Capital Punishment.

Greetings,I will respond to each of your points and then restate my argument.Response1) You claim to not have confused arguments in your opening statement. However, in your original Kantian paragraph, you suggest grave negative consequences of not using the death penalty."The world would be in such chaos, given the sinister would know that they can achieve their ends through devious means and still get away with it"This seems to be the major thrust of your Kantian argument. The problem is that Kant was strongly against this kind of argumentation. He believed the consequences of an action were morally irrelevant. All that mattered was the action's conformity to reason (1). You are misrepresenting what Kant would argue and such, your conclusions in your 1st paragraph based on his expertise are suspect.2) You claim I did not provide statistical data. In my original statement, I cited a criminology study that was based on data (2). It concluded there is little evidence to support deterrence from the death penalty. 3) You make the claim that we can never know whether the death penalty is effective. "The fact is, neither you nor I have the capability to entertain ourselves with such data, as the matter is solely subjective."This is an argument from ignorance and is simply not true. Many social scientists have studied the issue - i.e., the study I cited (2).4) You take issue with the fact that I state my premises as "beliefs". I will defend this approach in the next section. However, you use identical phrasings in the same round when you state," I highly believe that criminals should fear Justice. If it was said that any given suspect would get away with murder, then perhaps the prize beats the punishment, then why not? I also believe that giving criminals such sharp advantage would be a sense of naive self."It seems inconsistent for you to dismiss my beliefs as irrelevant and invoke your own in the same breath.5) You take issues with me using moral intuitions in the deontological section of my argument. Here I use my own beliefs and intuitions to suggest what duties might come into play and which take priority. You feel that I should provide evidence. The use of moral intuitions has been used before by deontologists such as W.D. Ross (3) to argue about morality though we have an obligation to check our intuitions against others. Again asking for empirical evidence in the context of my deontological argument is problematic. Deontologists do not justify moral rules using evidence. This is what consequentialists do. You may have a problem with deontology but then you also invoked Kant as half of your original argument. You even seem to abandon Kant totally in your closing argument. "You might argue that it is inhumane to kill a self, and by doing so we bring ourselves to the criminal's level. Again I would like to remind you that any action that grinds in favor of the society should be accepted as a moral deed."(6) You failed to answer any of my consequentialist arguments. I will restate them. The death penalty is costly, sometimes kills innocent people, and has little evidence of being a better deterrent than life imprisonment. Given you have not attempted to refute them, I take it you concede them as true.ClosureThe death penalty is immoral from both a consequentialist and a deontological to morality.From a consequentialist approach, the death penalty destroys a life, offers little deterrence in return, sometimes is inflicted on the innocent, and can be very costly. From a deontological approach, the duty to not kill runs counter to the duty to make amends and I argue that the sanctity of life is a more important duty (as we intuit it) than the obligation to punish. (1) http://en.wikipedia.org...(2) http://link.springer.com...(3) http://en.wikipedia.org...