The real reason to end the death penalty is because it's hypocritical for society to declare killing as a most serious crime and then turn around and kill the killers (and others usually, traitors, double agents etc). That's a "do as I say, not as I do" situation that even a five year old would understand.
The real reason to end the death penalty
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Re: The real reason to end the death penalty
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
This argument is useless because what inhuman and barbaric my means depends on your belief system. Abortion is inhuman and barbaric to significant % of the population and death penalty isn't. They use murder argument as well. Of course death penalty is not murder nor is abortion if you're honest about what the word means but here we are with those absolute statements about ethics. If we just use this argument and don…
Opposition to abortion and capital punishment is pretty basic moral reasoning and really not challenging. The premise is killing innocent human beings is wrong. In the case of abortion the innocence of the person being killed is assured. In the case of capital punishment that’s not necessarily true, but since we can’t truly know for certain the convict isn’t innocent we ought to err on the side of caution to avoid th…
You're wrong about it being easy, that's why it doesn't make sense to you.
There are many ethical systems in which both death penalty and abortion are justified.
Death penalty is any easy one. It was considered to be a proper penalty for various crimes for most of the human history in many cultures. It just takes understanding of ethical values of those cultures to understand why it was justified.
Your argument about taking innocent human life is a naive one. We do a lot of things that cost innocent human lives. Allowing diesel cars in cities cost more innocent lives than all death penalties in the history of humanity combined and it's not a small difference.
It's about tradeoffs and priorities. It's natural for a tribe or state to kill for treason for example as disincentivizing treason is more important (saves more lives, prevents suffering and destruction of your countrymen) than occasional mistake. Putting long term survival and well being of your society is more important than individual lives.
Our wealth clouds the picture so well. If it was required of everyone one to spend addition 20 hours a week providing food and shelter for a murderer atop of all the work we need to put into getting food and shelter for ourselves and our families you would be very quick to accept death penalty instead. As the choices would be about caring for your family and making sure the murderer doesn't die in custody. Today we can arguably afford it but if that's the argument then we already agree it's about tradeoffs and where the exact line is not obvious.
Even if you don't agree you can at least see it's a justified view. It's all about tradeoffs.
Re: The real reason to end the death penalty
#543Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The state should not have the power over the life of a person. Then it can't do war and can't defend its existence as a state unless it's somehow a dependent state of some other state that does have power over the life of a person. Like some small Pacific island that's protected by more militarily well equipped allies.
Plenty of states don't "do war" and aren't Pacific islands.
All of those will be like a Pacific island in that they're protected by a warlike ally. A truly undefended country would quickly be invaded.
Re: The real reason to end the death penalty
#544Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it actually hyperbole though?
Yes. There are many successful arrests of people who would face the death penalty if convicted without them being killed. The number of police killings are a very small number. This is blatantly obvious to anyone who cares about the truth. And I'm strongly against police brutality. But you don't solve that by being ignorant about what actually happened in reality.
No one claims there are never nonviolent arrests. The claim is that there are executions in the street at all.
Re: The real reason to end the death penalty
#545Earlier quoted context omitted.
Us Americans left behind the death penalty as well, so you are being a bit nationalistic (racist?). The death penalty is against the law in nearly 1/2 of US states. Even in the states where it is "legal," many have not carried out the procedure in several decades. They simply reserve the right to do so in the case where a child is murdered. > The rest of the civilised world decided on this a long time ago. But please…
You've broken the site guidelines badly, even relative to the rest of this thread, with name-calling, flamebait and slurs. Would you please stop doing that? We ban accounts that post this way—it's destructive to everything this site is intended to be. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
What more do I need to do to have my account deleted? I sent you an email as per your request, but my account still exists.
Re: The real reason to end the death penalty
#546Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've broken the site guidelines badly, even relative to the rest of this thread, with name-calling, flamebait and slurs. Would you please stop doing that? We ban accounts that post this way—it's destructive to everything this site is intended to be. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
What more do I need to do to have my account deleted? I sent you an email as per your request, but my account still exists.
7 days later... my account still exists. I guess I've quashed the "just email us and we'll delete you're account" lie.