The death penalty?

[WaywardOn3]

Ok so I was reading this article about a man sentenced to death taking half an hour to die. The state have upped the dose to try to prevent it happening again.

While I'm against having a death penalty his lawyers comments bugged me as him potentially suffering for up to half an hour before death breached his human rights. What about the young pregnant woman's human rights to not be raped and murdered? She must surely have suffered far longer than half an hour and in actual pain/fear for herself and her child not assumed and unconfirmed pain.

AIBU to not care that he may have suffered ever so slightly in his last unconscious half hour?

I'm against the death penalty.

But I'm not against it because of some vague "ooh, that's nasty" feeling or some notion that it would hypocritical to put a murderer to death.

I mean, are some people only held back by the possibilty of being called a hypocrite? It's nonsense.

To those of you who would hunt down and kill the people who harm your family, careful you're not the next one on death row: www.terrywilliamsclemency.com/

For those who can't click on the link, it's the case of Terry Williams, who, when he was 17 and then 18, killed 2 of the men who had been raping him for years. He's been on death row for the murders for 30 years now, despite even the jurors and the wife of one of the dead men signing a petition asking the sentence to be commuted to life in prison.

Bonkers!

I mean, are some people only held back by the possibilty of being called a hypocrite? It's nonsense

Eh? Eh?

Is it wrong to murder people. In order to show you how wrong you were to murder someone, we are going to murder you.

I think capital punishment IS hypocritical and don't see any reason why citing it as such should be considered "nonsense".

Why do you think it's wrong? If it's purely pragmatic (it doesn't work as a deterrent, it isn't economically viable, etc), then you don't have any moral position on it. I think THAT'S nonsense

Thinking about it, the problem with these sort of moral questions is that people can never agree on the moral arguments. Probably because moral arguments aren't really arguments at all.

"It's wrong for anyone to kill" is not an argument, but simply a bare assertion.
All moral arguments essentially boil down to relying on such assertions plucked out of thin air. And if someone else's unsupported moral assertions differ from yours, you've no hope of agreeing. When anything becomes a moral question, debate and discussion is a waste of time. You're doomed.

I think it's best to be scientific about it, consider all the objective results of either policy, and go for the one that does the most good.

Thinking in those terms, the only conceivable conclusion is that for small, primitive societies the death penalty makes sense on practical grounds (as someone mentioned earlier), but for developed societies such as ours it is a nonsense.

I mean, in a developed society such as ours what are the objective benefits? The onus is on supporters to answer this question, and convincingly enough to justify both the risk of error and the monetary cost. An impossible task.

MaidOfStars
The hypocrisy arguement is nonsense because the morality of an action can only be judged in its context. The context is rather different between:
a) a man shooting a woman in cold blood then watching his friends bury her alive
b) the penal system implementing a sentence.

The argument could also be uses to argue against prison or, in fact, any sort of judicial system:
"Taking away a person's liberty is wrong. So to punish Josef Frtizl by putting him in prison is absurd."
Precisely the same flavour of nonsense.

if anyone hurt my child like this man hurt this pregnant woman, I'd want to kill them myself. I don't think I'm the only person who feels this way.

You're not. I would too. But WANTING to and being SANCTIONED to (or the state being sanctioned to) are different things. People murdering other people are an aberration and I believe that's the way it should stay.

The state killing people, for whatever reason, is society lowering itself to the level of the lowest, most aberrant members of that society, and I believe that it should be the other way round: that, regardless of what an individual might feel like doing in this scenario, society as a whole should hold itself to the highest standard.

I think it's best to be scientific about it, consider all the objective results of either policy, and go for the one that does the most good

How do you plan to do this without using subjective judgments about what is good, given that:

Thinking about it, the problem with these sort of moral questions is that people can never agree on the moral arguments

By 'good' I mean well-being. Very subjective also, but hopefully there any disagreement will be by degree (and very unlikely enough to swing the overwhelming case in this instance) rather than fundamental disagreements about morality.

You're right, there are no objective morals at all. (Even if there were, we'd never be able to know what they are, so we'd be left with the subjective anyway.)

By 'good' I mean well-being

Are you Sam Harris?

It would be a normal response to feel vengeful about someone who hurt my child. But that is why in a civilised society, the victims of a crime don't decide the punishment.

Has anybody mentioned the executioner. I mean if you wanted to kill then you're probably not the person for the job. On the other hand it shouldn't be a duty, for want of a better description, that anyone that works in a prison should do.

I would be perfectly happy with the death penalty PROVIDED that to deal with the possible miscarriage of justice issue, if it was ever established that the executed person was innocent, the entire jury that incorrectly found them guilty, the prosecution lawyers, and the judge was then executed using the same method.