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I firmly believe that the anti-death penalty stance is evil inasmuch as any relatively normal political stance can be. I think I understand the philosophical underpinnings for it fairly well and can countenance certain object-level objections (e.g. requiring very high certainty), but at some point, we slam into a values difference that I really do think is flatly evil. When considering a case like Payton Gendron (the Buffalo Tops shooter), a man that filmed his actions on live stream, there are no outstanding questions about the certainty of his guilt or the pointless evil that he committed. The purpose, arguably a core raison d'être for a state is to dispense justice, and I simply cannot accept that less than public execution of such an individual is anything but evil. I suppose we could get into what exactly "evil" means or should mean, but this sort of sniveling weakness, extending completely unwarranted sympathies to the worst criminals seems like a vacuum where someone's sense of justice should be.
To me, it is the finality and chance of a mistake. I’d concede the point where someone livestreams it. But I worry in other cases.
Right, understood, that's the type of argument that I agree includes tradeoffs and has differing levels of willingness to tolerate error. If someone insists on a very high evidential bar for execution, I have no qualms with them. It's the refusal to accept finality even in cases where there is absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind that I refer to as evil. The fact that a guy like Ed Kemper still walks the Earth is, put simply, evil.
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