But the toll on your own people has real consequences that you can prevent. Killing someone is the sort of thing that makes you question your own right to life. Don't do that to people unless you have to, and by "have to", I mean there is an imminent threat to life. You don't "have to" pay taxes. Someone's going to come after you, but they're not going to kill you over it. You don't have to kill prisoners.

Agreed. We never consider the toll this takes on the executioner. How about the cost to society? The people that have to witness death will have long term psychological issues. How about the cost to society when we realize we've executed the wrong person? The downsides to our barbaric practice of executions are huge, and quantifiable.

What's not quantifiable is the motivation for keeping the death penalty. The only justification after debunking all other reasons is belief. People "believe" that killing is the only punishment that fits the crime. We should not be in the practice of making life or death decisions based on belief.

This is part of what I would mean by saying life is hallowed. I don't think it a red herring. Killing does damage to the killers as well as those killed. To choose it under less than terrible necessity is a mistake.

    1: holy, consecrated <the church stands on hallowed ground>

    2: sacred, revered <the university's hallowed halls> <hallowed customs>

While they may not kill you directly for paying taxes, if they come for you, or your property, and you attempt to defend yourself they will kill you

Thus I believe that is in fact being killing because you did not pay taxes and that also means you in fact you "have to" pay taxes

Sure, if an IRS agent comes with a policeman, and you pickup a gun and start waving it, you may get shot. But if you just don't give money to the IRS, nobody is going to actively try to kill you. Your life gets much, much worse, but you aren't killed.

if you attempt to defend your property from their theft then you will be shot.

So yes they will actively kill you.

If anyone is stealing, in this hypothetical where you aren't paying your taxes, it's you, from the rest of us.

While there can be a case for Land taxation, there is no ethical claim for Income Taxation.

With any good or service, there is the same economic trace back to government subsidies. Your income comes from the trading of goods or services.

I own a house, if you trace back the chain of land ownership, the original title was issued by the government. (Where did the government get that land from? They stole it from the indigenous people.) When the government gave the first titleholder the land, they granted that title subject to the understanding that taxes would be paid and laws would be obeyed (including taxes and laws introduced after the original title was issued.) You can't give better title than what you have, so every subsequent owner, up to myself, has inherited the same obligation to pay taxes and obey laws. If the government's right to tax me is invalid, then my ownership of the land my house is built on is invalid too.

The scenario I described was the IRS taking your land to cover taxation based on your Income, IRS does not tax land in any way. They tax income and other transactions but not land.

The IRS however can take your home, car, or any other personal property you own to cover income based taxation.

I actually agree with your assessment for pure land taxation (not to include any structures, or other items you places upon the land)

Taxing land value I believe has a ethical foundation for the reasons you stated, taxing income has no ethical foundation for those same reasons. If you believe the government has the right to tax land because it has or once had an ownership interest over that land, then the only possible reason you could agree that the government has the right to tax income is if you believe the government has a ownership interest over your person.

Suppose someone wants to lease land, and make the rent proportional to the tenant's income. You might think it is an odd arrangement, but freedom of contract implies if landlord and tenant agree on this it is binding. Now, that essentially describes income tax. The government owns all its territory, it has leased it to the residents of that territory, it has made the rent (tax) proportional to income. If you don't pay your rent, the government can seize your moveable property, just like how your landlord can seize your moveable property if you don't pay your rent. (Unpaid rent is a debt, and its collection can be compelled through the same legal processes as any other debt.)

As I said, you are not figuratively killed in prison.

Secondly, prison does not end your day to day life. There are many people serving time who will get out and be able to go on with their life. Not everyone who goes to prison gets a life sentence. And even for those who are doing long stints, they very well do have a life worth living. Prison sucks, but saying someone who's doing a stint (or multiple) doesn't have a life worth living is a akin to telling them to commit suicide.

I understand you were probably engaging in hyperbole, but it's clear (to me at least) that you probably have not encountered many (or any) people who have gone to prison. Your view of prison inmates is probably a combination of a few tv shows. As someone who has a better view I'll say that prisoners do have lives worth living, they do have rights, and (when prison is done correctly) they should come out better on the other side.

Prison is shitty, and leaves a stigma on people that is hard to shake. But prisoner is in that situation, not of that situation.

So, is it so important that the guilty are snuffed out that one is ready to accept collateral damage in the form of innocent being put to death.

There are reasonable arguments you can make about the death penalty, like uncertainty or cost or efficacy as a deterrent. They may even convince some people.

But a lot of people have an axiomatic view of the death penalty.

I personally hold the belief that killing is bad, and should be avoided, with some complicated feels towards self defense.

I may make all of the arguments above trying to convince people to oppose the death penalty. Hell, I may consider lying about the statistics. But they won't change my mind. If it's more expensive to not execute people or less effective at deterring crime, I'll still oppose the death penalty.

Uncertainty is no different. There is always uncertainty of varying degrees. There will be cases where the convicted is almost certainly guilty. Imagine a suspect commits his capital crime in full few of a large crowd of unbiased witnesses, many of who knew him personally and can clearly identify him. Moreover, he was taken into custody immediately after committing the crime, by police officers who also witnessed the crime. He gave an unforced confession, gave details not available to anyone else, and offers no remorse. He is mentally competent by any measure.

Add in any other caveats you'd like. If you are still opposed to the death penalty in this particular case, well, then you're not really concerned about the uncertainty, you're just opposed to the death penalty. If you aren't opposed to the death penalty in this case, then isn't it really just a matter of improving our definitions of "reasonable doubt" for capital cases?

I think people could fall into a spectrum between the axiomatic views you present depending on what is considered a capital offense.

For example I might be in favor of capital punishment but only in cases of war crimes. In that case, for almost all intents and purposes I'm against death penalty since I only approve of it in extreme cases, versus someone that is in favor of death penalty for rapists (assuming there is no uncertainty like in your example), since I could indeed imagine a rape victim that would like to have the rapist dead.

So I agree that if you have an axiomatic view as you put it, the rest of the (non-axiomatic) factors will not be of relevance to you, but then the problem becomes defining on which side of the slide do you consider your view to be axiomatic.

My point is that this almost seems as a sort of "fractal" discussion in the sense that you can always think of yet another factor that would establish different positions for two people although they might seemingly have the "same" axiomatic view, and that makes it very hard to discuss this subject without polarizing people.

I don't buy this for an instant.

The argument isn't that a life sentence can be fully reversed, just that it can be modified later, which death cannot be.

A ruined life isn't much better than death, and sometimes worse IMHO. Without wanting to throw around accusations (truly! I don't mean to presume anything about you, specifically!), I find that people who make your argument often have no appreciation of just how terrible a ruined life can be. I think it's critical to remember that there can be no suffering after death, and while I'd still rather rot in prison than hang for a crime I didn't commit, there's no question that imprisoning an innocent person will cause tremendous suffering and debilitating handicap.

To be clear: there are other, stronger arguments against capital punishment. My point is rather that this one isn't the strong argument it's often made out to be.

This is because either way, people's lives are being ruined. There are a great many people who have been freed from jail only to continue suffering on the outside as a direct result of their incarceration.

Incidentally, I think you've made some assumptions about my position on capital punishment that are mistaken...

EDIT: I seem to have been unclear and this is causing a lot of visceral reactions. Yes, it's worse to be wrongfully killed than wrongfully incarcerated for life (or incarcerated for some length of time and then released). The argument is that it's still close enough that the argument of irreversibility should apply (IMHO) to life sentences. As such, I don't think this is a very strong argument against capital punishment. As an auxiliary point: I think there are other, much stronger arguments against CP. tl;dr: a life sentence is bad enough that the irreversibility argument should apply to it as well.

It's one argument of many, but it's useful for people who think capital punishment is morally justified, but don't want innocent people killed.

That doesn't make sense. While irreversibility is, in fact, an absolute trait of a death sentence, the irreversibility argument is an argument about the relative features of death sentences vs. life imprisonment.

Its true that any imprisonment includes some harms that are (or some probability of harm that is) irreversible, those harms can stop being compounded at any time during the imprisonment by terminating the imprisonment -- as has been done, in fact, not only for innocence but for other causes -- and, even while irreversible, can in some cases be compensated for in some extent, which also (though more rarely) occurs.

To the extent either of those can happen in the case of death sentences, it is only because death sentences are, in practice, sentences to long-but-indefinite terms of imprisonment followed by death, and the imprisonment portion of that sentence behaves exactly like any other sentence of imprisonment. (And note that death sentence proponents often argue that this feature of the death sentence is, itself, a misfeature imposed by resistance to the death penalty which should ideally be eliminated.)

We cannot ignore that there are also innocent people who are sentenced to life in prison -- who die in prison. From the perspective of maximum damage, surely society has harmed these people (and their families) more than it harms the innocents who are executed.

In the context of wrong convictions, I think the question is whether people fear being wrongly convicted more than they fear a cold-blooded killer escaping a life sentence. And secondarily, how strongly wrong convictions of others effects their sense of justice and equality more generally, and thus the legitimacy of their government.

I'm sure this sense has changed over the years, especially when we were more segregated and different classes of people didn't feel that the treatment of certain classes could effect their own class. But I think it's become increasingly the case that the death penalty is having a detrimental effect on our sense of justice and equality. Part of that has to do with modern mass media--dead or alive, our killers are both omni-present and strangely distant. Also, unlike in bygone times we basically kill on-the-spot many of the criminals we'd otherwise be afraid of. For example, domestic terrorists.

So on the whole I would guess that the death penalty provides increasingly less benefit and incurs increasing social costs. The moral question is more definitive for some, but if we're going to be utilitarian about it, it's much more complex than a simple accounting of the statistics.

That is incredibly myopic and presumptuous. You're effectively arguing that we're going to destroy your life so it'll be better if we just end it. If the person's life ends up being so terrible after the fact they still have the option of just ending it. There is no benefit to making such a callous decision for them. Calling the argument weak when your own is short-sighted and at the very worst disingenuous is kind of disgusting to me, personally.

I am not even sure you understand your own position completely.

I argue that a life sentence is only marginally better than a death sentence. I further argue that if we oppose the death penalty on the grounds that it causes substantial irreversible damage, then we must also oppose perpetual incarceration because the difference in harm is not large enough (IMHO). I, and many others, are not willing to do away with perpetual incarceration so this is not a satisfactory line of argumentation.

From there, I reach my point: there are other, more compelling arguments against the death penalty.

I'll say the same thing to you as the other guy: you're making assumptions about my position relative to capital punishment.

If you're going to call people disgusting, at least make a good-faith effort to understand what they're saying.

This is where your argument fails to convince me (and, I suspect, many others). I could accept, if I really stretched myself, that a death sentence is only marginally worse than a life sentence, but only up to the point when it is actually carried out. The obvious discontinuity brought about by the irreversibility of death cannot be ignored; it makes the distinction between the two sentences not marginal, but catastrophic.

Because of this, your argument is weak (IMHO, in keeping with your restrained manner).

No where in my post was there indication or any reason to make the claim that I don't understand what you're saying. I get what you're saying, it's just unsupported and presumptuous -- which is exactly what I said in my first post.

Even if we knew that in every single case that your life was completely ruined after the fact for various reasons (which is factually not the case), it's still morally reprehensible that you consider the outcomes marginally different to the point where whether or not we allowed you to live is insignificant.

I don't consider this argument weak at all. There is no reason for it to be weak; in fact the only way it can be weak is if you make certain assumptions (that we know aren't true) along with some other not-so-popular philosophical value judgements. Hence, not only is the position rather disgusting at a certain level, but making a claim that the argument in discussion is weak is actually rather weakly supported in and of itself.

Again, it is you who does not really understand the position you are taking. I'm not sure how much more you want me to spell it out.

A good example of a candidate for life imprisonment is a mass murderer who has obviously shot tens of peoples without any remorse and boasts doing it again. The crime is not debatable - the question then remains - how should a society respond to such a situation.

No, that's not the assumption they're making. They're saying that the damage can at least be partially reversed.

What's the difference? Dead or locked in a horrible box for life? We euthanize sick cats; we don't make them suffer needlessly. I would argue life imprisonment is a punishment more severe than death.

Just by way of disclosure, I have witnessed two executions in Texas back when I worked for Reuters. I spent a lot of time on death row, interviewing prisoners as well as families, so I don't have a positive feeling about the death penalty... however I contend that life inprisonment is even worse.

It of course depends on the nature of the prison. I would claim it could be just like a regular apartment - except you can't leave. There is no reason for it to be doomy , gloomy and grimy if the raison detre is to protect the society from the person locked away.

I think norway's treatment of prisoners is great example of how to do this as sensibly as possible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment_in_Norway

Do you have any evidence that reality conforms to this theory?

Do you have any evidence that reality doesn't conform to this theory?

Not a counter-question just for the sake of counter-questioning; I am sincerely interested in knowing.

Then that's what should be fixed, isn't it? The amount should be substantial enough to a) be a significant deterrent for future screwups and b) support the former prisoner indefinitely.

That's a bill that probably won't get paid. What are they going to do, throw me in prison?

Possibly that's an appropriate punishment then, for the very worst of offenders.

I think above a few months, imprisonment probably isn't the answer. We should explore alternatives: corporal punishment (wouldn't you rather a single lash than a year in prison?), fines, slavery (why not make someone who commits manslaughter work for the victim's family for a decade, rather than sit in prison for a decade?) and, yes, execution (which is, I contend, more humane than long-term imprisonment).

I don't really know what the answer is, but I'm pretty certain it doesn't involve years of prison.

I think it literally is, which is why I think requiring it in order to graduate from high school or college is uncouth and unconstitutional (likewise, the draft).

I have no problem with it as a punishment for crime, although I do have concerns about the efficacy and efficiency of how it is administered. Does it make sense for someone with high-value skills to be cleaning toilets as community service?

Here are a few, though, for the curious:

Those who believe in the dissuasive value of death penalty are unaware of the human truth. The criminal passion is not the more stopped by the fear of death than other passions which are themselves noble.

— Robert Badinter, extrait d'un discours à l’Assemblée nationale - 17 Septembre 1981

So what is capital punishment but the most deliberate of murders, to which no infamy, however calculated, could be compared to?

— Albert Camus

Death penalty is an immoral punishment, or at the very least useless, because it make us used to the performance of torments, and because it repairs nothing; as, sadly, the death of the murderer does not give back life to the victim.

— François Eugène Vidocq.

What does Law says? Thou shalt not kill! How does she says it? By Killing!

— Victor Hugo, Les misérables

I looked into death penalty by both of its sides, direct action, indirect action. What remains of it? Only a horrible and useless thing, only a bloody assault called crime when the individual carries it, and called justice (oh pain!) when society perpetrates it. Know this, whoever you are, lawmakers or judges, to the eyes of God, to the eyes of conscience, what is crime for the individual is crime for society.

— Victor Hugo, discours devant l’Assemblée constituante, 1848

As long as death penalty exists, we will feel cold when stepping into a Court of Appeal, enshrouded in night.

— Victor Hugo

Death penalty is opposite to what mankind, since two thousand years, has thought of higher and dreams of more noble.

— Jean Jaurès

To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, not justice.

— Desmond Tutu

Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination because there it is invested with the approval of the society. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

— George Bernard Shaw

- Killing is bad

- Killing constitutes revenge

- Killing is unbecoming of society

- Killing is disturbing

Yes, they're from great thinkers, but on their own they don't constitute much of an argument, nor are they particularly elucidating.

The devils advocate might respond:

- pleasant dissuasion is oxymoronic

- what is justice without revenge?

- there's value in symbolism (a hornets nest of an argument, I willingly admit, but one that I think is nonetheless undervalued)

- the disturbing nature of killing has little to do with anything

- we recognize that lethal force is legitimate in self-defense, so clearly some intentional killing is acceptable. This is at odds with the sweeping condemnation of killing in the selected quotes.

- the comparison of capital punishment to murder is fallacious since the former is done with careful attention to impartiality (in principle, anyway)

- the state is founded on the monopoly of violence

I'm as French as you are, cher ami, but there are few things I cherish less about our country than our penchant for empty grandiloquence (exhibit A: Bernard Henri Levi). Appeal to authority does not a strong argument make; just because Victor Hugo said it doesn't make it true. It also pays to remember that many of the individuals you cite are reacting to a very different brand of capital punishment: the kind in which people were tortured in the public square.

To be clear, these intellecutals do have interesting things to say on the subject, but a handful of quotes does little to advance the debate. What we have here are just pretty words, I'm afraid.

Justice. Sentencing is here to take criminals away from the rest of society, in order to protect the latter rather than punish the former.

Obviously, but I could not translate a whole body of work on the spot, therefore I had to take shortcuts so as to give a few pointers for the interested audience. The whole process was a saga in and of itself, and Badinder's eloquent discourse on 17 sept 1981 goes more in depth, interestingly counterpointed by Maurice Barrès's one in 1908 in a paperback[0]. Again, the tip of the iceberg, but hey, we got to start somewhere before digging deeper.

[0] ISBN 978-2757815021, seems available on amazon.com for a couple of bucks, apparently also in English

But he is emblematic of the cultural trait in question, I think.

"For the rule of law, the death penalty represents a failure, as it obliges the state to kill in the name of justice. … Justice can never be wrought by killing a human being. … With the application of the death penalty, the convict is denied the possibility of to repent or make amends for the harm caused; the possibility of confession, by which a man expresses his inner conversion, and contrition, the gateway to atonement and expiation, to reach an encounter with God's merciful and healing justice. It is furthermore frequently used by totalitarian regimes and groups of fanatics for the extermination of political dissidents, minorities, and any subject labeled as 'dangerous' or who may be perceived as a threat to its power or to the achievement of its ends."

https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/pope-francis-death...

As it was shown even this weekend in St. Cloud

Society has a lot of self-contradictory situations like that. Hence why I think no value is absolute

Is that is indeed the definition, #1 and #3 are directly incompatible. This is the problem with using words like "hallowed" in philosophical debates. One person uses a word without defining it, and they intend it one way. Then the other party argues with their imperfect and improvised understanding of the word's definition, and no one gets anywhere. This is how we end up with six people debating whether or not "the good always matches the beautiful", and it's one of the reasons philosophy as a discipline has a bad reputation to outsiders.

If you dig deep enough, what will often happen is one or more parties will try to create an empirical definition and the other parties will just use circular definitions until it's clear they're not saying anything at all.

If "hallowed" doesn't mean "must always be preserved", I'm not sure it can mean anything of consequence to the debate. You could define it as "must be preserved unless there is a justifiable reason not to", but then you're not saying anything new. It's redundant.

If anything, war makes a much more challenging case for this view, unless you accept a position of total pacifism

If that is the definition we're working with, it precludes "justifiable" exceptions, because there are no exceptions allowed. You'd need to equate passively allowing someone to kill another life with actively killing to preserve a life, which is another entire debate before we can begin to take that as a premise.

If that is not the definition, then why should we bother saying something like "life is hallowed"? What could it mean that would have any consequence for, or add any further meaning to the debate? "Life is meaningful."? "Life is to be respected."?

This is the complexity inherent to engaging in dialectics, and in my opinion words like "hallowed" should simply be avoided unless they're rigorously defined by all parties.

If you are then going to argue that it doesn't actually deter then why not do away with all punishments for crimes?

Every study of it -- as practiced in the modern US, at least -- I've seen has shown that it has no or negligible additional deterrent effect, so I'd say that in fact it is not deterrence. Of the five classes of justification for criminal punishment, the modern death penality is obviously not reformative or expiatory (but then, punishment itself usually isn't expiatory, limitations and exceptions to punishment usually are), and empirically not deterrent. If you are going to make a case for it, you probably need to appeal to either retributive or preventive/incapacitory theories of justice.

There are several possibilities as to why capital punishment may not be or may not seem to be as effective today as it could be.

The first obvious one is that universities and most of media has been under control by the left for decades now, so everyone that might tell you death penalty is ineffective is more likely to follow an ideology that views these punishments as inhumane or have an incentive to do so. (Let's not kid ourselves, most people here that are against capital punishment do this because they view it as inhumane. If presented with two studies where one showed that is was ineffective and one that is was effective most of these people would choose to believe the first one - no matter what)

The other possibility is that we made changes to how we apply the death penalty that causes it to be less of a deterrence. For example it gets less and less likely for any criminal to be actually executed, and if that happens then often after decades of trials and retrials. Or how about the fact that we seem to be so much more concerned today about the cruelty and the supposed inhumane treatment of the criminal than about what the victims of said criminal had to go through?

There used to be a time when we hanged people publicly for everyone (including the criminals family) to see. Today we make criminals that are executed into martyrs against state cruelty (many even reach celebrity status) instead of displaying them as criminals that are likely to piss their pants in public before being hanged for their heinous crimes. This definitely has an effect on deterrence.

You're really going to have to justify and unpack this one. Especially as I'm not sure what details you're referring to.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/19/us/police-shoot-attacker-i...

I place human life above logical consistency in my arguments.

    > the article only devotes a single sentence to the
    > core of the argument, at the very beginning: the
    > author has come to believe that life is either
    > hallowed or not, and he prefers to believe that it is
    > always hallow, and killing always wrong

I can't explain to you any sort of moral basis for feeling life isn't hallowed, and isn't indeed particularly special, but I know I've felt this way for most of my life. Death often causes loss and suffering in those around the dying, and often in those who know they're about to die, but the dead are incapable of caring that they're dead, and everyone's going to die.

However: the death penalty seems simply ineffective in any of the goals it sets out to achieve, and so I don't support it.

How exactly do you reach this conclusion, I mean what underlying principle is this based on?

I ask this because the question that immediately comes to my mind is that if this principle were true (which I dispute) then it wouldn't matter at all whether the monetary cost was $100 or $100 trillion dollars per execution.

This is obviously not true, therefore the cost a society is willing to pay must be based on something else.

In my opinion it is based on a combination of factors like how much available resources does a society have, how great is the need to deter others from committing the same crime (some countries have such high crime rates that they are actually destabilised by it) and what exactly is the value of a human life to a society.

> If killing is always wrong

That is only a question for persons that live in societies where violent crime doesn't exist (utopia) or for those who wouldn't use lethal force to protect their own lives in face of a life threatening attack.

For all others this cannot be a question. Killing is justified in many cases and being able to defend one self is a useful skill everyone should aspire have.

The core argument I see being made -- not even mentioned in your list -- is the effective impossibility that the death penalty can ever be fairly enforced in our justice system (given that it doesn't just err occasionally; it errs frequently and systematically). Combined, of course, with the uniquely irreversible nature of the death penalty itself.

All the other arguments don't matter.

Others disagree.

If justice requires a life for a life,

An assumption which not only everyone shares, but which is on its face quite problematic.

Because if you take the arguments of pro-life advocates on good faith, that's what you're saying. You can't make your case against position by ignoring the underlying reasons people hold it.