Re: What do you think about death penalty?
In the late 1880s John Stewart Mill made an arguement very similar to that Nocturnus presented earlier.
The basic human good he said was freedom, removing someone's freedom permanently by condemning them to life in prison was far worse than anything a person might have done, therefore he was completely in favour of the death penalty in cases when a criminal was so at risk of destroying the freedom of others that that criminal could not ever be released.
I generally agree with mill accept for one tiny little problem, namely that the sort of people I've always seen who are in favour of the death penalty and want to utilise it for a given sentence, are the last sort of people I would want to see with that level of power over someone else, especially when they start on about "retribution" and "paying for crimes" and such, motives which murderers frequently use to justify their own activities, ie entirely personal, emotive ones rather than the sort of rational concerns we'd hope that a public servant making an impartial decision would use.
So, while I'm in favour of the death penalty in theory, in practice my reservations about the sort of people who would administer it, especially in the current climate always tend to make me argue against whenever this debate comes up, heck given the current mess that the prison system is in at the moment in the Uk, I'm not really sure we should be condemning people to life in prison either. Heck I'm not exactly sure at the moment if people really know the moral and theoretical reason why! we're sending criminals to prison, and the rates of reoffending after prisons sentences speak for themselves.
So, until firstly, we can decide what actually we're sending people to prison for, whether as rehabilitation, whether as deterrent, whether as retributive punishment, or whether as a way to actually try and straighten people out.
And secondly, we can actually find a way of recruiting people to judicial positions whose basis for making decisions about any given criminals sentencing is based on some sort of rationale that makes sense, I'd suggest leaving the hole debate of the death penalty alone, since if you can't work out exactly what is the best way of dealing with a petty vandal, how can you expect to have a justice system which deals with a murderer, rapist, terrorist etc.
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