241–250 of 546 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The distinction between revenge and justice is that justice is carried out by a disinterested third party.
If the third party carrying out the "justice" is merely implementing the vengeful wishes of the most irrational party (i.e. the victim or their family) then I wouldn't say they are "disinterested" in any practical sense. Also, by the supposed logic of "restoring natural harmony", if someone kills your family, should you be allowed to kill theirs?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't mean to pick on you specifically, but this sort of remark is why the left and intellectuals more widely fail at winning politically. Rather than use arguments that are amenable even to people who disagree on the fundamentals, you would rather retain the moral high-ground by refusing even to debate on their terms, thereby failing to actually influence policy (in this case a matter of life and death). If the de…
I don't want to kill someone. I don't know if or why a person became a murderer. It could be their upbringing which should be the responsibility of the society and clearly the society failed. It could be a medical issue. A biological one. It could be that the murderer did nothing wrong in their worldview. We have to understand this as a society. We have to teach it if people don't understand it.
If there were some device (which doesn't exist and maybe can't) which simply lights up with perfect accuracy when pointed at someone who tortured someone before murdering them, I would support instant execution of that person by firing squad.
I'm not willing to accept a 4% error rate however. I'm not sure how low it would have to go, but it's lower than it plausibly can.
This isn't some kind of lack of "understanding" on my part, and you're not going to "teach" me to feel the same way about this issue as you do. We have different values. So you'll have to content yourself with my being on the same side of the policy question for different reasons.
I'm glad this is being shared widely, because I agree with it. That said, I have to snark a little about it, because I was in high school, in the 90s, when I came to the same realization about why the death penalty is wrong. So this seems pretty obvious to me. Our justice system is not reliable enough to have the death penalty.
If you extend the logic to other sentences they become similarly problematic. In other words, clearly it's bad to execute an innocent person. But it's also bad to imprison them for life, or 30 years or 20 years or 10 years and so on. There's no clear reason to draw the line at execution but not at life imprisonment.
I'm glad this is being shared widely, because I agree with it. That said, I have to snark a little about it, because I was in high school, in the 90s, when I came to the same realization about why the death penalty is wrong. So this seems pretty obvious to me. Our justice system is not reliable enough to have the death penalty.
I mean, there are cases where you have clear video evidence of murder, or mass shootings where it's obvious who the killer was with 100 witnesses. If a proposal came to redefine the threshold for the death penalty from "beyond reasonable doubt" to "irrefutable" then the arguments here would not hold.
On the subject of deterrence: If someone commits a premeditated crime carrying a guideline sentence of {20 years in State A, vs 30 years in State B} do we really think that they're more likely to commit the crime in State A? It's my intuition that for the most part, people committing crimes aren't thinking about potential repercussions, much less measuring them. I mean is someone thinking "Oh, only 10 years? I'll do…
It's my belief that the sentence length affects crime rate indirectly by affecting the collective unconscious . For instance if you see someone who did his time talk about his life in retrospect on the telly that affects you. When you see the (lack of) wrinkles on his face, that affects you. When you uncle Joey misses your birthday bash because he is still in jail, that affects you etc.
On the subject of deterrence: If someone commits a premeditated crime carrying a guideline sentence of {20 years in State A, vs 30 years in State B} do we really think that they're more likely to commit the crime in State A? It's my intuition that for the most part, people committing crimes aren't thinking about potential repercussions, much less measuring them. I mean is someone thinking "Oh, only 10 years? I'll do…
It's my belief that the sentence length affects crime rate indirectly by affecting the collective unconscious . For instance if you see someone who did his time talk about his life in retrospect on the telly that affects you. When you see the (lack of) wrinkles on his face, that affects you. When you uncle Joey misses your birthday bash because he is still in jail, that affects you etc.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180514-do-long-prison-s...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But please, go on continuing to believe Europeans are superior to the rest of the world. I remember that working out really well for you guys back in the 1930s. That is unnecessarily snarky. The comment I was replying to was suggesting that basically the UK and the other Europeans would happily welcome back the death penality. Which is not true. I only said that "we" - the strawman used by gp - left it behind and m…
Please don't do this, no matter how provocative another comment was. The proper response is to flag it and ignore it—then the provocation fizzles out, as it should. The site guidelines put it this way: " Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. " That's our euphemistic recoding of "Please don't feed the trolls." I realize this is not so easy when you belong to a group that's being put down, but w…
I'm glad this is being shared widely, because I agree with it. That said, I have to snark a little about it, because I was in high school, in the 90s, when I came to the same realization about why the death penalty is wrong. So this seems pretty obvious to me. Our justice system is not reliable enough to have the death penalty.
>So this seems pretty obvious to me If you extend the logic to other sentences they become similarly problematic. In other words, clearly it's bad to execute an innocent person. But it's also bad to imprison them for life, or 30 years or 20 years or 10 years and so on. There's no clear reason to draw the line at execution but not at life imprisonment.
Though I agree that in most cases death penalty should not be used, in some very specific but not rare cases - like mass shootings with dozens dead - where you have a lot of video and DNA evidence and dozens of witnesses - I just can't find a single argument against it. If I find any - I would gladly change my mind.
I'm glad this is being shared widely, because I agree with it. That said, I have to snark a little about it, because I was in high school, in the 90s, when I came to the same realization about why the death penalty is wrong. So this seems pretty obvious to me. Our justice system is not reliable enough to have the death penalty.
Part of the issue is that we divide the trial into (guilty or not) and (determine punishment if guilty). There's no 95% chance of guilty, go to jail and 100% chance of guilty, death penalty. But, ultimately, some people are going to go away forever. People like Manson are never going to get released. What's the big difference between the death penalty and life imprisonment with no parole that attenuates the error in…
You can't reverse the damage done by either sentence. However a sentence of life without parole is correctible as soon as a mistake is identified. Releasing an innocent person after taking 40 years of their life is awful, but it is better than realizing we killed an innocent person 25 years ago.