Death Penalty

I too have enjoyed these killer arguments, and hope to end them well by exploring how murder and utopia are not so mutually exclusive as you think them to be. In regarding a place of perfection, the following question should always be: perfect for whom? Traditionally, we might think of Heaven: perfect for the Christians. Yet, what is the antithesis to this Utopian society? An eternal death penalty in the fires of Hell. Those condemned by God instead of receiving eternal life are subject to its opposite. Heaven allows for the eternal murder of all those who do not believe in Christ as their saviour. Unless you exempt God from murder because God is God (which I find entirely unconvincing). What other utopias are there? Plato’s state, which condones infanticide for defective babies? Or how about Huxley’s Brave New World? In all the utopias man has dreamt up, murder has been integral to them; I can’t conceive of a realistic state on earth either which this has not been the case. If I'm wrong put one in the comments section. You mention Bentham’s act utilitarianism as a defence against murder. I see where you come from providing that you localise the pain and pleasure produced by the death penalty to those emotionally involved. But, using this example again, Bin Laden’s death probably brought more pleasure than it did pain to the wider global community. Isn't murder permitted in utilitarian morality? It is a highly relativist theory. For Bentham, any moral action is permitted providing it abides by the pleasure principle: that it maximises pleasure for the greatest number of people. This has often been criticised as ignoring minority rights. It permits the murder of the individual if the greatest happiness is produced. This reminds me of the Hitler Paradox: would you go back in time to kill Hitler and thus prevent WW2? Thinking of the immeasurable pain and loss of WW2, I think the act utilitarian would be forced to yes. This is our attempt to give the death penalty to Hitler: we judge his actions so awful as to vindicate his death and then by time travel argue that it's okay to kill him. As for your second attack against murder, what makes you believe that your life is your own? This is a common assumption, born from religious and then Enlightenment values. Unless you believe in a soul (which cannot be scientifically certified) what part of yourself exactly do you own that the state does not give you? Your genetics: from your parents, sustained by the state. Your body: developed by the social structures of society providing you nourishment in exchange for your labour and/or money. Your ideas and identity: not original, but born of the information and experiences built up around and prior to you. As Hume says, think of an idea which doesn’t come from experience. Your consciousness (in my view, though only an inference) arises from the material reality of your brain. This material reality is caused from the world around you. If anything, murder robs the state of one of its resources. Your rights are only given to you through your existence in the world; you as an individual don’t have them without the world. Therefore, the state which sustains you surely also has the right to extinguish you if you go against it (as the Hitler Paradox seeks to eradicate Hitler's life because his actions went so vehemently against our moral values). Personally, I have done a lot of work on solitary confinement within the field on phenomenology (hence I brought it up) particularly focusing on Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. It is relevant to the death penalty debate because those convicted of very serious crimes are often faced with this dichotomy exactly: solitary confinement or death. And whilst death might be irrevocable, a premature burial in solitary confinement I think can be a much more torturous and grotesque practice (especially if the crime is so egregious as to never permit the guilty convict’s release). I’m not a fatalist; just because society is ordered in a certain way, doesn’t mean that it will be always. My point about the costs being a part of a social process was to attribute responsibility to our social order away from the actual deontological act of capital punishment itself. We can always eliminate social practices by resisting them and raising social awareness over prolonged periods of time (evident, up to an extent, with racism and sexism in the USA). ‘As a society, I don’t think we are capable of living with this burden’: that ‘we will continue to accidentally murder innocents’. I don’t know, we’ve been doing a pretty good job of it for the past... entire history of our civilisation. Our western society is built upon blood, whether slave or colonialist, or produced in some sort of warfare. Even today there is high collateral damage in the countries we are militarily involved in. I don’t think we should tolerate this, we should seek to eliminate it, but to say that we ever will in its entirety is again highly idealistic. And, in the meantime, we can certainly live with the burden. Hell, Henry Kissinger is still alive and kicking after the realpolitik slaughters of the Vietnamese in the Vietnam War. I did think that finding someone in the act would be proof enough for the death penalty in the USA. I concede to your point that we can never be sure whether a condemned individual is truly guilty or even whether anyone can be blamed for their crimes (an entirely different question). Again, to reiterate, I’m not actually in support of the death penalty. But, I think to really argue for it, you need to have a strong argument for why murder is wrong (which I suggest you to try and develop—it’s a pretty tough one). Your argument fundamentally relies upon it and it is an assumption. I think in our society, a case can be made for it being practically destructive and damaging but this doesn’t make it wrong always, absolutely. But, nevertheless, I think your arguments could be used in exam papers and general conversation and be accepted; they just need to fill in any background assumptions to develop philosophically. Pleasure debating with you.