is not unreasonable here to expect that a prisoner be sentenced, and live the rest of their life in jail, causing no more pain and suffering, yet not suffering themselves (beyond that of lack of freedom).
I also take issue with the argument of giving the wronged their peace. We can't speak for the dead. The argument has been made in the past that executing the criminal gives peace to the family of the victim. Studies show, however, that the entire process, and then the act of the death penalty produced negative effects or provided no closure at all to families and friends of the victim. So with this in mind, the argument that we are bringing peace to the victim isn't truly valid. Like I said, we can't speak for the dead, but we certainly can take into account the needs of the living.
deletedover 7 years
Key word here is eager. No one should be killed eagerly...which is why Gandalf was a bad mofo how slaughtered orcs (irredeemable) with his staff and sword.
deletedover 7 years
Don't assume its moral. It can be utilitarian.
The argument for it is that it does prevents suffering. If we put one mass murderer to sleep are we not possibly preventing future deaths or ending his own suffering? Are we not giving the wronged their peace?
This argument is a platitude that can be applied to the whole justice system and war. People aren't put on death row just for vengeance. They are also put there because they have been deemed irredeemable and unable to return to society eg.serial killers, terrorists and serial rapists. Secondly, If the Oklahoma Bomber kills 168 people, and the family members and friends all want him dead, why not give them his death? What benefit is there for life imprisonment over death?
The death penalty gets rid of the worst criminals and provides justice for those they wronged. That's the whole point of the justice system. Your previous arguments tackled the practicality of efficiently executing the right people but thats an argument against the efficiency of the justice system not the death penalty itself ( I'll give you that you are right taking that point of view with the way the question is worded.)
what it ultimately comes down to is that no punishment is "good" in and of itself, punishment is by its nature a bad thing, but you apply punishment out of a sense of "justice" (vindication) and "safety" (the imperfect idea that prison is what stops criminals and death is what stops murderers)
as far as justice goes, there is no greater justice than equal punishment. that doesn't sound pleasant to your sensibilities, but that's because punishment isn't pleasant. justice only cares about objectivity and fairness, and while those things sound peachy-keen most of the time, that means fining thieves and that also means executing murderers. nothing is more just than equal punishment
it becomes unjust when you're punished for the wrong thing, but that isn't exclusive to the death penalty and it permeates every facet of every criminal justice system as humans are flawed. we will nevertheless uphold the systems
personally, i prefer life imprisonment and solitary confinement with the choice of death (it'll be chosen often for the latter), but i can only defend that position on the grounds of morality, not justice.
that's a separate topic from the one we're discussing that criticizes the question more than either answer
i also think this whole debate is a dichotomy between "absolutely for" and "absolutely against" when most people pick and choose and would ultimately favor reform, but that's not what we're discussing
if im on the side of "Death," then i'm trying to argue what "Death" is.
also, justice doesn't mean benefiting society. prison does more harm than good to society, exactly your argument against the death penalty ("while it may sometimes do good, it ultimately does harm"). unless you're willing to argue that prisons should be abolished because they ruin innocent people's lives and are effectively a mild form of torture (locking people in cages, among the more twisted internal punishments like "the hole"), you can't make a fair and balanced argument against the death penalty
criminal justice isn't about the betterment of society, it's about punishing people for their crimes, whether or not punishment is the solution, whether or not it works, and whether or not it's necessary. it is entirely vindictive, that's why i don't agree with the justice system but if we're arguing within the context of the justice system then we have to be fair about it
I do think that purely "just v unjust" is a flawed way of looking at things and you must consider other options as well, but I'll entertain you.
The philosopher Glaucon argues that there are three types of goods--those that are intrinsic (has value for its own sake, like reading a book, or anything enjoyable), those that are instrumental (valuable for the good generated by it, like the value of money in a city), and those that are both.
Justice is, at best, instrumentally good. It certainly is not desirable for its own sake, but for the good that it can do. If people had the opportunity to be unjust without being caught or punished, there seems to be no reason why anybody would prefer justice over injustice. Glaucon believes that the sole reason people are just is because 1) it is convenient--people are just because they wish for others to be just to them, and 2) they fear punishment of being unjust.
If that is true, how is society being punished for not putting people to death to death? What is the tangible benefit? What is being lost by not enacting it?
(Sidenote: Yeah, you are getting the short end of the stick. You're doing a great job by yourself but you need more people on your side.)
I admit I'm late to the party, but the question I see on the sidebar with the pie chart is "Should the death penalty be abolished? Yes or No?"
Going off of that info, then while justice is a part of the question, it is not the whole question, and morality and practicality need to be taken into account as well.
Morality involves particular principles to achieve one state of affairs, while justice only deals with one principle (being fair and equitable) to achieve one particular state of affairs. And you can't divorce it from tangible practicality if you're arguing a policy that will have real-world consequences.
If the death penalty is just, does it also provide a tangible, measurable benefit to society? If so, what is it?
Death vs Justice
