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A comment on What It’s Like to Almost Get Executed. Parent comment

Re:What It’s Like to Almost Get Executed by barrkel on Saturday April 02, 2016 @05:47PM (#11413641)
Governments are made by people out of people. The whole system is just people, telling one another what to do, with the carrot of reward and the rod of violence, as necessary. An organization isn't a shield against personal morality. Capital punishment is a bunch of people telling another person to kill yet another person. That's all it is.

(And yes, war is murder too.)

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Re:What It’s Like to Almost Get Executed by ajkjk on Sunday April 03, 2016 @03:37AM (#11415305)
I agree with most of that, except for the "is" in "war is murder".

What do you mean by "is"? At the end of the day we have decided as a society that "Killing people is called murder and it's Very Bad", and we can also decide that "killing people who don't deserve it is murder and it's Very Bad" if we prefer.

Personally, I vacillate between thinking that capital punishment and life-imprisonment is quite immoral (and that we should fine something like 'exile' as an alternative), and a more utilitarian stance that, well, we have to find something to do with dangerous people and it doesn't really bother me if getting rid of them entirely is it.

[n.b. these stances are all in a vacuum and do not reflect my policy beliefs, which are specifically attuned to our society's pisspoor implementation of life-imprisonment and capital punishment.]

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