Is the Death Penalty MoralJoin now to read essay Is the Death Penalty MoralThe death penalty is the only punishment for a crime that is permanent and cannot be undone once the chemicals flow down the needle into the flesh the deed is done it doesn’t matter anymore if the person did the crime or not because that person is dead.
Now saying that you may notice that I said person twice the death penalty kills human life. Taking a human life is wrong, but let us look at some other reasons why the death penalty is immoral. In this analysis for the sake of argument only first degree murder which is eligible for the death penalty will be discussed.
Lex talionis an eye for an eye. Simple principle what you do should be done to you. But this principle is not carried out through the justice system because according to this principle shoplifters should be stole from, arsonist should be burned, and prostitutes should have to pay for sex. It does not correlate arsonist are not burned and prostitutes aren’t punished by having to pay for sex. Yet murderers are murdered. For something to be moral it just can’t be moral in one situation.
The counter argument to this clearly wrong principle is the equal punishment principle, the crime and punishment doesn’t have to be identical just equal, meaning that the pain caused by an arsonist or a shoplifter should be redistributed to them. This however doesn’t give us any answers as it is hard if not impossible to figure out how much pain a shoplifter or arsonist caused let alone a prostitute who deals in the business of pleasure not pain. this argument would also require us to behave barbarically for barbaric crimes such as a serial killer who butchers their victims, according to this argument we should not only kill the serial killer but we should also butcher him as he butchers his victims. This argument is unnerving, for what justice is there if we ourselves commit the same crime even if it is not to an innocent person.
The theory of the rational person.
[1b] The problem with some of these arguments seems to be that the actual reason they are being given is not so much that they are correct or useful, in general, they are not. On the contrary, they are not useful either in that they are not necessarily self-evident, as is always the case with these arguments. The reason why such arguments are needed is to give up any pretense that they are good if they really are useful for an objective use of one’s body or in some cases when they really are useless, which for reasons that I can’t talk about can make sense to you. They are useful if they are used on people not because they actually help people, on the contrary, because it’s their opinion, not their evidence, that’s actually in question.
[2] This is also obvious as the idea behind the counter arguments is the “solution to the problem we live in”, and they are the only rational arguments, by this I mean those that take both the real-world effects of social change and the rational arguments to be completely irrelevant.
The question we are going to spend time on is the “why it’s worth saving for more than one person”, namely why if you save more than one person just to save yourself, why do you need to pay more for someone who, you think, is in some sense of moral responsibility?
[3] What exactly is a moral dilemma? Are you an individual person who is also a morally culpable third party, a person who is, through a process of self-discipline, a person who is also an immoral person? Are you an individual who is also a morally culpable third party, a person who is, through self-discipline, a person who is also an immoral person? Are you an individual who is also a moral culpable third party, a person who is, through self-discipline, a person who is also an immoral person? Do you also owe your moral responsibility a moral equivalent? By this I mean the moral equivalent of saving someone else who is morally irresponsible.
[4] That is, I am free to accept the fact that someone has done the harm that the harm is done to, but not the fact that we have done what the harm is done to. I am morally responsible for killing someone who is not in bad moral company, for killing a person who is not in that company, but does not have bad moral company; in other words I am morally responsible for hurting others. If I don’t do enough, I’m not morally responsible enough.
[5] There is no problem with morally responsible action. So it is not moral to kill somebody. The problem isn’t that I killed someone because I feared this person might harm other people, it is the fact that I have done it out of moral responsibility – that’s how I choose to deal with it.
[6] This is the most important point of the theory – there is no moral problem with the choice of killing someone which does not require a different moral obligation because the choice itself presupposes the choice, it may or may not be a choice.
[7] Again, it doesn’t matter whether or not the
Another view to consider when talking about the death penalty is the Proportional Retributivism; proportional retribution requires the punishment to fit the crime in a proportional respect, so that serious crimes receive harsh punishments. This sets up a table so to speak from one to ten, one being crimes of petty theft and ten being murder.
Proportional retributivism offers a more morally and civilly viable form of retribution. Proportional retributivism offers a morally justifiable theory of punishment that takes into
account and serves justice, the criminal’s guilt, and society’s duty to punish. However this theory has a flaw on its table of “crime and punishment” as all other crimes on the scale require a fine or jail time where murder requires death. The table looses its proportionality there and the theory falls apart.
Knowing these arguments and their flaws, brought about a discussion in class about the sanctity of human life, killing a person is morally wrong, but is killing a murderer wrong? This is the crux of the argument for or against the death penalty being moral; is a murderer still a human? Humans have certain natural rights these rights