Crimes that deserve the death penalty?

[David]

[HAL]

I am not sure if I would do it that often.

[Mugwump]

Returning to PTID’s quality post above, the problems I have with his well-made argument are as follows :

Firstly, I do not accept the conventional wisdom re “rights”. “Rights” are a form of universalism that grew, via Voltaire and Paine, from a specific critique of French and British society around 1790, into a utopian project that now occupies a global position regardless of the conditions of a particular society. They are now used to badger developed societies into indulging undesirable behaviour, while doing nothing about large scale abuse in most of the world (eg China, inter alia).

What matters are liberties, evolved out of the particular historic experience of nations and underwritten by the sovereign power of a free people and their capacity to defend their self-government. Clearly it is desirable that liberties be founded on natural law to some extent, but the will of a free people can be expected to lead to some cultural variant of this. Not to put too fine a point on it, if certain Muslim societies wish to proscribe (say) blasphemy, then I consider that they should be free to do that, whatever “Human rights” says. I believe that the adoption of human rights as a guiding principle in international law, rather than Wilsonian self-determination, is anti-democratic, and the backlash against it will lead to wars and conflict, in time. We already see this mounting in Europe.

Liberties are contingent upon citizenship, and of course circumscribed by the laws of the nation. Break those laws, and you are choosing to place yourself under the sanctions advertised by llaw. In committing an act of aggravated murder under a statute which provides for capital punishment, the criminal effectively elects to hang himself.

So it is seductive, but the first reason I cannot accept your “minimal violation of the minimum right necessary to achieve some end deemed necessary” is that I do not believe in the underlying concept.

Even if I did so, I would arrive at a different place to you. The question is really the “end deemed necessary”. In my view, the point of capital punishment is only incidentally to remove the most grotesque offenders from society forever. As you rightly say, this can (in theory at least) be achieved with a lesser sanction. The main purpose is the one I stated earlier in the thread : it is to represent society’s ultimate revulsion at the act committed, and thereby to set an absolute standard for conduct, and to symbolize the power of the law over society’s most vicious members. When we abandoned that standard, we opened Pandora’s box, and ushered in a mini-holocaust of murder and serious violent crime.

I note, again, that murder rates rose steeply post the 1960s, and have stayed at that high rate despite advances in trauma surgery which should have seen it fall dramatically. Also, that three people are killed annually in the Uk by people on release from sentences for murder.

It seems to me from these facts that the death penalty abolition probably has more innocent blood on its hands than the advocates.

[pietillidie]

^Mugwump, here's a further effort to address some of the points above and some from your earlier post. Don't ask me to condense it, even though it's repetitive; I've run out of gas!

1. The Primacy of Reason

I still don't think it matters what the principles of the moral or legal system are called, or whether they're 'natural' or otherwise. Often, the term 'natural' is used in historical argument vis-a-vis the 'supernatural'. But in a non-religious argument, it's hard to know what is meant by 'natural' given that in one sense, everything including our reasoning minds is natural. From what I can tell, people who think they've seen some useful distinction in the term are arguing that a move towards the natural has greater moral weight or primacy:

[natural[instinctive[reasoned]]]

But this leaves us with two problems. First, 'nature' and 'instinct' share all of the mystery and pliability of the divine, and have been used to deprive people of liberty just as effectively ('yes, but it's in their nature'). Second, the decisive filter still ends up being reason. How do we even describe what is instinctive if not through reasoned language? If nature is inscrutable, instinct is one of the most formidably difficult notions getting about; I can't see how its use can help except by disciplining a reason fetish in the way behavioural economics puts classical economics in its place. But you and I already accept that utility can override principle, so we're already on board with the limits of reason.

Think of the practical implications of trying to manage instinct as a principle of law. We might instinctively be repulsed enough to kill a killer or a rapist, or we might not blame someone for reacting instinctively and killing them. The issue here isn't dangerous people and their deserts; it is how 'instinct', or some notion resembling it, gets rolled out across the moral or legal system.

If we don't define these things more precisely, Fred kills John because he was 'naturally' enraged. Mary 'naturally' kills Father Jones because she thinks he has molested her son, only to discover later she was mistaken. So, how else do we get a handle on all this instinct except through reasoned, consistent principles? It would seem more conservative in the best sense of the word to start with our best reasoned effort, and from there override only on the basis of some inherent logical conundrum (e.g., taking a life to preserve a life in self defence) or pressing utility (e.g., airport security checks), in a begrudging acknowledgement of the limits of reason.


2. Rights/Liberties

You may have something else in mind here, but even if we start with a liberty as a principle, we still have to define it and incorporate it into our system of axioms. I can't see how the history of discussion concerning rights and liberties could change this. (That said, I would want to emphasise that rights and bills of rights, and the definition of rights over time, are central in concept and language to the formation of English law and democracy, from long before the English Civil War forward).

The problem with using liberty as a launchpad is that it assumes life/not life, so it isn't actually an a priori. And by not establishing life/not life first, we've jumped downstream and left a lot more undefined than meets the eye because we really mean:

life/not life [of some subject]

That single starting point has filled books on its own. Even so, I don't think this is lethal, because we can always back-track. But why would we mess about like that when we're trying to establish a system of principles, and inspire confidence in their efficacy?


3. The Scope of Rights/Liberties

The difficulty of defining the subject in 'life/not life [of some subject]' doesn't eliminate the need for a coherent system. The agreement presses on, as it does in our received system even as the identity of the subject remains contentious in abortion, euthanasia, animal rights, and so on.

Similarly, the abuses of colonialism or the unilateral actions of The Coalition of the Willing based on a vulgar universality don't undermine the fact that rights do already operate just fine within boundaries, some of which are more complicated than others. This aspect of scope is also assumed in the a priori:

life/not life [of some subject party to this agreement in some jurisdiction]

Sure, issues of scope cause complications. Hence, the state versus the federal, the EU versus the Member State, or the treaty versus the signatory. Still, no one thinks we should put our moral and legal systems on hold because of difficult boundary decisions.

I certainly agree with you that going beyond one's immediate jurisdiction is a fraught affair. Despite being internationalist in posture, my own standards for intervention and even trade are rarely met. You're dead right on this, in my view.

[Dave The Man]

Bloke who Stabbed his 5 year old Son deserves it

[Dave The Man]

The Man who Rapped the 11 year old should be sentence to Death by Hanging by Balls and Dick

[David]

Spare us your perverse fantasies, please.

[stui magpie]

^

To be fair, I think all rappers deserve that treatment.

[stui magpie]

Japan has just executed 7 people after 22 years in gaol

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/07/05/asia/japan-aum-shinriyko-leader-executed-intl/index.html

[ronrat]

[Mugwump]

Right result, terrible process. 22 years. Ugh.

Had to roll my eyes at the Amnesty spokesman. “Justice demands accountability but also respect for everyone's human rights. The death penalty can never deliver this as it is the ultimate denial of human rights."

Justice involves, at minimum in such cases, suspension of human rights by locking someone up for many years. So “Accountability” means that your human rights are annulled by virtue of your gross violation of others’ human rights - in this case by murdering strangers, very torturously, on a subway.

Do these people have any intellect at all ? Amnesty started off with the laudable aim of representing people who were punished for their political views. Now it’s just another ideological branch of the wishing-tree la-la Left, representing the interests of torturers. I’m ashamed to think that I once donated to it.

[David]

Opposing killing by the state – what a bunch of far-left pansies!

Can you remind me about the point in the past when Amnesty supported capital punishment?

[Mugwump]

[HAL]

Can you remember the website?

[David]

Look, I’d be honestly astounded if there was ever a time in which opposition to capital punishment wasn’t one of their core planks. If they’ve made it a more central part of their advocacy in recent years, I have no problem with that and I doubt most members or donors would either.