Capital Punishment

I will be supporting the resolution, that, theoretically, the death penalty is morally permissible for the mentally competent. In this round, I will offer some framework analysis in the form of an observation, and then I'll launch into the meat of my case. OBSERVATION: According to Prof. Deni Elliott, "A moral system differentiates among behaviors that are morally prohibited, those that are morally permitted, those that are morally required, and those that are morally encouraged. .. . Permitted [means] behavior that is within the bounds of the moral system. " Extrapolating from this, it is not my duty to prove that the death penalty is something that should necessarily be encouraged or required; rather, it is my goal only to illustrate that the death penalty can be permitted, or allowed, without being a grave affront to morality. PRO's CASE I will divide my case into three distinct parts: (1) Death as a due, (2) Death and Proportionality, and (3) my Conclusions. I. Death as a due Let us imagine the following scenario: a girl has put in hours of dedication into crafting a truly amazing experiment for her science fair. Her hours of effort pay off, and when the judges come to evaluate, they realize it is the best project present at the fair. As a result of their realization and her efforts, she is awarded first prize. We can gather from this hypothetical situation that one is due the results of one's actions; in this case, the girl is owed her prize. In other words, the prize is her right, her due. If there is no logical inconsistency with this extrapolation, then a criminal's punishment is something owed to him. G. W. F. Hegel once observed that ""in punishment the offender is honored as a rational being, since the punishment is looked on as his right. "" If a criminal chooses to rob a bank and kill 12 people in the process, then that criminal is owed punishment as a result of his choices and actions, just as the girl was owed the prize. To withhold punishment from the criminal would be to assert that his choices did not have value, and would be to, therefore, infringe upon the criminal's moral agency. Insofar as a criminal perpetrates an offense, he simultaneously accepts the consequences of his actions, which become his due. To deny him the penalty would be to demean his power of choice and treat him in an inhuman or subhuman fashion. In other words, "[f]ailure to punish can be seen as an unacceptable form of paternalism where individuals are viewed as morally deficient and lacking an understanding of what they did" (Ward and Salmon 239). Thus, capital punishment actually affirms the human dignity of criminals by respecting their autonomous power to make choices and by affording them their due. II. Death as Proportional Point one has established that criminals deserve penalty, but that alone does not suggest what particular penalty should be administered. I contend that to answer this secondary question, we must examine the notion of proportionality. I will do this by asking two questions: (A) How can we employ proportionality in decision-making, and (B) What is the most severe penalty that can be brought to bear. A) What is Proportionality, how does it relate to justice, and how should it be used in determining punishments? Firstly, Justice requires dispensing a person his due, a desert commensurate with one's actions and choices. For example, if a child were to weed a garden for an afternoon, he may be entitled to a few hours of play but certainly would not be entitled to two months off from chores. By the same token, it would be miserly to only afford the child one minute of play for his afternoon of toil. A sense of proportionality inheres in the notion of what is due. Hence, if one chooses to commit a crime, the results of which are one's due, those results should not be grossly disproportionate to the crime one chooses to commit. This is the essential premise of proportionality. Many understand the notion of proportionality to mean Lex Talionis, the notion that the correct punishment for a crime is the turning the offense back upon the offender; but, this interpretation is neither correct nor wise. Few would support the belief that "the state ought generally to be in the business of perpetrating the horrors on offenders that match in kind the horrors that they perpetrated on their innocent victims. No one in today's academy believes that the state ought to satisfy the demands of retributivism by torturing the torturer, raping the rapist, or flashing the flasher. And what would it even mean to be treasonous to the traitor? " (Hurd 405). It is therefore appropriate to abandon Lex Talionis; yet, this rejection does not harken the end of proportionality altogether. To say that proportionality "cannot give us a certain answer in every case doesn't mean we can say that proportionality is unable to give answers. In fact, once we fix a punishment for one crime, we can go on from that: is the next crime better or worse than the crime we have a fixed punishment for? " (Flanders 87). In this way, punishment is assessed in degrees. This means that, from this scalar perspective, the worst criminals are due the worst punishments, and vice-versa. B) What is the most severe penalty? Now that we have established that the worst crimes should entail the worst penalties, all that is left is to determine what that most severe penalty actually is. Death seems to be the most severe punishment--it is an obliteration that no other punishment can rival. Additionally, "[l]ife imprisonment is not adequate because it makes the criminal a dependent of the community, a ward of the community he sought to undermine" (Perlmutter 144). It seems inappropriate to permit such criminals to continue to draw benefit from the community they sought to destroy. There is also a risk of escape inherent in detaining any prisoner. Therefore, by depriving them of not only their life, but also of any hope of freedom, death is the worst penalty possible to levy. Consequently, if the worst penalty should be applied in response to the worst crimes, then, as the worst penalty, death must be permitted in response to those worst crimes. But there is a further argument to be made about why death is actually the worst punishment. Don Marquis argues, to some extent correctly, that "The wrong of killing is not primarily explained in terms of the loss to the family and friends of the victim. Perhaps the victim is a hermit. Perhaps one's friends find it easy to make new friends. The wrong of killing is not primarily explained in terms of the brutalization of the killer. The great wrong to the victim explains the brutalization, not the other way around. The wrongness of killing us is understood in terms of what killing does to us. Killing imposes upon us the misfortune of premature death. " What follows then, is that the death penalty inflicts upon us a loss of future, something that life imprisonment cannot. Inmates often find ways to live in comfort while in prison, or find means of amusing themselves through some pastime or another. Therefore, death is more severe than life in prison because prison deprives you of freedom, death deprives you of everything, especially your future. III. Conclusion If we hold that a criminal should be held responsible for the choices he makes, so long as those consequences are not grossly out of proportion with his choices, then we hold that punishment is justifiable. If one further holds that the severity of the punishment should run along a scale roughly matching the severity of the crimes, then one holds that the most severe crimes should entail the most severe sanctions. Finally, if one holds that some crimes are so heinous and despicable--such embodiments of moral turpitude--that life imprisonment is insufficient penalty, then one must also hold that the death penalty is not only warranted, but it is the criminal's due. They have, in effect, chosen death by their actions. We can sum up my train of thought so far thusly: If criminals are due punishment And, if the worst criminals are due the worst punishments And, death is the worst punishment Then, the worst criminals are due death Thus, I affirm that the death penalty is morally permissible. SOURCES: 1. Flanders, Chad. "Retribution and Reform. " February 2010. bepress. com. Digital File. 16 September 2013. . 2. Hurd, Heidi. "Expressing Doubts About Expressivism. " University of Chicago Legal Forum (2005): 405. Document. 3. Perlmutter, Martin. "Desert and Capital Punishment. " Arthur, John and Steven Scalet. Morality and Moral Controversies: Readings in Moral, Social, and Political Philosophy. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall, 1981. 139-146. 4. Ward, Tony and Katherine Salmon. "The Ethics of Punishment: Correctional Practice Implications. " Aggression and Violent Behavior (2009): 239-247. Digital File. I turn it over to Con. I look forward to a great debate.