The issue of capital punishment has all sorts of angles that need to be considered. There exists the possibility of executing an innocent person. But we could leave that issue aside for the moment. Then there's the issue of the purpose of executing. Is its purpose to act as a deterrent, or as an appropriate retribution or punishment instead?
Does it in fact deter? If it does should we execute people if the net sum of peoples lives are saved even if we regard capital punishment as barbaric? Or is retribution or punishment sufficient in itself even if it has no deterrent?
What about the cost of keeping them in prison for many years compared to execution?
What about the issue of the ultimate origins of our behaviour? Is it me who determines my behaviour? Or are we mere meat robots whose behaviour is determined by physical laws rather than our conscious intents? In which case why would any punishment be justified?
Who should we execute? Anyone who illegally and with premeditation murders someone else? What about a woman who murders her husband as a result of being beat up by him day after day, year after year? Or murdering anyone who has made your life a living hell? What about murder due to a hopeless all-consuming jealousy?
Is executing, in fact, a greater punishment than spending many years languishing in prison? That also depends on what will actually happen to that person after death.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Whodunit
People constantly boast about anticipating the "big reveals" or "whodunnits" in novels and films. But, these big reveals...
-
Just reading the following article: 20 years ago, we were all set for a Y2K disaster that wasn’t Article says: Patti Duncan stockpiled ...
-
Many philosophers and scientists have some truly bizarre beliefs. The denial of consciousness (as we understand this term) is the most bizar...
-
I read this article. * The parents of a boy claims their boy appears to remember being Princess Diana in a former life. It's also cov...
-
Ugh . . I had an important email that someone had sent me, so I foolishly imagined that selecting the archive option would ensure I don'...
-
According to this article Greenland is the country with the world's highest suicide rate. From 1900-1930 Greenland had a suicide rate ...
-
All aspects of consciousness -- whether pains, perceptual experiences, thoughts and so on -- can be changed, attenuated, modulated, even ...
-
So Liz Truss has announced her resignation as PM. The shortest serving PM ever -- just 44 days as PM. And something I predicted before sh...
-
There's 2 possibilities: a) This is the only life there is. When we die we simply cease to exist. Our lives and the Universe are, in a...
-
I was just thinking. Suppose we could go into the future exactly 1 million years from now. What would we see? I would speculate that our t...
-
Someone on twitter/X asked the following question: A mathematician emerges from a cave, hands you the photo below, and asks "Will a c...
No comments:
Post a Comment