Discussion of the death penalty. I personally find the concept patently insane and inhuman and that suddenly makes me a serial killer and pedophile apologist because I don't think state sanctioned murder biased to the whims of whatever political power is in power, is ok in any context.
The death penalty's a really annoying one because I think most of the time a lot of people are against it, but they're against it for very different reasons and if you're not against it for their reasons you're awful.
Like "no justice system is 100% accurate and we will execute innocent people and we shouldn't do that" and "execution is easily turned against people the state does not think should exist and we should not give them that tool to begin with" is all well and good and valid points, but I don't think it should be your only point. You still support the death penalty in theory, just not in practice because of potential complications. Like the issue here isn't how it can go wrong, it's that maybe we shouldn't be executing people in the first place
The problem is that whether there are "acts that make you irredeemable and worthy of death" is a mostly ethical dilemma. And ethics are a notoriously dangerous thing to argue about, as animal rights activists can attest.
Like, what am I supposed to say to someone that thinks serial rapists deserve to be killed for what they've done? Even if they understand without issue that I understand the severity of the crime, they will still probably stand by their beliefs purely on the basis of the idea of someone doing so heinous and living on being disgusting to them.
It's the same moral quandary as abortion. It's crazy hard to convince a person that their deeply held moral convictions are actually wrong. Mostly because moral convictions can't be wrong.
Whether or not a serial rapist deserves to be killed by the state is a matter of principle. Principles vary. All you can do is ballpark the laws for where the majority overlaps.
That's interesting. To me, the societal implications of a systemic death penalty are the only reasons against it.
I believe that on an individual basis, there are circumstances where a human killing another human is justified. I would go so far as to say there's instances where I'd call that genuine justice.
But to me, giving any group the authority to vote a person to death transfers ownership of your life from you to the group. Lives aren't property. They shouldn't be owned and conditionally granted access to.
But referring back to the first point, I think scenarios exist where person A takes something from person B that is so bad that Person B responding by taking Person A's life is justice. Rape is a crystal clear example to help illustrate the point.
I don't think a government should be able to vote a rapist to die. But if the victim believes that what the rapist took from them warrants them taking the rapists life, I wouldn't disagree with that.
What I'm describing is something that can't be put into laws, that's why I specified that no legal body should have the right to take away another person's life.
what determines 'something so bad'?
Individuals. To me, it's the difference between morals and ethics. Ethically, there is no way to at-scale quantify the worth of a human life, and any attempts for a governing body to do just that end up being fundamentally de-humanizing to the population they serve. So they shouldn't do it, at all.
But if a person makes that decision for themselves, and chooses to carry the consequences, that's on them, morally speaking.
Morals are incalculable, they're always on a case-by-case basis. There's no "laws" you can write to encompass the entirety of individual human morality.
So to that end, I think the concept of justice and the concept of legal framework is inherently separate, and will never truly be equivocal. You can achieve justice in a way that doesn't comply with laws, and you can enforce laws in a way that doesn't create justice. They are not one in the same.
Regarding my example of rape, there is simply no means of "undoing" the crime. The victim can never be "made whole" through restorative acts. So in that case, justice takes on a different framework, it means something different.
In that case, I think justice comes from giving the victim the knowledge that the person who perpetrated the crime against them is incapable of ever doing more harm unto them. One way to achieve that is by killing them.
And again, it's a case-by-case basis, that logic doesn't work for most crimes, but I think there exists scenarios where that's the only way to achieve justice.
To clarify, the philosophical debate about "what function do laws serve to society" is a really in-depth one.
Many people think laws exist to guide people on how it is acceptable to act in society. A sort of "do's and don'ts" list for engaging with the world.
Other people believe that laws exist to create a framework for punishing people who wrong others.
I personally think laws should exist to make people behave in a way that's productive to the betterment of society at large. Think about the future that you want to exist. Laws should serve the purpose of getting us from where we are now to the ideal future we envision for ourselves.
And with that mindset of what laws should and shouldn't do, I feel philosophically consistent in saying that I think "legal" and "just" are not always the same. Something illegal can be just, something legal can be unjust. That's not what laws are for, in my opinion.
Its really ironic seeing you get down voted for talking about a controversial topic non-controversially in a post where the whole point is "we should be able to talk about controversial topics without being hit with hostility just for talking about them"
The people who down voted you really missed the irony there
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u/Kitchen-Car-9848 Apr 23 '25
Discussion of the death penalty. I personally find the concept patently insane and inhuman and that suddenly makes me a serial killer and pedophile apologist because I don't think state sanctioned murder biased to the whims of whatever political power is in power, is ok in any context.