We consider murderers the lowest of the low, therefore we stoop to the same level. That's the thinking?
In the US, the same people who think government should not have much power, are against taxes, think that abortion is a kind of murder and should be illegal, these people are nevertheless fine with government murdering citizens. I don't get it.
nice try though
if it’s really so unclear, to you, each sentence is about a different group comprising large swaths of Americas population.
That's some weapons grade bias.
It makes perfect sense if you realize that none of those things are rational positions; they're all opinions people arrived at for emotional reasons, while lacking information or the ability to process it.
What hurt them is the behavior. You really going to feel good about your brother senselessly murdering three people, because "at least he's alive".
The notion of standing behind loved ones, no matter what, is not universal.
So that's the explicit goal.
I wonder if they were really focusing on the family needing to be punished, vs. the murderer knowing what they've done to their family. In such a case, you could argue that it does not and should not hurt the family any more (or not much).
You don't have to stand by family, and can feel very little different about their receiving justice; perhaps a bit worse, since you don't know what else they could do before being laid to rest.
I thought this was getting dismissed too quickly, but I forgot how directly this was said. Yes, if you literally want to hurt their families, that's just insanity; lashing out at people who had nothing to do with it...
... although there's a really interesting argument that you're always doing this when you punish someone.
It's the intention that matters.
Punishments have several functions -- to work as deterrent, to keep society safe from the perpetrator, to change them so that they won't repeat their crime in the future, to compensate the victims if possible, and also pure retribution, to let people feel "they got what they deserved."
To me, that last one is the least important, and "tooth for a tooth" makes the punisher guilty of the same crime as the perpetrator.
When I said "punishment" I meant the purely revenge version. I was basically working from that assumption, and this is what we'd been previously discussing.
So, I was purely speaking from a harm perspective. The argument is that it makes no sense to try to harm anyone, for any action, no matter how evil.
Without "free will" this is a violent act of senseless aggression against the innocent. Interestingly, if it's an animal we think it probably doesn't have "free will", however we accept this as a reason IN FAVOR of disregarding their rights (eg. the killer bear doesn't think and feel like us, just shoot it).
With modern sensibilities, you shouldn't hurt people unless they do something under their own "free will"; but this is never true, if we don't have "free will" to begin with.
So if an animal kills we use their lack of free will as a reason to kill them, but if a person doesn't have free will, then that's a reason they should be spared; doesn't this just seem like we've created another spiritual concept, to shape based on our cultural values.
P.S. Even arguing the inverse case, it's tempting to use lack of free will as a justification for leniency; at the same time you'll be very quick to use some form of it as a reason in favor of the sanctity of life.
Some cultures actually did do retribution based executions, they where horrific and very different from lethal injection etc.
No, it would not. That's not the definition of retribution.
The argument was one for the proportionality of death for death, but death wasn’t the only harm. That’s an inherent contradiction in the argument being made. You can’t argue an unequal punishment balances the scales here.
That would surprise me!
But executions change all that. Whether or not a person supports capital punishment reveals if their morality is a flimsy thing of feelings and self-interest or a thing of principle. It is safe for someone to hate a heinous criminal and wish them ill. There's little fear of guilty feelings or reprisal. The average person will give in, baying for blood purely because they want to see the hated person suffer. A good person will refuse to hurt others no matter how badly they want to.
Capital punishment is a good litmus test. It reveals those who are murderers deep down inside.
Does this include or exclude killing in self defense? Would a good person allow themselves to be killed rather than harming the attacker? Imagine that the assailant would be rehabilitated after serving 10-15 years for your murder and live a productive life with family and kids, does that change the equation? Is absolutist pacifism the end goal or is there an arbitrary line you are willing to draw?
You could go further than that. You could kill someone for hurting an animal. You could kill someone for threatening arson. You could kill an entire army in wartime for no reason beyond wearing the wrong colors. In all of those cases the killing is justified by more than just bloodlust. I am not a pacifist.
Executions are different. People are not afraid to admit that they support executions because they like knowing that hated people will suffer. That is not something I will consider acceptable under any circumstances. If there were any evidence that capital punishment served a purpose beyond feeling good I would change my tune. But there isn't, so I won't.
We should not torture them on purpose but besides that I do not particularly care if they suffer or not during execution.
As bad as that may be, it isn't a sign of violent intentions.
There are a lot of people who aren't shy about supporting the death penalty simply because they want suffering and death. There are others who don't care what's happening in the world, give in to peer pressure, or honestly believe executions have practical value. Those aren't the same problem as simply cruelty.
How are family members guilty by association? Did they even chose to be somebody's brother, daughter, etc?
The pact the government has with people is that the government metes out justice so that people don't try to get it themselves. Some measure of retribution, it doesn't need to be the death penalty, works towards this goal. If people believe the courts will punish a criminal they are less likely to do it themselves, it reduces the risk of vigilante justice. That's a good thing because vigilantes are less discerning about getting the right person and considering extenuating evidence. It's a compromise.
Imagine the government found a way to cure psychopathy with a pill. They catch a serial killer who brutally murdered dozens of people, utterly rehabilitate him with their pill and release him the same day. This might satisfy you and some of the other wise and enlightened commenters in this thread, but many people would not be satisfied with it and people would be more inclined to kill murderers in retribution, since the government no longer punishes them.
That's a bold claim. I know people who didn't do illegal stuff because they didn't want repercussion that comes with it. So it is a deterrent.
Or it's a form of societal self-defence: there are some folks that will continue to be a menace to society, whether they'll do murder or other bad things, and society wants to eliminate the risk/threat.
If someone comes at you with a knife or gun, you have a right to protect yourself, potentially up to the point of killing the attacker. If someone comes at a group of people (e.g., at a temple, mosque, church), they have a right to protect yourself, potentially up to the point of killing the attacker.
If someone keeps coming at member of society, society has a right to protect itself.
In modern times, with modern prisons, it is much easier to keep these people isolated from society at large, and so the need for the mechanism has been diminished, but the principle is still there.
Sure, the author wrote why they believe what they do. That's not itself evidence that they are right in their beliefs.
I don't understand why this "must" be the way things are done; it seems way more of a stretch to argue this than to say that if the family of the murderer is innocent, choosing a punishment specifically based on wanting to make them suffer seems pretty messed up. I don't think claiming that innocent people who happen to be related to criminals should be forced to suffer is a universal premise; if you're going to claim it, you're going to need to back it up with an argument about why that's somehow more reasonable than "we shouldn't go out of our way specifically to punish innocent people".
> If we are going to shy away from punishing wrong-doers on the basis that the punishment won’t stop other people from committing the same offence then we might as well not send anyone to jail because sending people to jail has never stopped other people from committing the same offences.
If your goal is a 1:1 justice system where the guilty party suffers the exact same punishment that their victim suffered through their crime, doesn't that also imply that imprisonment should basically only ever be used as a punishment for kidnapping/holding people hostage? Do you punish a drug dealer by forcing them to buy drugs from the victim, or a fraud doctor to get care only from people without medical degrees? It's virtually impossible to try to define punishments like this in general, so I don't find it compelling that it's somehow the obvious way to punish murder.
To quote a post I recently found resonating with me:
"Look, we don’t necessarily hang murderers to deter other people from committing the same offence. We kill them simply because the punishment has to carry the same weight as the offence. The family of the murderer must go through the same anguish and pain that the murder victim’s family went through. The killer has to be stopped from enjoying all the things that come with being alive. When you kill another person, you deprive them of worldly enjoyments like food, sex, conversations, bathing, laughing, crying and therefore it is only befitting that you too get deprived of same and the only way to do so is through the death sentence. If we are going to shy away from punishing wrong-doers on the basis that the punishment won’t stop other people from committing the same offence then we might as well not send anyone to jail because sending people to jail has never stopped other people from committing the same offences."
https://www.sundaystandard.info/iocom-a-retributionist-i-sup...