Here’s why the ‘death penalty’ is not what you may think it is.
There’s an interesting dialectic between notions of justice and the realities of common good. From the justice perspective, a criminal is likely to face the death penalty if it can be shown that they planned, committed homicide, and then attempted evasion, all in sound mind. Whereas, if the criminal was not of sound mind, lacked the ability to understand consequence, and this condition is permanent, then sentencing is likely to be quite lax. Unfortunately, the likelihood of recidivism is the opposite of what compassion drives us to believe.
In animal shelters, this is well-understood. The goal is always safety and reform, never punishment. An animal of sound mind is reformable. Rarely, an animal has been drugged, diseased, or abused beyond hope of sanity, and must be destroyed. A human criminal in such a condition would be likely to receive clemency. Occasionally, I have known people to destroy their own dog out of a sense of justice for non-threatening bites such as on the hand when receiving food. I personally regard these people as absolutely horrendous, and they’ll never understand why. They think they are executing justice, like some form of discipline, and I really wonder who they are trying to teach.
Likewise, I believe that we, as a society, are massively deluded about the idea of justice. Everything today is about ‘justice’: social, economic, criminal. Just because it makes you feel good, doesn’t mean that it does you or anybody else any good. I am not saying that we should be lenient or rule out all use of necessary lethal force in peacekeeping, but it seems that the moral reasoning that leads to any act of unthreatened aggression ought to be questioned.
tl;dr: The ‘death penalty’ is bullshit precisely because it doesn’t function at all as a penalty. A penalty is a device for behavior modification. I don’t know exactly what ‘justice’ is either, but all I see is chaos and violence from people demanding it.
There’s an interesting dialectic between notions of justice and the realities of common good. From the justice perspective, a criminal is likely to face the death penalty if it can be shown that they planned, committed homicide, and then attempted evasion, all in sound mind. Whereas, if the criminal was not of sound mind, lacked the ability to understand consequence, and this condition is permanent, then sentencing is likely to be quite lax. Unfortunately, the likelihood of recidivism is the opposite of what compassion drives us to believe.
In animal shelters, this is well-understood. The goal is always safety and reform, never punishment. An animal of sound mind is reformable. Rarely, an animal has been drugged, diseased, or abused beyond hope of sanity, and must be destroyed. A human criminal in such a condition would be likely to receive clemency. Occasionally, I have known people to destroy their own dog out of a sense of justice for non-threatening bites such as on the hand when receiving food. I personally regard these people as absolutely horrendous, and they’ll never understand why. They think they are executing justice, like some form of discipline, and I really wonder who they are trying to teach.
Likewise, I believe that we, as a society, are massively deluded about the idea of justice. Everything today is about ‘justice’: social, economic, criminal. Just because it makes you feel good, doesn’t mean that it does you or anybody else any good. I am not saying that we should be lenient or rule out all use of necessary lethal force in peacekeeping, but it seems that the moral reasoning that leads to any act of unthreatened aggression ought to be questioned.
tl;dr: The ‘death penalty’ is bullshit precisely because it doesn’t function at all as a penalty. A penalty is a device for behavior modification. I don’t know exactly what ‘justice’ is either, but all I see is chaos and violence from people demanding it.