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DoggPickle posted:This is basically the dumbest argument that I've ever read. When people are mean or evil to other people, when they're scary or violent. it's quite obvious, even though it may be difficult to put down in words. The problem is the justice system isn't, and never will be, perfect. You can't reliably just look at criminals and go "oh it's just obvious he/she committed the crime" or "oh, they're obviously a terrible crazy person!" As long as you allow the death penalty, innocent people will be put to death. There is no avoiding this, and talking about some hypothetical situation where everyone put to death was actually guilty is pointless. So the death penalty ultimately comes down to whether you value the "justice" of putting a terrible criminal to death (versus giving them life in prison) over the lives of a non-zero number of innocent people. And I can pretty confidently say that anyone who thinks innocent lives are an acceptable price to pay for a justice that is proven to not even reduce crime rates has some pretty hosed up values. I think most pro-death penalty people just aren't bright enough to think things through and realize that it's not as simple as "well we should really kill the super bad people, right??" Because, in practice, as long as the death penalty is on the books it WILL end up being used against the innocent. The only potential exception to this is limiting the death penalty to literal war criminals or something. edit: Also, if you want to punish people based off of the harm they cause others, people who perpetrate large-scale white collar crime/corruption probably cause more net harm than murderers. Someone who runs a business/scam that helps driving thousands of people into poverty has undoubtedly caused more suffering than a murderer. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Mar 1, 2017 |
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Mar 1, 2017 01:14
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edit: You might notice that in the below post I'm never addressing the morality of the death penalty itself. This is because "is it okay to kill people who commit terrible crimes" is ultimately a moral judgement and you can't really prove that it's immoral. So I think it's more useful to focus on the inevitable cost of innocent people dying and weighing that against the "benefits" of the death penalty (which pretty much just amount to "revenge").hakimashou posted:Consider: The problem is that we are not talking about individual hypothetical situations. We are talking about having the death penalty as a potential punishment on the books, and there isn't really any way to write "Only give the death penalty when it's super obvious they did it!" as a law because it's impossible to really define "super obvious" in a generalizable way. And even if you could write the laws like this, people are fallible. No matter how good you make the laws people will sometimes make mistakes and innocent people will always be convicted and punished, so if you have the death penalty as an option innocent people will die. How is this for a compromise? We take the death penalty off the books, and if at some point in the future the courts reach the point where they're 100% accurate at convicting murderers (or other terrible crimes) we can add it back in. I think this compromise works well, because those of us with common sense realize that the courts will never become perfectly accurate, but the option is still technically available if we reach the point that they are. hakimashou posted:You can't have a justice system where "nobody can really know anything" is a compelling defense in the face of extremely good evidence. It would be wrong to punish anyone for anything, since no guilt could ever be established under any circumstances. It's absurd. But this is actually basically the case, and that is why we should try to compromise by not giving punishments that are either inhumane or that can't be undone (such as death). Our system is set up under the assumption that being found guilty isn't necessarily proof that someone did the crime. This is why the appeals process exists. Ultimately we have to find a trade-off between deterring/preventing crimes and minimizing the level of wrongful punishment administered. Part of the reason the death penalty is a bad idea is that it does not actually deter/reduce crime. If it had a significant effect on crime rates, then it might be worth the downside of occasionally executing innocent people, but it doesn't. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Mar 1, 2017 |
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Mar 1, 2017 17:57
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bitterandtwisted posted:You're leaving morality aside and the death penalty serves no practical purpose so what's the point of that compromise? It is not a serious compromise, I was just trying to find some sort of excuse to effectively ban the death penalty within the confines of hakimashou's argument.
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Mar 1, 2017 18:47
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twodot posted:This doesn't make any sense to me. You can't undo prison time. You can't undo missing your kid's birthday. I can let you out of prison, I can give you money, but in no sense is the punishment undone. You can't even really undo fines. You can't get reimbursed with interest, but who knows what opportunities you've missed between being fined and being reimbursed. The arrow of time only points in one way, and committing to punishments that can be undone is committing to no punishments. That's why I said it's a compromise. There are downsides no matter what, but at least you can make some sort of attempt to compensate someone for time lost if they're imprisoned and later found innocent. edit: And there are actual tangible downsides to never imprisoning people, whereas the same isn't true for never giving them the death penalty, so the "pros" side of the equation doesn't really exist with the death penalty in the same way it does with imprisonment/fines/whatever.
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Mar 1, 2017 19:03
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twodot posted:I've said many time it's easy to argue the death penalty has outcomes worse than other options, it just doesn't have a property of non-undoableness that other punishments lack. Well, it's not a simple issue regardless, but there's still a clear difference when comparing the death penalty with other punishments. The situation is something like this: Imprisonment/Fines Pros: Work to some extent as a deterrant and/or prevent dangerous people from continuing to commit crimes (in the case of imprisonment anyways) Cons: Can't give back lost time, and prison sentences/fines are sometimes ineffective or counterproductive Death Penalty Pros: Uhh...revenge/"justice" I guess. Literally 0 chance of recidivism upon potential release. Cons: Can do literally nothing to compensate someone for being killed. Does not have any positive impact as a deterrant. So basically there's at least an argument to be had for the former. There are major problems that need to be dealt with, but at least there's some sort of reasonable pros/cons debate and you can always change things like sentence length, prison quality, fine amount, etc. But for the death penalty it's pretty much all cons (which are worse than the ones for imprisonment/fines in most cases) with no almost no pros.
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Mar 1, 2017 19:38
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stone cold posted:How about don't kill anybody, do you think you could restrain yourself from killing another living human being? Impossible, the criminals must be executed in order to control my insatiable bloodlust.
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Mar 2, 2017 06:14
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hakimashou posted:Some people believe it is somehow wrong to execute guilty murderers. As a hypothetical, do you think it is okay to rape rapists? Because the argument against killing murderers basically stems from the "no cruel/unusual punishment" idea. It's obvious that our legal system was not created with "an eye for an eye" in mind.
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Mar 4, 2017 00:06
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hakimashou posted:I really dont know, never thought about it. I mean, past a certain point you can basically just argue "morality is entirely subjective, the universe doesn't care about human suffering" but that isn't really a useful guiding principle for human societies. That's why "what are the practical impacts of doing this" is an important question to ask (and in the case of punishments like execution or other cruel/unusual things, arguably the biggest downside is the fact that the justice system is fallible and any existing punishment will inevitably be levied against the innocent).
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Mar 4, 2017 00:47
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tin can made man posted:Lots of crimes other than murder leave behind a dead victim. Is Involuntary manslaughter also a capital offense? What about negligent homicide? How does this apply if a killer is coerced, misled, or mentally incompetent? How far removed from the corpse can a person be for execution to apply - should every wartime US commander in chief be executed? To be fair, hakimashou is presumably talking about limiting the death penatly to situations with some much higher burden of proof. The problem in that case lies more with the fallibility of the people administering justice than with the laws themselves.
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Mar 4, 2017 02:19
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If I steal $500 the state should require that I pay no more or less than $500 as punishment, because the punishment must match the crime.
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Mar 4, 2017 10:41
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hakimashou posted:Maybe if you cut someone's hands off, and then had your hands cut off in turn or something. Treat others the way you want to be treated, after all. This isn't solely related to this topic, but I want to point out that "treat others as you would want to be treated" is actually not a good idea and can lead to a lot of bad things. People are different, and some people are hurt by things that other people enjoy (for example racists find racist jokes funny while the minority in question finds them hurtful). While it's true that it can apply to most situations, it is a bad idea to use it as some hard guideline for what is acceptable and what isn't. edit: A better rule would be "treat other people as they have informed you they'd like to be treated, and if you're uncertain ask them." hakimashou posted:That's probably less true when it comes to executing murderers than it is for anything else. All murder is not equal. Context/intent matters as well, and punishments should vary based on this. Someone who was under the influence of alcohol or some other drug killing someone during a heated argument is guilty of a lesser crime than someone who carefully premeditated someone else's murder and exhibited no remorse afterwards. hakimashou posted:The choice to commit murder is also the choice to be executed, they are inseparable and one and the same. The act of committing murder is the act of choosing to be executed. You can use this argument to justify literally any punishment, no matter how severe or absurd. For example, if the punishment for theft were to cut off a person's hands, you could argue "well, they shouldn't have committed theft if they didn't want their hands cut off!" This isn't to say that you can't have some other justification for the death penalty, but this specific argument is not a good one. VitalSigns posted:You continue to dodge the question of why this reasoning doesn't apply to other criminal acts: rape, torture, maiming. Lying, even. I have an app on my phone where I record every time a person has lied to me, so that I can be reminded to lie to them as well in the future. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 02:26 on Mar 6, 2017 |
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Mar 6, 2017 02:02
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hakimashou posted:I think most people believe that a justice system should have some mix of both utilitarian and moral considerations, even if they can't describe exactly what a perfect mix would be. I know I do. Actually, the only problem I see with your proposed fake-torture island is the fact that information about it being fake would inevitably be leaked somehow. If there were some way to 100% avoid the information being leaked, I don't really care how good the quality of life for such criminals is, as long as they're kept separate from the rest of the population so they can't re-offend.
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Mar 6, 2017 20:13
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hakimashou posted:It seems difficult to me to get from "people deserve to be punished or rewarded based on whether what they do is right or wrong" to "no one deserves to die". Nah, the logic is pretty straight-forward. Would you agree that no one deserves to be repeatedly raped and tortured for 20 years straight (or insert whatever disgusting inhumane thing you can think of)? Basically the logic is that there exists a limit that punishments shouldn't cross, and that the death penalty is beyond that limit. You can disagree about where the limit should be, but most people would agree that limit exists so the logic itself is fine.
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Mar 9, 2017 03:07
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Smudgie Buggler posted:Of course. Utilitarianism is batshit. Most of the complaints I've seen towards utilitarianism either require that some really dumb/wrong assumptions be made about the utility of various things or involve bizarre hypotheticals (like the utility monster). For example, when people complain about "the ends justifying the means" being bad, they're usually referring to situations where the ends either aren't actually good or have a bunch of negative side effects. As an example, if you had a situation where government censorship of a particular topic might reduce the chance of rebellion, you would also need to take into account the long term effects of censorship becoming normalized (for example censoring this one thing now might increase the chance of other things being censored in the future). Also, in reality you usually can't guarantee a preferred outcome, so if you do some evil thing with the intent of yielding some good outcome, if you fail you've just done an evil thing for no reason (and that risk needs to be included when evaluating the utility of such a course of action). Basically, if you magically 100% knew that an action would truly cause more good than harm in the long term, it would absolutely always be the right thing to do. But in reality it's impossible to clearly define what constitutes "good" or to accurately predict the long term result of actions.
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Mar 14, 2017 09:45
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Smudgie Buggler posted:Shooting an unrepentant serial rapist with no means to make a meaningful contribution to society ever in the back of the head the morning after he's convicted on multiple samples of his DNA left in victims who all independently ID'd him is none of those things. I imagine the problem is that it's hard to write the laws in such a way that you know exactly where the "this person super obviously did it" line is drawn. You can't just make a law that says "execute them instantly if it's super super obvious."
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Mar 14, 2017 17:54
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twodot posted:To get back to my earlier examples, I would be very upset if one of my loved ones was struck by a government employee driving a car and died, but I still accept that government employees driving cars and predictably (in an actuarial sense) killing innocents is worth the damage it causes. The whole "You must only accept policies that have zero innocent deaths as a result" argument just doesn't scale for literally anything else. Eh, in some weird hypothetical world where killing criminals actually had a significant positive effect greater than the inevitable negative effect of killing the occasional innocent person, I think it would be okay (for the same reason as your government car analogy). Of course, that isn't the world we live in and there is virtually zero benefit to killing criminals over simply imprisoning them for life, so that calculus will never come out in favor of the death penalty (unless the person in question just doesn't care much about innocent people being executed). While someone could argue "well, if we reduce the rights of criminals to appeal the death penalty it would cost less, causing life imprisonment to be more expensive", such a change would also result in an increased number of killed innocents so there isn't really any way to toggle things so that it makes sense.
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Mar 15, 2017 07:39
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OwlFancier posted:You know what might be even more humane, get this, it's this radical idea, not torturing people. Amazing right. But then how would we get enough ~justice~ If we do not extract enough suffering from the sinners, the great karmic scale will become unbalanced and the fabric of reality will unravel.
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Mar 26, 2017 11:05
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