Our attitude to the death penalty should be based on the moral position that to end a human life is an evil act which is can only be justified by the need to avoid a greater evil. If someone is attempting to rob me I would be justified in using non-lethal force to prevent the robbery. Only if he was trying to kill me (or someone else) would I be justified in using lethal force.

By extension, capital punishment as a public policy would be justified only if it can be shown to act as a deterrent to further murders. This question can only be decided by comparing the murder rates of societies which have capital punishment with those which do not. The result of international comparisons show that capital punishment does not do this. There is no consistent difference in murder rates between societies in this respect. Therefore capital punishment does not lower the murder rate. Therefore it is not justified.

Another relevant consideration is that no legal system is foolproof. Every jurisdiction has had to free criminals who have been falsely imprisoned, including some who had been imprisoned for murder. Capital punishment, of course, removes the possibility of restoring freedom to victims of injustice.

Peter

I think Peter's last point is the crux of the death penalty problem.

Let's say for the sake of argument (though all of this merits debate in itself) that SOME people deserve to die for their crimes, and that society will be safer in SOME cases by executing selected convicts.

The problem still remains that capital punishment fails from both utilitarian and deontologic points of view. In the former case, the problem is that innocent people WILL be sentenced to death and possibly executed; and in the latter case one CANNOT design a system that can decide with 100% certainty who is guilty or innocent, let alone who among the guilty deserve to die.

As odd as this may seem, my stance on the death penalty is lifted straight from "The Lord of the Rings". When asked whether or not Gollum should be killed, his various crimes being presented as evidence of the utility of his death, Gandalf respons no, arguing "Not even the wise can see all ends." The point is not, 'no, he might be useful later', the point is 'no, for how could any of us claim to know enough to know with certainty that his death is preferable to his life?'

We can discuss ideal situations, 'if we know he is guilty', but pragmatic concerns cannot be ignored. Can we risk a human life on probability? I don't think so.

Aedes, I'm with you in opposing the death penalty but (though it might be splitting hairs), I cannot agree that the inevitable imperfections of the justice system is the crucial factor. It is merely an important one.

If, as a thought experiment, we imagine a judicial system which is 100% foolproof, we would still be in the position that the presence or absence of capital punishment does not correlate across jurisdictions with the prevalence of murders. We therefore have no grounds for saying that capital punishment does anything to lower the murder rate. In this situation society would not be justified in implementing this policy.

The fallibility of the justice system is an objection based on practicality. The evidence that capital punishment does nothing to lower the murder rate is an objection on principle.

Peter

I think it's crucial because death cannot be rectified. At least life imprisonment can be truncated, criminal records expunged, etc. But a system should not be allowed the latitude to execute innocent people.


Yes, I think the death penalty fails on these grounds as well (the utilitarian argument). But it also fails from the moral perspective because of the possibility of killing someone innocent. It doesn't really have an ethical recourse.


Uh, I think you have it backwards here. Evidence for or against lowering a murder rate is empirical -- there is no principle that will predict whether or not the murder rate goes up or down. You need historical controls, and risk/benefit or cost/benefit analyses. Hardly principled.

As for the fallability of the justice system, all you have to do is show that one innocent person has been condemned to death (even if they were never executed) and you'll have proved that this is a system that can kill innocent people. That seems like a pretty terrible violation of basic human expectations for their government.

Hello Aedes. There is something metaphysical about this debate since we are agreed in opposing capital punishment and are merely engaged in weighing up the respective merits of two arguments against it, both of which are perfectly sound.

My contention is that the absence of a deterrent effect associated with the death penalty is a more fundamental objection since it applies to the policy of capital punishment per se, rather than merely to its misapplication in the form of miscarriages of justice.

The advocates of capital punishment would love to argue, "Ok, executing people is morally undesirable but at least it cuts down the number of murders, so it is the lesser evil." They would love to argue this way but cannot convincingly do so because the evidence points at best to a very weak connection between use of the death penalty and the prevalence of murder. Interestingly, in the subset of world data which is represented by the USA there is a noticeable relationship between homicide rates and the death penalty: non-capital punishment states have a lower average murder rate than states that use capital punishment, and the gap is increasing yearly. (See Death Penalty Information Center )

With evidence like this it is clear that no benefit accrues to society from executing criminals. Therefore every judicial execution is a morally unjustified killing. This objection applies intrinsically to every use of the death penalty, not just to the minority of cases in which a miscarriage of justice occurs; though, of course, the occurence of miscarriages is a perfectly repectable argument against capital punishment.

You seem to dismiss the data on the lack of a deterrent effect from the death penalty rather lightly as being merely empirical. Well, all our knowledge about what goes on in the world is empirical. Every scientific law, as you know, is a generalisation based on observed data. I am quite happy for arguments about the effectiveness of capital punishment to rest on empirical data. In fact it is difficult to think of any other basis on which this point could be settled.

Peter

Hey Peter,
I certainly agree with your arguments, and to be sure I'm not much of a deontologist. But I do feel that the potential arbitrariness of the death penalty is a huge violation of a basic human principle -- and I haven't even gotten into the immense racial disparities in death sentencing, which is another huge violation unto itself.


A miscarriage of justice that results in killing an innocent person is a lot less abstract and a lot easier to measure than the sociological and psychological deterrent effects of capital punishment on potential murderers. Maybe capital punishment has a HUGE effect on deterring murder -- but the murder rate doesn't change, because instead of people afraid of death committing the crimes, you have a rise in murders by people who obsess about death. In other words, you might be replacing one subpopulation of murderers with another, which would be a huge effect of the death penalty but a minimal effect on actual number of crimes.

Point being, I don't think a deterrent effect is measurable given the number of variables. It's used rhetorically, but I don't think that the issue boils down to something that we simply cannot have good information for.


But no one knows why. Non-capital punishment states are probably sociopolitically and demographically different, have different firearms laws, and this correlation isn't causal -- it may well be that states with capital punishment have higher murder rates, but it may also be that a state is more likely to approve the death penalty in response to a higher murder rate.


I think there is no benefit -- but I don't think that it's demonstrable through this evidence. And not all states with (or without) the death penalty are the same as one another -- Connecticut and Texas both have the death penalty, but CT goes years without executing anyone.


The miscarriage of justice I describe is not simply the single instance of executing someone innocent. It's the probability (or at least possibility) that ANYONE and EVERYONE who is executed is innocent.

Furthermore, there is the question of who deserves to die? and is our justice system capable of deciding that fairly? Why do blacks receive the death penalty far more often for the same crime? Is it because the justice system thinks that a black murderer is more deserving of death than a white murderer?


I'm not dismissing it as being empirical. I'm saying that basing an argument on empirical data is a consequentialist argument, not a deontologic (i.e. first princilpe) argument.

Because one can easily imagine an alternative scenario in which murders ARE deterred by the death penalty and demonstrated empirically as such. By your argument, the death penalty would therein be justified. My argument is that even in this scenario the death penalty would not be ethically justifiable.

Thanks for these interesting thoughts, Aedes.

It is certainly true that my moral thinking is heavily imbued with consequentialism. I do not believe, however, that it is the whole story. When pushed to justify a moral position you eventually have to come to a basic moral principle such as the value of human life or human happiness, on which you take a stand as a core value or basic principle.

As soon as you get down to the business of evaluating any policy or action in practice, however, it is difficult to avoid the utilitarian perspective. All this means is that to evaluate the moral worth of an action you must take account of all the likely effects of that action. For this purpose the Nineteenth Century utilitarians proposed the use of 'moral arithmetic', literally counting up the good and bad effects to find which makes the greater number. This is over-simplistic. For one thing, it assumes that all the effects are of equal value, which is often not the case. Nevertheless, the principle of taking account of the effect of actions is a sound one. Merely having an impulse to promote human happiness is not good enough. The effects of our actions need to monitored to check if each of them really does promote the moral goal in practice. This is the version of consequentialism which I espouse.

Retuning to the question of capital punishment and deterrence, of course it is true that a myriad of social, economic and legal factors are at work in determining the murder rate in different societies and states. And of course the links we can observe are correlational not causal. (If you reread my last posting you will see that I only claimed correlation.) My point is that nowhere in this flux of untraceable influences is there the slightest hint that capital punishment is a lever which governments can pull to effect a reduction in the murder rate - a claim which would need to be substatiated beyond doubt if the proponents' favourite argument (deterrence) were to be confirmed.

I find that in practice most statements in favour of capital punishment are based on mere prejudice, primitive feelings (such as revenge) or shallow reasoning. When pressed to provide a coherent justification, proponents usually fall back on the deterrence argument, not realising what flimsy ground they are treading on.

I don't think it is true that if the correlational argument against deterrence were to disappear I would be forced to accept capital punishment. If we consider a counterfactual world in which the death penalty could be relied upon to reduce the murder rate, then a rigid application of utilitarian moral arithmetic may indeed require acceptance - if it could be shown that the murder rate would be reduced by one more than the number of persons executed! But things are more complex than this. In this situation other undesirable consequences of capital punishment would still obtain, such as the inevitability of miscarriages of justice and discrimination on grounds of race and social class.

You will see that in the version of consequentialism which I employ, there is no conflict between the core moral value and the process of utilitarian reasoning. The latter is merely the careful working out of how the core value can be implemented in practice.

Peter

It would be relevant to this thread to mention a documentary which was shown on BBC2-TV in Britain on Tuesday of this week. Michael Portillo set out to investigate not the morality of the policy of capital punishment but the question of which of the established methods of execution comes closest to delivering a painless death.

The general finding was that none of them can be relied upon. I hadn't realised that the electric chair is prone to producing actual flames at one or more of the contact points, with the possibility of molten fat running down the skin. Lethal injection emerged as being theoretically the most humane method but as being particularly prone to maladministration with disastrous results. The best of a bad lot seemed to be a table relating weight to drop heights which was used for hangings in Britain after the 1880s (with lighter people requiring a longer drop). Experiments have been done using this table with dummies specially constructed to replicate human characteristics. Most of the time the procedure produces an instant death but it cannot be relied upon because individual physiology is variable. Incidentally, if the drop height is extended by as little as two feet beyond the heights prescribed in the table, the result is decapitation.

Portillo then turned his attention to a group of scientists who are used to producing painless deaths - those who prepare animals for experiments. It turns out that a simple method of painless extinction is anoxia. The air we breathe is approximately 80% nitrogen and 20% oxygen (and very little else). If the oxygen component is removed so that the subject is breathing pure nitrogen, the result is a few seconds of euphoria followed by unconciousness after about 15 seconds, followed by death in about two minutes. (These findings refer to experimental pigs; it is expected that the results for humans would be similar.)

Peter

I'm a physician and if I wanted to I would be able to suggest about 12 different ways to create a painless death using medications. Insofar as I deal with end of life issues and palliative care, I know how to take away pain from people who are imminently going to die of a painful illness -- and it's NOT hard to do. The cocktail of drugs they use for lethal injection doesn't even include a pain medication, which is silly. This isn't really a big deal -- if state executioners wanted death to be painless they could easily make it so.

One of the points that was made in the documentary was that the various methods of execution were developed entirely without medical input. One reason given for this was that it would be ethically unacceptable to doctors to become involved in such procedures. I can understand that this is indeed the case, but I suspect that the reasons are also historical: the death penalty has its origins in punitive penal regimes where care for the victim was/is not a particularly high priority.

Peter

Here in North Carolina (and I've just moved here a few months ago after my whole life in New England, so I don't know the politics very well) the state medical board has threatened to remove the license of any physician who participates in an execution. And good for them, because that is outside the scope of our profession. If the government wants to put people to death they don't need a physician for it.

Using the death penalty contradicts one of the basic moral and religious laws. How can we have a law that says murder is wrong, yet murders those who disobey it?

That is quite possible the most ludicrous and ignorant statement I have read on this forum. "America"? Quite the opposite in fact, it is up for the power of the pacifist righteous common people to make a public statement, and to infiltrate the vast and corrupt network of socialite scandal known as "democratic government".

I have always been against capital punishment but want to kill certain individuals for certain horrific crimes and feel willing to accept that certain criminals need exterminating...Why is that? The need for revenge is an overpowering emotion that the law does not recognise, for those who seek it the law is inadequate..Should the law be interested in revenge ..in natural justice?

We currently spend our taxes on tons of **** that will never have anything to do with us, therefore I hate that argument with quite a passion. One should be given the opportunity to a full life, so that he can have as much time as he is naturally granted, to redeem himself spiritually, and just maybe, he'll eventually want to physically, as well (organ donor).

if it was a viable economic option, i would be all for the death penalty, it removes crazy members of our society, it means we dont have to feed and clothe them, and it acts as a minor deterrent. sadly, our appeals system is so complicated and cumbersome, most crooks on death row are either released, or die of old age before their last meals are served. People choke up the state with appeals which not only cost the state a bundle, but also keep the dear con from being executed, if the system were streamlined, say 1 case trial and one appeal per person, it would be a viable option

For what it's worth:
I think killing is wrong and living the only way to make it right.
Another wrong will never make a wrong right.
Justice is balance or truth, equality.
Wrong can only be balanced or made right by the use of right to equate the problem.
In many cases justice then can never be achieved.
For surely no right will ever bring back the dead.
We can and must only try.
It's the right just and equitable thing to do.
Justice.

=
MJA

but you see, peoples definition of wrong and right are usually dangerously biased, 100 years ago, interracial marraige usually carried with it the promise of a lynching, even today the same principal is applied to homosexual marraige. So the only intelligent thing to do is when a crime is commited, do not engage in what is right or wrong, that just creates confusion in which hundreds of cons get off scot free, the only way to reciprocate crimes such as murder is with cold calculating justice, why give a man a life sentence. Rather than take care of him for the rest of his life, just kill him and be done with it, 20 years is a finite term, but a life sentence is supposed to be infinite, so make it so