And honestly if your answer to this is yes, you’re in need of deep help.

This is silly. It’s fine to disagree, but millions (billions?) of healthy, morally ordinary people support the death penalty.

They might of course be wrong, in some sense, but they don’t “need help,” for crying out loud.

Yes. They do. If you support the death penalty then you’re probably in need of therapy to figure out some deep traumas.

You ever heard the proverb "revenge is a dish best served cold"?

I'm sure you'll get a few cheap virtue points for your rhetoric but the reality of the society we live in seems to contradict your opinion.

And for the record (which is really just a fancy way of saying "if I don't say this some jerk will come along and imply otherwise) I am against the death penalty because I think the risk of executing an innocent person is too great.

> Yeah it would definitely be less acute, still there every day, but less acute. Like most trauma.

I hope you realize you are co-opting someone's pain for your own political or ethical brownie points. A lot of people are completely happy watching their child's murderer/rapist be punished via the death penalty.

You're just trivializing an incredibly complex moral conundrum.

You're just "trivializing an incredibly complex moral conundrum" -- by stating someone is "co-opting someone's pain for your own political or ethical brownie points" for having an opposing view point on " an incredibly complex moral conundrum."

Given the rest of what you have written in this thread, your idea of justice comes off as being based in a punitive approach, and it shouldn't be surprising not everyone agrees with that.

I get the feeling you're projecting a bit? "co-opting someone's pain" means using someone's (inferred) pain to justify something you believe in.

Are you seriously arguing that the pain of someone's child being raped & murdered is inferred? Talk about the onus being on you to prove that. Your argument form is something like "if I chop your arm off, your pain is inferred" -- like, uh, guy, we all know it would hurt, it's not inferred.

Didn't you start this whole argument by doing just that and trying to coopt the pain of a victims family to try and prove a argumentive point?

How is it different when you did it?

Nope, because the default, prima facia, position is that killing people is bad and causes pain and requires some kind of response. That's why arguing against the death penalty is actually quite hard. Especially when faced with incontrovertible evidence (video/confessions/etc.).

Life in prison isn't a response?

Re: the edit, calling confessions "incontrovertible" is... unsupported. https://www.law.northwestern.edu/legalclinic/wrongfulconvict...

> Life in prison isn't a response?

It is. Some people argue that it's actually a more harsh punishment than death, though. A lot of rich literature here.

> calling confessions "incontrovertible"

You're missing the forest for the trees, my point was "assuming guilt by default... blah blah." I know confessions aren't technically always reliable.

> killing people is bad

> arguing against the death penalty is actually quite hard

Almost in the same sentence too

You do realize there's a difference between the state killing as a punishment and an individual killing for sport, right? These are two different categories. To wit, it's obvious I was referring to the latter.

There's actually more categories as well: killing in a war as a combatant, euthanasia, abortion, and so on.

>and an individual killing for sport,

What about individuals killing as a punishment? That's a lot more common than organized recreational killings.

False confessions are a lot more common than you seem to think; a confession is hardly "incontrovertible". Confessions aren't an exception either, many forms of evidence are less reliable than many think or wish.

You didn't actually answer my question. You started by co-opting someones pain for your argument, asked us to put ourselves in their position and then told us we were wrong for doing exactly what you asked and did.

And if your default argument is that killing people is wrong then how is the state executing someone better and in favor of the death penalty? Your arguments make no sense.