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Notes -
I guess I’ll bite on the last point.
I think killing a person is relatively but not absolutely wrong. We deprived this man of his liberty and eventually life because it was the only way to protect the rights of (would-be) victims. Since we can’t predict recidivism, we’re stuck with this approximation.
I am giving equal weight to life and liberty, here, but I’m not feeling confident in that. Outside of pragmatic concerns like cost and false positives, do you think life imprisonment is categorically more moral than killing?
I think there are cases where it's justified to kill someone. I'd refer to aquinas' just war theory as being illustrative. Every death is a tragedy, but there are times where causing a lesser tragedy serves to prevent a greater. But note that I specified "helpless" person. Which-- relative to the carceral system-- inmates are. In older, meaner times, when society had fewer surplus resources, the relatively higher difficulty for the state to efficiently contain criminals made the death penalty more justifiable. But in the modern context, that's simply not the case.
So yes, I believe life imprisonment (where technically feasible) is more moral than killing. I wouldn't try to life-imprison an enemy soldier in the middle of a firefight, but I would absolutely prefer to imprison rather than execute them after their capture.
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