Re: PRO- ARGUMENTS WANTED!!

[SkyLoom]

You start with moral absolutes, like the universal admonition against rape and murder.

Which "universal admonition" is this? People rape and murder all the time. They just don't call it rape or murder. Some people call murder "execution." Others call it "war."

Of course, to a moral relativist, murder isn't always wrong. Neither is rape. It's always society's fault. By definition, however, you can't reason with these people.

Well, Joseph, you do amaze me sometimes. The "moral relativists" would see a man starving and start by asking whether or not he was an illegal and why he was so lazy that he wasn't working. The moral individual would start by buying him a sandwich. You are quite right. You can't reason with these "moral relativists."

[SkyLoom]

josephdphillips said:

As a murderer, I would expect it, the logic being: do to the state that which I'd want done to myself. Since I killed a citizen of the state, the state may be logically expected to kill me in return.

I didn't ask if you'd expect it. I asked if you'd want it.

Golden Rule: That which is hateful to you, do not do to another.

[josephdphillips]

SkyLoom said:

I didn't ask if you'd expect it. I asked if you'd want it. Golden Rule: That which is hateful to you, do not do to another.

Every rule requires enforcement. As codified by the state, violators of the rule against premeditated, malicious murder are in some circumstances punished by death.

Emmanuel Kant, by the way, was a strong proponent of the death penalty.

[josephdphillips]

SkyLoom said:

The "moral relativists" would see a man starving and start by asking whether or not he was an illegal and why he was so lazy that he wasn't working. The moral individual would start by buying him a sandwich. You are quite right. You can't reason with these "moral relativists."

Your blind altruism isn't moral at all. You're simply doing it to make yourself feel good. Where you would buy a starving man a sandwich without asking a single question, I would want to know why he insists on starving himself.

[The Bavarian]

Hi!

I have some pro arguments for you:

1) The dp satisfies the bloodlust of the mob. So they are less likely to burn houses or break shop windows.

2) You can do the same as nazi physicians did 65 years ago without doing anything illegal. Great fun...

3) Prison staff may work some overtime for extra money.

4) If you are a politican, just support the death penalty and you will get plenty of votes from the badly educated.

5) You may play god.

6) You don't have to think about a stupid thing called "rehabilitation".

7) You don't have to think at all. Just kill'em.

8) You can solve social problems by killing people who cannot afford proper defense.

9) People with an IQ below 50 can get a job: public defender.

10) Executions are big parties where you will get a free meal.

11) If the state makes a mistake and kills an innocent, the prosecutors and judges don't have to care. Nobody is interested in the case of an executed prisoner anymore.

12) The victims familiy get their beloved person back.

So hang em all!


Greetings from Munich

The Bavarian

[sally104]

You argue murdere and rape are wrong becuase it both crimes violates the right to life and the right to privacy of their body

skyloom said:

Agaveman said:

Alright friend, I admit it. But your system is based on emotion too. Everyone's is. It is impossible to argue ethics in terms of pure logic. logic an help, but there are certain ethical principles that one just 'feels'. I mean, how can you logically argue that murder and rape are wrong without first accepting certain emotional concepts.

You can argue that murder and rape are wrong because you wouldn't want them happening to you. The Golden Rule argument, you can call it. By the same token, you wouldn't want execution to happen to you either, would you?

[anna_marek]

skyloom said:

You start with moral absolutes, like the universal admonition against rape and murder.

Which "universal admonition" is this? People rape and murder all the time. They just don't call it rape or murder. Some people call murder "execution." Others call it "war."

Of course, to a moral relativist, murder isn't always wrong. Neither is rape. It's always society's fault. By definition, however, you can't reason with these people.

Well, Joseph, you do amaze me sometimes. The "moral relativists" would see a man starving and start by asking whether or not he was an illegal and why he was so lazy that he wasn't working. The moral individual would start by buying him a sandwich. You are quite right. You can't reason with these "moral relativists."

Sky Loom think of these Japanese Samurai warriors, who's honor is their life. If someone of this mindset would commit such a heinous murder it's obvious they'd lose their honor and people of this culture would prefer death to being a living reminder and taunt to the victim's family by keeping this horrible murder more present and painful to them. Yes do onto others as you would have them do on to you.
I and many others feel the same way as these honorable Samurai warriors! If we, theoretically speaking, do something that horrible-please lights out!

[anna_marek]

I think it's really absurd that some people don't believe the DP is a deterrent. Worldwide and throughout history it has been a very effective deterrent against crime. In America of course we don't approve of the DP being used for anything except in cruel and heinous murder cases, but nevertheless it is a powerful deterrent against other offenses as well.

In Saudia Arabia robbery is punished by the DP, usually beheading. Shoplifting is punished with amputation. In Saudia Arabia the inhabitants typically leave their keys in the ignition, regardless of wherever they park their cars and have no fear of their car being stolen. The DP has virtually eliminated robbery in Saudia Arabia.

In Malaysia the possession and misuse of illegal narcotics ( drugs ) is punished by the DP. There is virtually no drug abuse in Malaysia-the DP has eliminated it.

If the DP deters these other offenses it certainly deters murder. I concede that a suicidal rage killer may be an exception, but humans as a rule avoid putting themselves in life threatening positions. Currently in America the DP is only carried out after at least 7 years of appeals, stays and delays. The powerful anti-DP lobby in the US and worldwide has also weakened the DP's deterrent effect, since we send potential murderers the signal that America lacks resolve on the issue of the DP.

At any rate after the US Supreme Court outlawed the DP in 1972 there was a clear rise in murders, especially the cruel, deliberate and sadistic form of murders. Serial killers like Bundy and Gacy committed their first murders.
This rise was reversed after the death penalty was reinstated.

[sally104]

skyloom said:

Agaveman said:

Alright friend, I admit it. But your system is based on emotion too. Everyone's is. It is impossible to argue ethics in terms of pure logic. logic an help, but there are certain ethical principles that one just 'feels'. I mean, how can you logically argue that murder and rape are wrong without first accepting certain emotional concepts.

You can argue that murder and rape are wrong because you wouldn't want them happening to you. The Golden Rule argument, you can call it. By the same token, you wouldn't want execution to happen to you either, would you?

Murder and rape are wrong because it is wrong to take peoples lives, and or invade their bodies and use it against them how about that.

[Ragnorok161]

Benty said:

Louiza said:

Hey people,

I'm currently writing an examination paper on Capital Punishment in the U.S., so I need some arguments from those in favour of the death penalty...

If you're interested, please write your arguments in this thread before the end of May (2005)...

Thank you.

Best regards,

Louiza

HERE IS YOUR COMPLETE TERM PAPER!!
www.yesdeathpenalty.com/argument_1.htm

If your professor doesn't give you an "A" he/she is a flaming liberal and you need to drop that course and transfer to another college immediately....

well thx this sure helped me

[pimpy]

tony said:

Louiza said:

Hey people,

I'm currently writing an examination paper on Capital Punishment in the U.S., so I need some arguments from those in favour of the death penalty...

If you're interested, please write your arguments in this thread before the end of May (2005)...

Thank you.

Best regards,

Louiza

The Death Penaly is an effective deterrent; it prevents the offender from reoffending, PERIOD!

Absolutely.

[taty]

As a justification for capital punishment, deterrence is used to suggest that executing murderers will decrease the homicide rate by causing other potential murderers not to commit murder for fear of being executed themselves ("general deterrence") and, of course, that the murderer who is executed will not kill again ("specific deterrence")

[naeske]

I understand your thoughts on the DP but me as a parent, if someone raped and killed my child, I would want them to spend the rest of their life in prison. Why give that person an easy way out. Let them suffer the rest of their life behind the walls and barbed wire to never see the outside again. Besides, killing the killer makes me the same as him/her.

[blakely]

If death were an easy way out, 99% of the prisoners would not fight their death sentence so vehemently, now would they?

And no, the support of the death penalty for the most heinous of crimes, does not make anyone like a murderer who has been tried and convicted and duly sentenced to death.

[anna_marek]

This excellent article from the "Chicage Sun Times" presents several pro arguments and refutes the anti arguments!
www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4155/is_20020827/ai_n12470549 Quote:

Death penalty foes thwart majority will
Chicago Sun-Times, Aug 27, 2002 by John O'Sullivan

Save a personal copy of this article and quickly find it again with Furl.net. It's free! Save it.
By a terrible and macabre coincidence, both the American and British peoples have found themselves confronted in the last few days with the chilling evil of child murder--and with the grave dilemma of exactly how to punish and deter it.

Last week, a California jury found David Westerfield guilty of the kidnapping and murder of his neighbor's daughter, 7-year-old Danielle Van Dam, while in Britain the entire nation was convulsed for weeks over two missing 10-year-old girls. A nationwide hunt ended when their charred remains were found in a ditch. A school janitor has been charged with their murders.

In both cases, the general public would like to see the death penalty imposed for these and similar crimes. But their wishes are likely to be thwarted by political elites.

In Britain, this elite refusal is quite open. Though polls show that 82 percent of the British would like to see the death penalty restored, the politicians refuse to even discuss it. In California, the opposition is more subtle. A tortuous appeals process will ensure that even if Westerfield is sentenced to death, he will probably die of old age.

Opponents of capital punishment realize that they need formidable arguments to justify what looks like an undemocratic contempt for majority opinion. And the arguments they use are as follows: that the death penalty risks killing the wrongly convicted; that it does not deter potential murderers; that its justification on the retributive grounds that the punishment should fit the crime is barbaric; that it cannot be justified on any other grounds, and so it is a cruel punishment incompatible with a civilized society.

These arguments are repeated so frequently and in tones of such moral self-congratulation that they seem formidable after awhile. But they wilt upon examination. Let us take them in turn:

First, retribution. Far from being cruel or barbaric, retribution is an argument that limits punishment to what is just and suitable. We do not cut off hands for parking offenses, even though that would undoubtedly halt them overnight, because we recognize that it would be excessive and thus cruel.

Equally, the death penalty is sometimes the only punishment that seems equal to the horror of a particular crime--a cold-blooded poisoning, say, or the rape and murder of a helpless child, or the mass murders of the Nazis and the Communists. Significantly, such civilized nations as the Danes and the Norwegians, which had abolished the death penalty before the First World War, restored it after 1945 in order to deal suitable justice to the Nazis and their collaborators. Was it cruel, unusual, barbaric, uncivilized? Or a measured and just response to vast historic crimes?

Second, deterrence. Perhaps the loudest and most confident claim made by abolitionists is that there is "no evidence" that the death penalty is a deterrent to potential murders. As it happens, this claim is false.

Last year, three economists from Emory University, Hashem Dezhbakhsh, Paul Rubin and Joanna Melhop Shepherd, released a study-- "Does Capital Punishment Have a Deterrent Effect?"--that concluded on the basis of careful statistical analysis of the recent evidence that there was a very significant deterrent effect.

Summarizing their conclusions, the statistician Iain Murray (ironically, an opponent of capital punishment on religious grounds) reported that "each execution deters other murders to the extent of saving between 8 and 28 innocent lives--with a best-estimate average of 18 lives saved per execution." On this reasoning, if the 3,527 prisoners now on Death Row in the United States were to be executed, then something like 63,000 lives would be saved!

That brings us to what is genuinely the strongest argument of the abolitionists--wrongful execution. For it must certainly be admitted that an innocent man might be wrongly convicted and executed and that we can never entirely eliminate that risk. But extreme measures are routinely taken to avoid it; only a handful of such miscarriages of justice are known to have happened; none has happened since the restoration of capital punishment in the United States in 1976, and the science of DNA has now added a further barrier to such terrible mistakes.

Though wrongful executions are exceedingly rare, we know a great deal about them. Curiously, we hear little or no mention of their exact equivalent on the other side of the argument--namely, murders committed by those who have already committed a murder, served their sentence, and been released to murder again (or who have murdered another inmate in prison). Yet a few years ago there were 820 people in U.S. prisons who were serving time for their second murder. If the death penalty had been applied after their first murders, their 820 subsequent victims would be alive today.

Where, then, does that leave the argument that capital punishment is incompatible with a civilized society? If the death penalty would certainly have saved 820 innocent lives, and might arguably save tens of thousands of innocent lives, at the cost of no innocent lives (as best we can judge since capital punishment was restored in the United States), surely a society that shrinks from using it deserves to be called cruelly sentimentalist rather than civilized. And if, in addition, it ignores majority opinion to indulge its refined sensibilities, then it deserves to be called undemocratic too.

When next the European Union ambassadors come calling at the State Department to complain of executions in Texas, shouldn't Colin Powell tell them exactly that?

Copyright The Chicago Sun-Times, Inc.

[Rhonda]

I agree, the dead can't kill the living! And many people know even if you are sentenced to death chances are you wont get the juice anyway so no the sentence itself may not always be a detterant but showing people that we mean business will change a few minds!