Let's not make blanket statements or anything.

Why not? Some practices are totally abhorrent and have no place in any liberal society.

Some might say that the practice of allowing brutal murderers and rapists to live out their lives and die in peace is totally abhorrent and has no place in any liberal society.

It's almost as though different rational people of good will disagree about moral matters.

A couple points:

> the practice of allowing brutal murderers and rapists to live out their lives and die in peace

Unless I'm misreading you, that's a huge misrepresentation of what death penalty abolitionists advocate. I don't want violent criminals to have zero repercussions for their actions, and no present-day society I've ever heard of allows them to.

But I agree with (what I perceive to be your greater) point about differences in personal moral code. I was merely speaking contextually about the general trend Western society has followed for the past few centuries -- like fewer, more lenient punishments and more respect for civil rights, among others.

Maybe I wasn't talking about Western / liberal society. Maybe most people don't currently live in that.

That's only if you consider the only societies of value to be "liberal"

Call it what you want. IMO, any society that recognizes the problems with capital punishment and accordingly outlaws it has at least some liberal tendencies.

That's a pretty cheap cop-out, using the tendencies of something to justify calling it that something.

And what makes you think most of the world currently lives in a liberal society?

There are cases in which blanket statements are valid.

I'm hesitant to do so in the case of moral arguments, though I find the case in favour of the death penalty, particularly given the many, many abuses, and utter and final nature, phenomenally weak.

That said, I disagree with the HN hive-mind's obliterating your comment.

Agree to disagree about the blanket statements, and I actually do agree that for what most people are picturing here, the death penalty should be abhorred. But, seriously, it's rough out there. Almost nobody actually lives in San Francisco, when you think about it. (Or similar.)