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Notes -
Last week, during the discussion of the Marcellus Williams execution we had a brief aside discussing my belief that the absolutist anti-death penalty stance is evil. That got me to thinking about the topic more and with the spate of executions last week, my social media feeds had a lot of discussion of them. Much of the commentary are sentiments that I find repellant, like this:
To be clear on who Littlejohn was:
…
To be clear on the arguments for clemency, it seems to be almost entirely based on uncertainty about which man pulled the trigger. This sort of hairsplitting, about who pulled the trigger is the kind of thing that I was referring to in the previous discussion as being about as close to just plain evil as any relatively normal, common policy position could be. Two men walked into a store with no intent other than robbing the owner at gunpoint. One of them shot him in the face. I could not possibly care less who pulled the trigger, they were both responsible and should both hang. I see no plausible moral case to the contrary. Perhaps one adheres to a generalized claim that the state should just never execute anyone, which I still strongly object to, but the idea that the case hinges on who pulled the trigger is either ridiculous or in completely bad faith. The latter possibility brings me to the second example of a post that caught my eye:
Readers will probably immediately spot what I think is in bad faith. Am I to believe that Ms. Gill’s objection to what she saw is that this method of execution is simply too brutal? That if only we could figure out some way to end Alan Miller’s life without suffering, she would agree that it’s appropriate to execute a man that “shot and killed two of his co-workers, 32-year-old Lee Holdbrooks and 28-year-old Christopher Yancy, at a heating and air-conditioning distributor, then drove five miles to a business where he had previously worked and shot and killed his former supervisor, 39-year-old Terry Jarvis”? No, of course not. Nonetheless, I want to treat this, for a moment, as a serious objection on the object-level to make a point in favor of execution that I don’t see made with much frequency.
How do you feel hearing that Miller may have spent five or ten minutes suffering before he died? Some may extend a degree of empathy to the monster on the table that I am not personally capable of, but I feel the same as many of the people replying on Twitter do - Miller deserves much worse than a few minutes gasping for breath. In fact, I’ve sometimes seen people argue that the death penalty is too good for the worst people, that life in prison is a worse penalty. This is presumably because they’re imagining a life in prison that’s filled with brutality, misery, and possibly rape and torture for decades. What this highlights to me is that the death penalty is not the worst punishment that a society can mete out - far from it, a swift execution is a cap on the amount of suffering that the justice system may inflict on someone. Truly, I think people like Dahmer deserve much worse than a simple firing squad, but putting some cap on it is a good way to prevent people from exacting revenge in a dehumanizing fashion.
I don’t really have any coherent argument to piece together here. I’m mostly expressing my frustration with empathy that is so misplaced that it seems like faulty wiring to me. Seriously, a man walks into a store with his buddy, shoots an innocent man in the face, is finally executed decades later, and people say, “rest in power” because it might have been his buddy that shot the innocent man in the face. How can I describe that other than evil? The only miscarriage of justice in the Littlejohn case is that the system allowed him to live for decades when no one even had any follow-up questions about whether he was one of the robbers. Other policies are more consequential, but there are none that I feel more conviction about my opponents being just plain wrong than the question of what to do with men like Littlejohn.
Yes, it is pretty obvious that a great deal of the people who are outspoken about cases like this, have misplaced empathy, and are quite willing to be anti life in other circumstances. There is also a strong element of especially sympathy towards black murderers. People are very animated and care and even some willing to call black murderers as innocents.
Personally, in most cases of vile criminals I don't have that strong of a position of life in prison vs execution. Death penalty certainly has a role though, as some people can become a problem later on, or remain one in prison through influence. Not to mention that in a system that is becoming more favorable to criminals, they might be freed to reofend in the future. While if executed, they won't get that opportunity. There have also been murderers who have been in prison for life, and then they keep committing murders or rapes in prison.
Even outside of the dangers of reoffending, it also might provide more catharsis to society and the relatives of victims. I strongly disagree with the idea that society has done any wrong when executing certain vile criminals.
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I disagree with you there. Modern society has the means to imprison people for decades.
I see the punishment of the worst criminals not in terms of revenge, but merely as society deciding 'you have hurt people badly enough that we will reduce the amount of freedom to enjoy to a degree where you will not be able to hurt anyone again'.
I do not believe that a state should punish murderers by killing them. Or torturers by torturing them. Or rapists by raping them. Or cannibals by eating them. There is all kind of scumbag behavior which decent society should not reciprocate.
Of course, I am also not going to glorify the median inhabitant of death row as some kind of martyr. Murderous fuck got himself caught and killed in some weird rite by the barbarians inhabiting the new world. Not gonna shed many tears for him.
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I think that having the death penalty seems like a weird hill to die on for anti-crime people. It is not universally accepted in the US, only 12-13 states still execute people. It provides a rallying point for the people opposed to it, from BLM to pacifists.
I get abortion as a CW topic. It matters. I would estimate lifetime abortions per capita to be somewhere between 0.1 and 2. Depending on your stance, that is a lot of innocent fetuses brutally murdered or a lot of women forced to give birth.
The death penalty might have been more cost effective than lifelong imprisonment in 1800 or 1900, but these days it is not (thanks to the efforts of the anti crowd). Clinging on to it for reasons of tradition only seems weird, like running a coal powered train line through some suburb.
This idea that the issue doesn't matter for your opposition, but it matters for opponents of the death penalty that ought to be appeased is pretty contradictory.
Clearly you oppose the death penalty, and you are trying to get the pro death penalty people to support you, by claiming they should appease groups like BLM, and how pro death penalty position is just clinging to tradition. A theme of outdated tradition vs inherently better progressive evolution appears.
I find it a subversive argument to act as if conservatives and other non progressives should adopt your values on this issue, and somehow it will help them from "dying on a hill". It seems like an attempt to fool them to abandon their preference, and adopt yours, without you giving sufficient due care about whether they might be right. On the face of it, this isn't a valid argument. But since it isn't a new one, there are more that can be said.
We know from experience that more appeasement and compromise on issues like death penalty will not satiate those willing to proclaim likely black murderers as innocent. Nor will it satisfy those who think that more appeasement and compromise by the right is necessary. Conservatives who listened to many of this iterations of bad advice to abandon their non progressive positions out of a mentality that it is a dying hill to not do so, either actually became the liberals, or failed to oppose the liberals enforcing the BLM agenda. It has been a consistently self destructive way for non progressives to act, and had played its role in things moving further left.
Like many issues is a legitimate issue that its proponents have valid reasons to fight for. Why are you so confident on this issue to ask others to stop fighting for it?
Are you sure you should be fighting on this hill?
Just like taking stolen money and giving them to the rightful owners is not theft.
And like kidnapping and imprisonment the crime is not equivalent to putting the same people in prison.
Neither is executing sufficiently vile criminals and murderers the same scumbag behavior to their actual murders. Equivalency in this case, can lead to too little empathy towards those suffering from murderers, including towards the ideological opposition.
There is an element of justice that is about punishment and retribution and making things whole for the victims by punishing perpetrators which is stronger towards sufficiently vile crimes. Bringing catharsis to the victims and their relatives, and to society by taking from the criminals what they have taken from those who suffered. Symbolically, it can also help avoid a society that sympathizes too much with criminals, or even with black criminals in particular, or shows some crossover with these kind of sympathies. The death penalty can reinforce the ways of thinking of a society that symbolically cares more for victims of crime. And then your wording of "barbarians" and "scumbag" in this issue has a symbolic significance in the opposite direction.
Cost, is the result of organizations and a general faction that are pro releasing even guilty criminals. And which also care about race and support a pro black criminal two tier system. And the way to deal with this, is to target the organizations, and the faction who are pushing this agenda even outside the death penalty.
Additionally, there are other valid considerations where the death penalty would apply. Cost and showing more care for victims than criminals which is connected to general anticrime policies is one thing. Others can be for example, mob bosses that remain influential, or people who would continue to murder inside prison, or the possibility of people being released in the future, by a more pro criminal system. At least by executing them now, you don't give them the opportunity to reofend. Which is a realistic issue in the circumstances.
I do agree that harsher treatment is not always better. There are crimes that it would be disproportionate, but these isn't the ones the death penalty is talked about in this debate. Still, empathy even towards offenders has its role. But too much empathy towards the worst criminals, does compete with empathy towards victims and is directly related with policies that help them reoffend.
While there are less passionate opponents of the death penalty who are so for various reasons, the death penalty debate among those who are more animated about it is also to a great extend about people who are willing to call actual murderers as innocents. It is a part of the general pro criminal vs anti-criminal conflict and the general conflict between people who have a wrong, and ironically racist view about black Americans being victimized by a white supremacist anti black system, when the reality is that black Americans are actually the demographic that engages in statistically the more predatory and criminal behavior, and black criminals should be punished for the common good. The response to those who sympathize with murderers and especially sympathize with black murderers, can't be to agree with them that an injustice of any sort is happening to these people. Or that society is failing to fulfill its duty towards them.
Executing criminals that are sufficiently vile is not barbaric, scumbag behavior, or a moral affront.
I guess one area I do agree with people more of your persuasion, is that prisons should not be unsafe, and there should be sufficient oversight so the places have order, are relatively clean, and there isn't violence and rape. Ironically, executing people who murder other inmates in prison, might help with that.
Rehabilitation like punishment is an element of justice, one that like punishment, becomes more significant in certain cases. And this applies more so in the less violent offenses.
Let me try an analogy. I am pro choice of Singerian variant, which means that I don't think that fundamentally, third trimester abortions to the point of infanticide are not evil per se (only evil in so far as someone would like to raise the kid, and is deprived of that chance). However, I think that politically, it is not savvy to campaign for third trimester abortions. There is a significant demographic which is fine with first trimester abortions but which will strictly oppose third trimester ones. Also, the number of cases for third trimester are small compared to the earlier ones. Allowing 3rd trimester abortions will allow pro life radicals to pull a lot of moderates to their side with pictures of dead babies.
I don't think that policy issues generally are resolved better when they become partisan, with each side claiming an extremist position.
For the purpose of my argument, the radical pro life side ("abortions should always be tried as murder") corresponds to BLM radicals ("When we say 'defund the police', we mean abolishing it"). The moderates are the ones who dislike the death penalty or the 3rd trimester abortions, but don't really care too much about Dobbs or criminal justice otherwise. The point of view I am arguing is people who care strongly about criminal justice or abortion rights, and are fine with the death penalty or 3rd trimester abortions, but would lose popular support if they demanded that.
(Another thing to consider is that among the left, the moderates generally refuse to be alienated by the radicals, with the moderates claiming that 'When people demand X, they obviously don't mean Y, but Z'. (X: "defund the police", Y: "abolishing the police", Z: "move some of the police budget to social services" or X: "From the river to the sea", Y: "destroy Israel", Z: "a two state solution").)
Now, you could counter that late abortions are much less popular than the death penalty, and that could be correct, especially if one considers individual jurisdictions like Texas.
I think that we agree that there are some crimes which are similar to means states should use -- with sufficient procedural safeguards -- as punishment (theft, kidnapping). We likely also agree that there are some acts which are considered crimes when random citizens do them which would still be bad it we had the state do them (rape, torture). We seem to have different moral intuitions into which of the two camps the act of killing a person against their will should fall.
FWIW, I do not consider the death penalty with sufficient safe guards for sufficiently evil crimes to be a great moral failing of the US. I don't like it, but only to the point that I will write on the motte about it. I really hated gitmo, though.
I think that justice should strive to be color-blind. If there are more violent criminals in a minority, the way I would spin this is that this very likely means that the non-criminals in that minority are exposed to more crime than suburban Whites. If police is more reluctant to take action against Black men abusing their partners than against White men abusing theirs, then they are failing Black women, which is something the wokes should care about.
You are pro murder in my view if you don't care about killing babies that are sufficiently late term. There can be some very rare exceptions, but supporting it in general is a rightfully hated position.
I don't understand your analogy. How is killing "vile criminals" similar to killing developed babies?
Supporting third trimester abortions is not just not savvy but a position that people find morally abhorrent for valid reasons that are much more understandable than any claim of moral abhorrence towards execution of murderous criminals.
Third trimester abortion is an extreme position. Singerian viewpoint can even support infanticide. In my view, treating after birth bill or immediate abortion as equivalen of murder is also an extreme position. But certainly your position is far worse.
I can understand how "all abortion is murder" can be not savvy electorally. Although, calls of compromise it is very harmful to the right. It's part of the mechanism for why things are so far left, because leftists including leftists who captured influence in right wing circles, ask for more compromise, with the end result the right becoming more of the left.
So, for example as far as late term abortions go, there is nothing wrong with making supporting it a taboo, and even criminal prosecutions of legislators and those doing them. Outside of some few exception.
Not caring too much is so commonly offered by people here as a "moderate position" especially by liberals towards right wingers. It is not a moderate position to not care. It can even be the opposite. It also not sensible to paint valid positions as extreme.
The death penalty is not an extreme position. It might be an unfashionable position in certain countries today, but that doesn't make it an extreme position. I would give you that, it doesn't make you an extremist to oppose the death penalty, weakly. Frankly, I respect to an extend the argument of fear of getting it wrong, or fear of the state abusing its power.
But the animating feelings among those strongly opposing it in discourse I have seen is about this idea of inoccent, framed, or falsely accused, especially black murderers. And how an injustice is done to them.
I would say that the right and people in general need to support valid positions that go against the pieties and orthodoxies of the left and of its associated sacred cows. Ironically easy conformism is the road to the worst extremism and what is fashionable is not something to just compromise and allow others to define, but something that can be fought over and change.
Moving the budget of the police to social services and defunding police somewhat has lead to increase of crime rates and is in fact an extreme position. The so called moderate left have promoted a very distorted picture of the world, and soft on crime and two tier justice policies. As always as narratives of that.
The moderate left are just extremists who are more moderate about their destructive agenda in my view. To a great extend, the moderate left doesn't exist, because what they want which is similiar to the BLM type agenda but not as far, is not moderate! To the extend something that can be considered moderate left exists, which is genuinely moderate, it must be a very small faction.
Fair.
You can't address the problem of pro black bias, by making it all about how blacks suffer more. You reinforce the woke ideology when your opposition to it is about primarily how it hurts blacks more. It can be part of the things you mention that such murderers also harm blacks but you shouldn't adopt the morality that prioritizes blacks.
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The fight is worth it merely to distract that crowd. They aren't the types to stop fighting battles, and if you can have them spending years on end getting death sentences reduced to life in prison, that stops them from shifting the focus to getting pedophiles sentences reduced from life to 3 weeks or whatever cause celeb comes next.
That is a reasonable argument.
I think that you meant "people who have committed sex crimes against children" when you wrote "pedophiles". There is certainly a large overlap between the two groups, but using the one term for the other discards the criminals who are not exclusively attracted to pre-pubescent humans but still fuck kids when the opportunity arises and the poor fucks who find themselves attracted to kids exclusively but don't break any laws regarding their fetish.
Sure. As someone who has prosecuted people who committed sex crimes against children, I assure you we and the police involved in such cases are not so careful with our words. And frankly, all we care about is what you do, not what is in your heart. Its simply like the "you fuck one goat" situation as far as I am concerned.
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Well yes, the death penalty is more expensive than life imprisonment because we imprison these people for twenty years first anyways.
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You oppose capital punishment because you don't have the stomach for it.
I oppose capital punishment because I don't trust the state and its justice system further than I can throw it.
We are not the same.
Have you considered the possibility that this is a case of 'arguments as soldiers'? The parent post implies as much, and I think they are correct.
I think we have had a humane method for executing people for a long time: the guillotine. A society which has to sugarcoat their killings as medical procedures (lethal injections) is simply lying to itself about still having the stomach for killing.
The "society" is a heckler's veto by death penalty opponents. I'd be fine with not making executions look like fake medical procedures. But death penalty opponents would seize upon this and use it as lawfare to stop the execution, so we can't do it. Don't blame "society" for this.
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Not sure how it is elsewhere, but in Texas the people who would vote out politicians that abolish the death penalty don't give a shit- they'd be perfectly happy with hanging, firing squad, the chair, whatever. Lethal injection was just fashionable the last time the topic came up for discussion.
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My reaction to him (putatively, let's say) suffering is that if Canada and others can figure out MAID, it's not a technical problem.
That said, regardless of what he deserves, there is a valuable fence in not engaging in cruelty or barbarity for our own sake. Civilization is discipline and if we wish to impose it on others, we must be willing to impose it on ourselves.
[ Conversely, I accept the observation that since civilization isn't imposing it and is countenancing disorder on a large scale, the breakdown is happening across the board. ]
I agree with your second paragraph. I've gotten a couple replies in this vein, which makes me think I must not have written clearly with regard to viewing the death penalty as a cap on possible punishments. I am not in favor of inflicting additional suffering, it's a gut impulse, but a bad impulse and overriding it with a justice system that allows no further punishment beyond what a firing squad or hangman delivers is my preference.
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I get nervous about the death penalty for the same reason I think it should probably be legal: death is irrecoverable. When the state puts someone to death in error, that is an error that should shake the government to its foundations. Basically everyone involved in allowing that to happen should be removed from government office or employment, permanently, and strictly speaking at least some of the police, lawyers, and judges involved seem to have earned the death penalty themselves as a result. And wrongful execution does seem to happen, sometimes, and the consequences for it happening are basically nil; redistributing a bunch of tax money to the family of the innocent deceased is no solution at all.
But by the same token, when a murderer ends someone's life, there's just literally nothing anyone can do to "make it right." We sometimes allocate money to the bereaved, but their loss is inescapably paltry by comparison to the permanent, irrecoverable loss imposed on the deceased. The death penalty is society's way of saying, "the impossibility of restorative justice in these cases means that Hammurabi is all we have left."
Discourse on this topic is frustrating because a rather labyrinthine motte-and-bailey complex has arisen in connection with the retribution/deterrence/rehabilitation theories of criminal justice. In the United States, at least, we refuse to really commit to any particular theory of criminal justice (probably as a result of the democratic process). Instead, we engage in laundered mob justice, demanding our lawyers dress it up in whatever theory has the best fit, or happens to be in fashion. This strikes me as... inadequate.
So I end up being kind of weakly opposed to the death penalty, more because I tend to despise government than because I have any philosophical objections to executing known murderers. This is all in much the way that I vehemently reject the idea that "all cops are bastards," while comfortably believing that, say, "all traffic cops are bastards" is basically correct.
The thing is that such a standard is literally impossible as long as you actually have a death sentence. And as it stands, the death penalty has been purposely turned into a very expensive, time consuming, and private process that because of the time between sentence and execution it has been neutered of any deterrent effects. And while I think the death penalty should only be used in extreme cases, if we’re going to do it, let’s do it such that it has at least some positive effect of deterring people from committing those particularly bad crimes we’re using it on.
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Okay, but the government does things which can’t be made right all the time. So do individuals. Can’t un-drop the bomb, can’t un-eat that cake, can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. That’s entropy.
But governments can survive scandals, and we might forgive our neighbors, and toothpaste is cheap, anyway. For any detector, the only way to get zero false alarms is never to respond at all. We have some tolerance for errors in proportion to how badly we want something done.
So why is killing different? Why should a mistake costing one life shatter the government? We make decisions with equal permanence, but vastly larger scope, all the time and without insisting on perfection. I don’t think you can develop a permanence-based objection without throwing out most every other core function of government. I’m not sure you can do it without throwing out most core functions of individuals. As soon as interests collide, someone is going to be harmed, and it’ll probably be irrevocable. Any theory which relies on reversing those harms is woefully incomplete.
Keep in mind that the last 4 years have taught us that even intentional mistakes by the government can cost millions of lives. Nobody seems to bat an eye at that (probably because it raised their socioeconomic standing)- whereas the death penalty is not, has the disadvantage of being showy and dramatic, and the media class can't make money off of it.
Isn't "intentional mistake" an oxymoron?
There's a billion possible things ThisIsSin could be referring too, but a simple one would be delaying the COVID vaccine trials so it could not be an October surprise thereby dooming high 4 digit to low 5 digit elderly Americans to dying in winter 2020-2021.
"Intentional mistake" seems like a weird way to describe that. It was an indisputably evil thing done for tactical, realpolitik reasons. The term "mistake" implies that the perpetrators have come to regret that decision, and I very much doubt they have.
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You really think someone would do that? Do the wrong thing on purpose just to spite their enemies?
I don't understand what you mean by "intentional mistake". I understand the concept of doing the wrong thing just for the sake of spiting your enemies. I understand the concept of doing what you thought was the right thing (morally or epistemically) at the time, but later coming to realise you were wrong. But I don't know what "intentional mistake" means in the context in which you're using it.
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Eh? Which part are you talking about?
The simplest explanation is that Daddy Stalin was right about statistics. I don’t find that very compelling from a moral standpoint.
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Amusingly, for largely the same reasons, I find myself mostly ambivalent (and maybe weakly in favor of) the death penalty. IMO for all the advocacy of "life in prison instead," that lifetime in prison isn't recoverable either: "Sorry grandpa, we realize you didn't do it 50 years ago. Here's some cash in exchange for the life you never got" isn't much, if any, better than a mistaken execution. They deserve the same standards of evidence as death penalty cases, at which point we shouldn't really be questioning guilt. The state already claims the right to expend lives in its service or at its discretion --- see The Draft and plenty of generally-approved-of kinetic actions against adversaries, even when those adversaries are citizens, or even the actuarial acceptance of marginal, but measurable increased risks of death in exchange for other goals, like banning DDT.
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I disagree that the death sentence is a qualitatively different punishment from the usual.
We do not have a 100% accurate legal system, or even one that approaches it. It is still, speaking broadly, an acceptable one. I and most people present here have negligible chances of ending up behind bars if we go on leading relatively normal lives.
If I were someone wrongly convicted of a crime, and only released at the hoary age of 80 with a few million dollars as an apology, it isn't much better than being dead. Better, yes, but assuming I was in there for most of my natural life, I would have lived a very substandard existence, I would have lost the opportunities that I cared about.
Life is fungible with time, and time with money.
Look, I get where you're coming from about the irrecoverable nature of death, but I think we're missing the forest for the trees here. Sure, death is final - but so is losing decades of your life to imprisonment. Many seem to consider that there's there's this huge, qualitative difference between execution and long-term incarceration, but I'm not convinced it's as big as we make it out to be.
Think about it - if you're wrongfully convicted at 25 and spend the next 40 years in prison, only to be exonerated at 65, what exactly have you recovered? You've lost the prime of your life, missed out on career opportunities, relationships, family, and pretty much everything that makes life worth living.
Most of us need to donate a decade or two of our lives laboring to make ends meet. And (for the moment), death has been an inevitability for 97 billion anatomically modern humans. You steal my life savings, and I can draw up a figure for the years of my life you've stolen for me.
Keeping someone alive in custody for decades is expensive. Yet, the damage done, if done wrongly, cannot be trivially reversed.
Executing someone, in the USA, even those guilty beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt, is somehow more expensive, but that speaks more to political opposition and organizational failure than the price of a bullet or a noose. It is not intrinsically difficult or expensive to end a human life, quite the opposite.
You mentioned the idea of Hammurabi being all we have left when restorative justice is impossible. I'd argue that this applies just as much to life sentences as it does to the death penalty. In both cases, we're essentially saying, "We can't undo the harm done, so we're going to remove this person from society permanently."
And that may as well be cheaply. Because the rest of us are paying for it with our finite time and money. Not without due process, extra care even, but the kind of people who end up on Death Row aren't particularly sympathetic characters if the recent discussion about the questionable candidates that the Innocence Project were forced to advocate for are any indication.
I'm an unabashed transhumanist. I think there is a very significant probability that human lifespans could be made nearly unbounded in the span of our current life expectancies. I think it's a tragedy that anyone dies, especially today, when the end is potentially in sight. That only changed the values of the calculus, not the core of it. Still, beyond wishful optimism, I know no reason to assume that humans can live literally forever, not while thermodynamics and Feynmann's quip about it stands. But as the world exists, reformative and restorative justice seem farcical to me. The closest we can get those congenitally inclined towards to criminality to desist within the tender caress of a prison is to age them out of their proclivities. While still outside, with the fear of swift and likely punishment (hence why the perceived odds of being brought to justice outweigh the kind of justice involved, the death penalty isn't a detterent over life in prison). Thus, without access to better ways of removing the crime from the criminal, we keep them away from those they might hurt. Maybe one day we'll be able to edit minds or genes to turn even the most murderous maniac into someone who sobs at the idea of hurting a fly, but that day isn't today. If the possibility of killing someone before that eventuality seems too much, oh well, cryopreserving their brains in a vat preserves some possibility of reform even after death, and is more than their victims received. It's a rounding error compared to the costs of trial, prison, or execution at the end.
Almost all societies recognize the necessity of governments making hard decisions, often unpleasant decisions, about who goes behind bars and who dies. We simply have to choose how to calibrate that curve, decide how many innocent men die and how many guilty men go free. For a functional society, the optimal number of either is not zero. When you bite that bullet, I genuinely don't see any reason to be squeamish about the most villainous biting theirs.
The only extra care given to capital cases in the United States is the bifurcated nature of the trial with both guilt and penalty phases and the requirement for death-qualified juries. While these impart some additional amount of time and expense, the biggest contributing factor is the lengthy appeals process. This is what's usually in the crosshairs of people who want to speed up the execution process, because it's the most obvious contributing factor; the trials may take a bit longer, but people don't start the clock on these things until after the sentence is pronounced. The problem, though, isn't that the appeals process is any different for capital cases than it is for other cases, but that the entire process is almost always utilized.
Most criminal convictions in the US are the result of plea bargains, and there isn't much to appeal in those cases. You could theoretically claim that an incompetent attorney talked you into taking a bad deal, but winning that appeal would at best get you a trial, at which you could be convicted and sentenced to a stiffer penalty. So no point in appealing that unless the situation is desperate or your attorney really likes your chances of winning. Also if there's a DNA exoneration or something like that, but those are rare. Even without a plea, though, most defendants don't appeal because it simply isn't worth it. Defendants who do appeal will usually only do so when there are clear avenues for appeal, and they will limit their appeal to those avenues. They'll also usually stop after losing at the first stage, and will only press further if there's a serious constitutional issue at stake.
Death penalty cases never result from plea bargains, and the defendants have no incentive to not file every appeal they can. So rather than focus on a few key issues they'll throw the entire record into question. Challenge everything in there that can be challenged. And capital cases are complicated and bifurcated so they have incredibly long records. This means the prosecutor has to wade through thousands of pages of trial transcripts to properly contest the appeal, and he's on the public payroll. So take your appeal to the intermediate appellate court and wait a couple years. When that appeal is rejected, take it to the state supreme court to be rejected (some states have tried to short-circuit this process by giving all capital appeals directly to the supreme court). Then maybe appeal that ruling to the US Supreme Court. They probably won't take it, but you'll by some time waiting for them to deny cert.
By this point, your appeals are exhausted, but that's not the end of it. Now you start filing for post-conviction relief. This is where you argue that defects outside the record merit reconsideration. Things like ineffective assistance of counsel, discovery of new evidence, and an intervening court decision. These also take a while. But then after that you get to argue the same things in a Federal habeas corpus petition. All of this by itself take a long time, but in a significant number of cases the defendant actually wins an appeal or a motion for relief. The thing is that winning these doesn't get you out of jail, but simply gets you a new trial, or a new sentencing phase. So now the defendant goes back to square one (or two) and starts the whole process over again.
The incentives in this process line up so that the goal is to expend as much time as possible. Someone serving a ten year sentence isn't going to do it this way because he's probably going to be out of prison before the appeals are exhausted. Someone serving a life sentence isn't going to do this because if they can theoretically get out they want out as fast as possible; buying time does nothing. But death row inmates aren't that stupid (or at least their attorneys aren't). Any postponement is a bonus, even if the end result is the same.
I honestly don't see any way around this. I understand the sentiment around not wanting to waste time, but these are protections that are enjoyed by everybody, and we have to look beyond death row if we want to scuttle them. Yeah, most death row inmates are total pieces of shit, but in some cases there really were serious procedural mistakes, in some cases there really was ineffective counsel, and there occasionally are exonerations. I'm not comfortable with the idea of intentionally scuttling constitutional protections across the board for the sole purpose of making it easier to execute people. I'm not sure what exactly is gained from that.
I think the answer is 'fast track appeals, so capital cases who appeal their sentence get a hearing almost immediately, and if they lose, it's over quickly'.
That sounds good in theory, but the reality is that court backlogs aren't the reason these cases take so long to resolve, and trying to force the issue actually increases the chance that the prosecution loses. Technically speaking, appeals are on a strict timeline. In reality, like most things in law, nothing is that strict. I can't speak for all states, but here's how it works in Pennsylvania:
After sentencing, the defense has 10 days to file a post-trial motion. This is where you list all the errors you think the court made and politely ask the court to reconsider them. Since you only have ten days to file, though, you pro-forma list every adverse decision the judge made. At this point, the judge has 120 days to grant or deny the relief. Since these motions are rarely granted, the default is that if no decision has been rendered in 120 days, they are automatically denied. Since this doesn't require the judge to actually do anything, you can expect to wait the full 120 days. Then you have 30 days to file notice of appeal. Once the notice is filed, the court will send a docketing statement, that has a deadline by which you must file a Statement of Errors with the trial court. Except you just got the transcript after 4 months, and this transcript is 11,000 pages long, and you need time to go through it to catch all the errors. So 2 weeks before the Statement is due, you file a motion with the court for an extension, which they grant, because the prosecution doesn't oppose it, because if they did then defense counsel would never agree to their extension requests. So the deadline gets extended by a month.
Once the Statement is finally submitted, the trial judge has to actually respond to every argument. And he's going to take his sweet time responding because he's about to start another trial which he isn't about to postpone for the third time just so he can respond to your long-shot motion, so add another couple months onto that. Once he's explained why your arguments are bullshit, you have to file a brief in support of your motion, which you nominally have 30 days to do but which you're going to ask for an extension on because you've raised so many issues that you need time to properly research the issues and apply the law to the facts in this monster transcript. And the prosecution again raises no opposition, because they don't exactly have an attorney assigned to handling this appeal and the trial team are all busy trying to incarcerate criminals who aren't in jail indefinitely and don't have the time to spend going through that 11,000 page transcript themselves and countering all of your arguments. After all, if they contest your motion then you're not exactly going to be inclined to grant them any extensions, which means their brief would be dogshit and you'd waive oral argument while the appeals court remands the case for a new trial and they're back to square one. So you get your extension. And since you got your extension, you're in no position to request their request for an extension, and they get one as well. And once you get their brief you now have 14 days to file a reply brief, which you probably don't do unless they made a particularly bad argument, but anyway. Now, a year and a half after sentencing, we're finally at the point where the case can even get scheduled for argument.
The upshot is that it's not so much the court's time that's the problem but the attorneys' time. We can certainly increase the speed of these appeals by hiring dedicated appellate teams for local DA's offices, but these offices don't have the budgets to fully staff their offices as it is. Why would we prioritize these cases? These defendants have already been convicted and are going to be in jail forever and a day regardless of what happens. Every capital case that gets fast tracked means another case gets bumped. Is this really more important than a free speech case? Or a case where there are legitimate questions about illegal searches? Or even a commercial case where the law is genuinely ambiguous? Shouldn't we dedicate what limited resources we have toward prosecuting crimes where the defendants haven't been convicted and might not be? Or do we raise local taxes to give DA's offices more money? That won't sit well in red areas. In Washington County, a rural/exurban county outside of Pittsburgh, the new DA has decided to make a statement by charging every murder he can as a capital case. His first year in office there were 9 murders in a county of about 200,000 people. He charged 5 capital cases, including 1 woman whose only connection to the crime was that her fingerprint had been found on a shell casing. This isn't a particularly large office. He probably could've gotten plea deals on most of these, but instead he has to waste taxpayer money on a quixotic attempt at securing the death penalty in a state that has a moratorium on executions, and that is considering abolishing capital punishment on the grounds that it's an inefficient generator of the bullshit described above.
I greatly doubt that this would actually result in expedited processes. The legal profession is hardly alone in finding that the amount of putative work that exists tends to increase to meet the number of individuals that are doing that work, but it's a stark example of the phenomenon. The United States has no shortage of attorneys, but legal proceedings have tended to increase in length rather than becoming quick and straightforward processes. Much like many of the other issues caused by endless legal wrangling and treating obvious bullshit as worth 120 day waiting periods, these aren't problems with no known solution to man, but problems created by the legal profession and the love its practitioners hold for artificial complication.
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Nominating for a late-in-the-game AAQC purely on the strength of that marvelous closing sentence.
Heh. I can't resist to throw in some alliteration, a pinch of prpsody, and I'm glad someone appreciates it!
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I agree with pretty much all of this, though I’d add the autobiographical aside that my views on the death penalty have gone from strongly opposed on principle a decade or so ago to weakly opposed on procedure today. Extrapolating my direction of travel, I can see myself overcoming my procedural scruples in time.
That said, it’s quite puzzling to me from a rationality and decision-theoretic framework to incorporate these kinds of predicted value-shifts into your views. For example, imagine I anticipate becoming significantly wealthier next year, and I observe that previously when I’ve become wealthier my views on tax policy have become more libertarian. What’s the rational move here? Should I try to fight against this anticipated value shift? Should I begin incorporating it now? Should I say what will be will be, and just wait for it to happen? Should I actively try to avoid becoming wealthier because that will predictably compromise my values?
Related to some AI discussions around final vs instrumental goals, and under what circumstances it can be rational to consent to a policy that will shift one’s terminal values.
Isn't this the problem that Rawls' Veil of Ignorance is designed to solve?
Given, that is normally offered to justify a socialist solution to problems. The Veil of Ignorance is offered to the rich man to say, imagine if you were poor, wouldn't you prefer a socialist system?
But there's nothing in the mechanics of the Veil of Ignorance that prevents it from being used the opposite way: imagine you were rich, would you dislike any of the redistributive policies you currently advocate for?
Given, it suffers from the flaw of many philosophical tools, in that it relies on "then think really hard about it" as the final step. But it's the clear solution to the value shifts: try to imagine a system of values that would appeal to you regardless of your position.
I don't at all agree with Rawls, but I think the point is that there are far fewer rich than poor.
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There is, the mechanic is "would you hate being poor in a dog-eat-dog world more than you'd hate being taxed a lot as a rich man?".
@anon_
Sure, but that's just a percentage thing, easily disposed of. Rawls would tell you that some degree of redistribution is optimal, but it can still justify Capitalism on a "more goods produced" logic, and set the level of redistribution to maximize everyone's happiness. That's a logic that holds from behind a veil of ignorance. What one shouldn't do within Rawls' paradigm is undertake policies that are not overall utility-maximizing.
Nor is mere quantity of poor and rich people enough to make anything justifiable. Neutral between whether I am the one or the other, I can still feel that there is some level of "fans harassing famous person" that isn't morally correct, for example.
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The kind of values shift I have in mind is one that is indifferent to one's position, i.e., not just filling in the variable according to one's position within it. For example, imagine you have a choice of three college courses you can take: one on libertarianism, one on Marxism, and one on library research. The first two are probably going to be more interesting, but you're also aware that they're taught by brilliant scholars of the relevant political persuasion, and you'll be acquainted with relevant rationally persuasive evidence in support of this position. Consequently, you know that if you take the libertarianism course, you'll come away more libertarian, if you take the Marxist course you'll come away more Marxist, and if you take the library research course you'll come away knowing more about libraries. Assuming the first two courses would indeed involve a values transition, under what circumstances might it be rational to undergo it?
If you really knew in advance that the courses contain rationally persuasive evidence for X, you should immediately believe X even without taking the courses based on your knowledge that the rationally persuasive evidence exists.
I doubt that you know that the courses contain rationally persuasive evidence for X. What you do know is that after taking such courses, you feel that you have been rationally persuaded. But being irrationally persuaded feels like being rationally persuaded.
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On the off-chance you aren't aware of this already, a similar thought experiment is discussed in Parfit's "Reasons and Persons" and Korsgaard's "Self-Constitution".
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I'm not sure it's ever rational to choose which values you will be inculcated in and then forget all about the choice. Ie if you take the course on Marxism, you should later realize that fact and keep it in mind when making value judgments.
Nor am I sure such a thing is entirely possible. I know I spent years of my life trying to shop for a religion that would inculcate values that I liked, only to realize that it was impossible to really believe in a religion learned under those circumstances.
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I think it's the sign of a particularly self-aware mind. The spectrum would go like this:
Personally I have always had a hard time pinning down my actual beliefs. I have the habit of being a devil's advocate in the extreme, defending positions whenever I see a hint that they might actually be defensible. So I would probably incorporate the anticipated value shift, even if I find myself on shakier ground to defend for now.
I'd go one step further. What he expressed is closer to
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I first saw this taxonomy on the perhaps slightly unfortunately named Hoe Math YouTube channel. Is that where you caught it too, or is it a more established framework?
No, that's just how I schematize it personally. Thanks for the link, though, that's a very interesting video!
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Aren’t you and @Folamh3 excluding the most common, most defensible objection? Would either of those accounts be dissatisfied with life in prison?
(Edit: @gattsuru pointed out that, yes, the Aurelius guy remained 100% partisan about life without parole. And in one of the other cases I cited, too! Mea culpa.)
You can see a similar conclusion in other cases. Clemency is portrayed as (specifically Christian) mercy and a chance to further reduce the false alarm rate. More cynically, it’s a way for governments to look responsive to public outcry without actually releasing a possible murderer.
The status of Oklahoma’s parole board is interesting. It looks like they’ve recommended clemency 5 times, always on grounds of inhumanity, and always on a 3-2 or 3-1 vote. But there’s no shortage of cases where they decline to recommend it. Clearly there are limits to any stonewalling. Regardless, Governor Stitt usually declines the recommendation.
I'm not sure I follow. I suspect that they would be dissatisfied, but I don't know that and I don't wish to mischaracterize them if I'm wrong.
Consider the response to a commuted death sentence in the same state:
These protestors had more skin in the game, more publicity and a better case for innocence, but they were still cheering for life without parole. I think that suggests a true distaste for killing.
In the absence of other remarks on those Twitter accounts, I’d assume they feel the same, and would be glad to accept commutation even though that admits guilt.
Uh:
Well, there you have it.
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The most defensible objection to what?
To the death penalty.
I think most death penalty protestors are neither evil nor conspiratorial. They just really reject killing. That leads to protesting whether or not innocence is in question.
See my other comment. I don't think this explanation describes all anti-death penalty activists.
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I'm not an absolutist. Or, let me phrase it this way: to the extent that I'm opposed to the death penalty, it's not due to an overriding commitment to pacifism. If a man were to witness another man murdering his wife, for example, I would not fault him for disposing of the murderer in whatever manner he pleased. When we speak of the "death penalty" though, we aren't speaking of an impassioned response to a personal injustice; we are instead of speaking of an impersonal state apparatus, one which operates over vast distances and vast quantities of time, and which publicizes (the knowledge of) its executions as a spectacle. Now things are different.
Nietzsche said most of what needs to be said in On the Genealogy of Morality, specifically in the second essay, which deals with the historical genesis of criminal punishment:
The right to inflict misery - or rather, the right to know that misery is being inflicted on your behalf, the right to know that somewhere out there, people are "getting what they deserve" - is its own reward, a reward that the state so generously apportions out to citizens as an incentive for good behavior. It is straightforwardly pleasurable; there are hardly any complexities or nuances to mention here. The idea that justice is painful to those that mete it out, the idea that it is only done begrudgingly and through gritted teeth, is of course nonsense - all advocates of "justice" like to imagine themselves as the executioner. Legal executions serve as a socially acceptable, state-sanctioned outlet for cruelty that cannot permissibly find expression elsewhere. The erotic pleasure of the business itself is the operative animating impulse behind the expansion of the state execution apparatus - likely ahead of any utilitarian concerns about reducing crime, and certainly ahead of any concern for a formal, symmetrical notion of justice.
Perhaps this state of affairs is the only alternative to a society of unrestrained vigilante justice (although, if that's true, it can only be true of a given culture at a given time - many countries have abolished the death penalty without descending into madness). Perhaps this impulse - the impulse to delight in the misery of others, the impulse to pawn off one's own injustices by proxy onto the condemned - must necessarily engage in subterfuge, must necessarily take on the false appearance of "justice" while it performs its vitally important social function. But, that needn't prevent us from performing an honest analysis of its origins.
Your post adduces evidence for the view I have outlined:
If it were about justice, why would it not matter who pulled the trigger? A life for a life - that's at least a plausible principle of justice. But "a life for an intent to take a life", or "a life for being an accomplice to someone else taking a life" - now things are no longer so clear. The fact that such nuances are of little interest to you indicates that the execution itself is the prize for you. Of course you can find other "tough on crime" advocates who don't even want to stop at murder, but are happy to advocate capital punishment for rape, assault, even perhaps petty theft in the case of repeat offenders. Is it really about justice at that point, or is it about casting an ever widening net so we have enough sacrifices to fuel the revenge machine?
Are you careful to align the painfulness of any proposed execution with the amount of pain that was originally inflicted by the murderer on his victims? Or do we just have open license to abuse convicted murderers however we want, for as long as we want? If it's the latter, is that really justice? Or is your motivation something else?
I hold both men equally responsible for the killing. You might have had a point if one of them was only an accomplice after the fact, but from my reading they both went into that business fully intent on murdering the staff member in question.
Hitler doesn't have to personally turn on the gas in Auschwitz to be responsible for the Holocaust.
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ISTM that the reason that primates take pleasure in punishing wrongdoing is that it is group-selectively-adaptive to evolve to take such pleasure. Cue all those game-theory results (I assume you've read them, otherwise will cite) in which participants willingly pay to punish defectors even at personal cost.
Same as eating a ripe piece of fruit or seeing a beautiful flower, the pleasure in punishing the wicked might be the result of evolution creating a brain that maximizes fitness.
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It's important to note here that Nitrogen gas is now being used, because anti-death penalty ideologues have lobbied chemical and drug companies to stop supplying the materials for the prior method (lethal injection). So for anti-death penalty advocates to point to nitrogen asphyxiation as cruel is to decry the results of one's own side.
Cruel and unusual punishments were banned at the founding to move past the medieval drawing and quartering, but definition creep has reached the point where it is used to ban the death penalty by the back door. We must settle on some standard of pain that is necessary and work from there.
Well, the catch there is that places like Oklahoma did manage to screw up lethal injections in new and exciting ways.
We don’t have a very good track record standardizing pain or suffering, either.
The lethal injections were screwed up because drug companies stopped providing the drugs, right? IIRC the original lethal injection was a three drug cocktail with the killing agent being specialized potassium salt(and also a sedative and anesthetic), but as it became harder to obtain the necessary chemicals states switched to using a lethal dose of horse tranquilizer, which is less instant and humane.
Well, they had that stumble, and ended up switching to midozalam. But they also managed to inject the wrong drugs.
Fortunately, potassium acetate works just fine.
Though a nice sharp blade would work too, with less fiddling. For all its indubitably French origins, the guillotine really fits well with America -- the execution technique of the nobility, packaged and commoditized for the masses.
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I'm biased here in that I find lethal injection disgusting for humanist reasons, I think it is below the dignity of a murderer to be put down like a dog, that it is more dignified to be hung or shot, to be blamed. The hanged man is a moral actor whose actions we deemed worthy of death, the lethally injectee strapped to a gurney is reduced to an object to be disposed of with minimal fuss.
Technically, there is one state where the default method of execution is shooting- Utah(technically the condemned is given a choice between the firing squad and lethal injection, but in practice every execution in Utah has chosen a firing squad).
Revealed preferences?
Mormons believe that atonement for murder requires the literal shedding of blood, so that might be part of it in some cases, given that this is Utah.
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Entering a criminal conspiracy to point a gun at man's head suffices for me to say that someone is morally culpable if that trigger gets pulled. Other people will draw the line in different spots. I'd be fine not executing Littlejohn, not knowing the details of the case, but I'm also fine with sentencing him to death. He was tried by a jury of his peers and sentenced accordingly. Had they decided that he was substantially less culpable due to mitigating circumstances that aren't obvious, I wouldn't really question it. The point in the Littlejohn case isn't that he absolutely must be executed, but that it's absurd to claim there was some horrible injustice done by executing him. His actions clearly and directly led to an innocent man being shot in the face and dying, execution is perfectly acceptable as a punishment.
I think I covered this explicitly in my post - my gut feeling that someone deserves worse should be overridden and limited. It's trivial to imagine worse punishments than being put in front of a firing squad, one of the legitimate goals that I think is served with the death penalty is providing finality without becoming perverse. I am not in favor of deliberately painful executions. I have explicitly stated that I think it's immoral to deliberately condemn someone to a lifetime of physical and mental torture - executing them is the moral solution to avoid such a temptation.
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To interrogate this a little: do you think that attempted murder should have the same punishment as accomplished murder?
Historically attempted murder has often drawn a lower penalty than completed murder, with there being an underlying assumption that failure to complete the act indicates some lack of mens rea to do so, or that cosmically it is wrong to execute a man without another body on the other side of the scale. After all, for Hammurabi "An eye for an eye" represented a gentler moderation rather than a harsher extreme, by that logic one cannot execute one's enemies unless they have taken a life.
One can, of course, focus on the mens rea and say that it's the evil intent that is most important.
I'm just curious where you come down on that argument.
Historically both attempted murder and murder were punished by hanging. More recently as criminal justice evolved into a more formalized system attempt murder was considered less serious by, usually, 1 tick. So murder would be a class 1 (or A or whatever based on the state) then attempt murder was class 2, which realistically meant 30 years instead of 40 or something along those lines.
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It's a difficult question, but there is a compelling (to me) consequentialist argument as to why it should not have the same punishment. It's a variation on the Dazexiang Uprising issue; if the consequences are the same, the moral event horizon of having "nothing left to lose" is crossed earlier, which could harden the resolve of would-be murderers in cases where they might have otherwise hesitated. It might also encourage them to take more extreme, deadlier methods because the risk of their victim surviving and becoming a witness becomes too great. One might chose to go with shooting or stabbing when they would have gone with a less effective "softer" poisoning because the downside of failure has increased dramatically.
*EDIT: Context for those unfamiliar with the Dazexiang Uprising story; two Qin dynasty officers who were going to be late taking their men to defend a village figured that since the penalty for lateness (no matter the reason) was death, they might as well take their chances in an uprising since the penalty for that was the same.
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My take on it is that punishment should more be based on what is best for the rest of us. Do we want to live next to this person? Is this person a massive risk for the rest of us and a drag on society? My main argument for the death penalty is that we are far better off without these people. They high risk.
To commit such extreme crimes they most likely have an outlier awful personality with high levels of psychopathy, poor impulse control and low IQ. They are pretty much the extreme left tail of the bell curve. We are simply better off without them. Also getting rid of these people is a eugenic measure that is highly effective as we would be removing the people with the worst possible traits.
Yes, but not unlike the problem of schools (nobody cared when dumb kids were dumb when everyone was white, but thanks to Multiculturalism if too many dumb kids are non-white you need to stop teaching algebra or calculus to anyone, and abolish standardized testing, and remove all discipline) we now have a problem with the death penalty, or even imprisoning anyone. When the country was majority white, I'm not sure anyone really cared if people who obviously murdered someone were put to death. I'm not sure anyone cared if a bunch of poor whites from the same zipcode were always getting thrown in jail. Add a dash of Multiculturalism however, and suddenly we aren't allowed to have a functional civilization anymore. To many non-whites end up in jail or get the death penalty? Time to start depolicing and just letting people go. Sure they might murder someone you love a week later, but at least we won't be racist.
What are you talking about?
Multicultural America is the only majority white country left that has the death penalty.
When England permanently put a moratorium on executions, it was 90% white British.
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The US movement to abolish the death penalty goes back to the 18th century, when multicultural considerations weren't a thing. I will leave this link to Perplexity's quick summary that has further links.
You are correct that currently people are concerned with the death penalty in part because it affects black men more than white men. (And that nobody cares that it affects white men more then Asian men or black women, etc.)
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Uh, do you understand the history of the death penalty in the USA? Until the very late 20th century, the death penalty was quite strongly associated with, and mostly used on, large black populations.
That’s not an argument against, but the death penalty being in heavy use against blacks has been going on for a long time, and recent shifts in demographic composition are not the reason many opponents tie it to civil rights.
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The SCOTUS-ordered moratorium on the death penalty was in place 1972-1976, at which time the US was still roughly 80% non-Hispanic white. European countries mostly abolished the death penalty back when they were still monoethnic. The other only other unquestionably first-world country to execute people on a regular basis is Singapore, which is rather notoriously not monoethnic.
So if anything, the empirical evidence points towards monoethnic countries being more abolitionist, not less.
Does China count as a first world country?
No. They are somewhere between Mexico and Thailand in GDP per capita, whether you use nominal or PPP.
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They don't use it often, but Japan still has the death penalty, has executed 98 people in the last 25 years, and has done as recent as 2022. Taiwan restored the death penalty in 2010 and it enjoys substantial polling popularity.
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Japan and Taiwan both execute people often enough to qualify, no?
It's arguable. Taiwan has been executing slightly less than one person a year lately. Japan averages about three a year if you don't count the Aum Shinriyko sarin plotters - although they appear to be passing more death sentences than that given that Wikipedia says they have a backlog built up of 107 inmates on death row.
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/states-landing
Looking through states that everyone agrees maintain the death penalty, there's lots of low-single digit numbers of annual executions and lots of 'carry out one execution every other year' type states. Like yes, they're much smaller than Taiwan or especially Japan, but Taiwan and Japan have much lower murder rates- and Japan in practice seems to use the death penalty for much the same things as retentionist US states. When you take that into account, a multiple murderer is possibly more likely to get the death penalty in Japan than in the US south.
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Complete aside, but I've always been curious about the word "interrogate" when used in this way. It's such an aggressive and presumptuous substitute for "investigate" that until more recently was most associated with criminal interrogation--an inherently manipulative, unfair, and coercive type of investigation. I can't say these connotations are inappropriate given the people who tend to use the term "interrogate" in this context, but usually they're better at picking their euphamisms to sound nice and cuddly.
It’s a relatively standard word in the contemporary philosophical literature and it doesn’t have any aggressive connotations (you can “interrogate” a position you’re friendly to as well).
I associate it with post-2000s prolifieration of predominantly lefty critical theory type work, though it has clearly been adopted more broadly. I don't think it carries the aggressive connotations in those intellectual communities today, but I suspect outsiders would still make those associations. I also see it frequently used in a struggle-session way.
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To me the use of the term indicates to be that Walter and I are playing Socratics, where you offer an answer to one question and then your interlocutor asks additional questions meant to pull out more information about your original position. By contrasting the answers to similarly situated cases we produce more nuanced rules or better understandings of underlying logic.
In my mind it's the opposite of manipulation, I'm inviting Walt to play the game with me. He can choose not to.
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I'm fine with biting the moral luck bullet. Drunk driving is the clearest example of this for me, where there is obviously no literal intent to kill anyone, but we punish those who do kill someone much more harshly than those that are merely negligent. I have no intuitive reaction to how attempted murder should be punished, but it seems basically fine to me to not escalate punishment to execution without a successful murder.
So why does that not extend to the accomplice, rather than the triggerman, in a felony murder case? What if witnesses testify that the triggerman was at the counter alone while his accomplice was in another room, but cannot identify which was which? It seems odd to say, well we wouldn't kill both of them if we knew which one was which, but since we don't know which one was which we'll kill them both.
Though I'll note that capital Felony Murder seems like a fine rule to me in that a felony is a sufficient predicate for an execution, but we can draw ever more outre cases. How many Jan-6th type "felony trespassers" can you charge with the murder of Ashli Babbitt? Felony murder has been used to charge felons for the deaths of their accomplices, on the theory that violence was a predictable result of their felonies on the day, and so the deaths of their accomplices were a predictable result of the violence they invited. We're only looking for a sufficiently tyrannical prosecutor.
Let's set up a hypothetical: five guys are at a party, all drinking, assume the same amount and tolerance for the sake of the hypo, all clearly plan to drive home. Four of them are caught at a highway checkpoint and arrested, the last is not so "lucky" he took backroads and crashed into oncoming traffic and killed another driver. Should the four men who did not kill anyone be charged just as harshly?
See this post for some elaboration. In the Littlejohn case, I don't think it's obligatory that he be executed, just that there is no miscarriage of justice in doing so. Had the jury gone the other way, I wouldn't have follow-up questions for them, it's fine.
Well, yeah, this is where a jury of your peers comes in, plus a little help from a judge in sentencing. I don't think planning on armed robbery where things going as planned results in someone getting a gun pointed at their face is all that similar to the guys that walked into the capital and were technically trespassing. Many lacked proximity to violence that would look like any sort of meaningful moral culpability. Further, Babbitt died because she charged a semi-fortified position with an armed officer there - her own death could easily be avoided with her own decisions. I get your point, but ultimately, it's hard to say much other than that this is exactly why judgment is relevant. There is no scalable, generalizable principle that would lead me to treat literally all plausible felony murder cases the same; two thugs deciding to knock over a convenient store and one of them shooting the owner in the face is pretty much a canonical example of what felony murder cases should be about though.
If the concern is really just that felony murder is too flexible a charge, I may well agree, but this isn't the case where that seems relevant to me.
Nope. Like I said, I'm just willing to bite the bullet on the moral luck there. I can come up with reasons why I'm willing to do so, but I kind of suspect that they're all just post facto, formulated to serve the intuition rather than the other way around. On the flip side, if there was a clearly articulated law that DUI is always punished equally harshly, based on the known facts about the level of inebriation rather than the outcome of the driving, I wouldn't feel a great deal of sympathy for the guys at the checkpoint that got "unfairly" punished. Some behaviors are beyond the pale - whether drunk driving is one or not seems less obvious to me than whether armed robbery is. In either case, my intuition is that your punishment should coincide with the actual outcomes rather than a probabilistic model of outcomes, but I don't think I can muster a great defense of that position at the moment.
This aligns with my basic intuition, I'd agree that the jury verdict should absolutely be respected absent a near certainty of error.
This, though, strikes me as a little shakier:
The armed robbers planned for a gun to be pointed at someone's face. The crowd charging at armed police officers intended for someone to confront the armed police, that it wasn't them personally who ran into that police officer is moral luck.
Though your point about Juries is well taken.
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My straightforward argument against the death penalty as that I'm pro-life in all cases (thus, anti-abortion and anti-death penalty).
I believe this because I think there has to be a hard fix on the sanctity of human life. If there is room for slippage, slippage does indeed occur and, after a few decades, you have what we have today - several million people "okay" with third trimester and even post delivery abortion. To be intellectually consistent, I don't think we should have that kind of slippage on the other end of life either (ask me how I feel about assisted suicide!)
On the death penalty side, while the cases you highlight are incredibly egregious, I don't think the State should be in the business of killing its own citizens. I like your argument about it not mattering who pulled the trigger. In death penalty cases, it seems to me like they're constructed to diffuse responsibility through a heavily bureaucratic process so that no individual has to bear full responsibility for condemning a person to death and then effecting that sentence. The prosecutor is simply adhering to their office's guidelines, the Judge allows for the consideration or pursuit of the death penalty, the jury validates that such evidence exists and was compelling, the hangman simply carries out that which has already been handed down. Who "pulled the trigger?" It doesn't matter. We've just bureaucrat-brained ourselves into collectively thinking "surely, not me!"
I also believe in the idea that someone can find meaning and redemptive power in their life even in the most awful conditions. Man's Search For Meaning is a small book about how even in Auschwitz, a guy was able to find a reason to keep going. After his experience, Frankl then had a full career. If I can forgive anyone for, instead, curling up into a bottle forever, it would be a literal holocaust survivor. I have little personal sympathy to criminals, but I believe they should have the ability to choose to try to find redemptive meaning. Now, that does come with caveats...
I absolutely believe there are many types of crimes that not only deserve but necessitate strict incarceration for one's entire natural lifespan. There are people who are either too dangerous or who have violated the social contract too egregiously to ever be let out again. They should be caged until they die. Though difficult, I do believe they still could find their own redemptive meaning even in prison. Finding that meaning, however, is not a ticket out of jail.
Yes, I am that guy that thinks that Red from Shawshank Redemption should've never been granted parole.
I don't write any of this to convince you. I'm trying to offer the best description of what / how / why I am anti-death penalty.
EDIT:
@Hoffmeister25 has a death penalty argument that I don't agree with, but 100% respect. As I read him, he believes swift execution is necessary to control the potential spread of defective genes, as well as to give clear and obvious consequences for violating the social contract. This is a consistent and honest opinion. But I worry about the "slippage" here - do we eventually turn into a state where one's potential for violent crime results in a minority-report style pre-execution? That may seem hyperbolic, but, you know, think about it duuuuude.
First, a tangent: this "pro-life in all cases" mindset seems to me a case of a whole swathe of society confusing a slogan with a moral principle. It's baffling to me why so many on both sides seem to have the idea that killing should either be absolutely indiscriminate or not done at all. Most of us are pro-jailing criminals but no one has ever insisted that we ought to jail babies as well to be consistent.
If you are a pacifist or have a principled objection to the state executing people in cold blood, by all means make that case, but abortion has absolutely nothing to do with it.
To interact with the case that you do make, I'm not sure if your slippery slope argument is supposed to apply to abortion / euthanasia only or to the death penalty as well. If it is aimed at the death penalty, I don't think it's well-supported and would be hard to meaningfully reason about given that practically every society in history up until the past hundred years has put some people to death. There's essentially no example one could look at of stepping onto the slippery slope since humanity has always existed on the supposed slope.
Your other support doesn't seem to be an argument but just an expression of your belief that the state ought not to be executing its own citizens. I think it ought to be, because the only human justice possible for a murder is the execution of the murderer, and only the state is in a position to do this with due process which at least attempts to ensure that the guilty is punished rather than the weak. What's your support for the belief that the state shouldn't do it?
If responsibility is diffused between many different people in the process of executing someone, that's fine by me as long as the person is actually guilty. They should all feel good for having worked together to achieve the only earthly justice possible under the circumstances. The fact that, in the modern west, most of them don't feel good about it, because they aren't persuaded of the goodness of justice, is a hindrance to the system working well in practice, but not an argument that the death penalty is principally unjust.
While I have problems with 'seamless garment' and 'consistent ethic of life' ideas as theological mandates, they are philosophically consistent- society shouldn't sanction killing people is a sentiment that doesn't preclude jail terms at all.
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I don't think this is a good thing. I don't want societies to put their own citizens to death.
Yes. This was my intent. To offer an explanation of belief for the OP.
Because I believe human life is one of the few things that is intrinsically beyond the State to decide on. Again, as my original post said, I 100% support the State's ability to put you in a box forever and never let you out. What is the meaningful distinction between that and death from the perspective of the State or the aggrieved? Or, to flip it around, what is the marginal utility / justification / satisfaction found in execution versus life imprisonment? If a prisoner is alive, there exists some chance that they may develop sincere feelings of remorse and regret. It'll never be enough to justify their release, but I believe a State ought to give its citizens every last chance to be human. If, as some will argue, some of these prisoners are just beyond-the-pale insane and unpredictably dangerous, I'd offer that raises a much more difficult argument; should the State be in the business of exterminating those we deem mentally incapable? You can see how quickly it gets to eugenics.
Are you raising the utilitarian perspective because that's the grounds for your opposition to a state putting people to death? If so, I'm not sure it works out very well.
This one's pretty easy, it's incredibly expensive to house an unproductive prisoner for 50+ years and incredibly inexpensive to e.g. build a gallows.
But I only address the utilitarian argument because you raised it, my belief is in no way utilitarian and is simply founded on the principle of retributive justice that a murderer should die for justice to be done.
That's cool. I think we're just going to hard disagree on this one.
A society gets to decide if human life is sacred or it isn't. Our current society says "no, not sacred" at the beginning of life and well through to the end. My belief is the opposite - human life is sacred and should never be treated otherwise within the society[1]. There isn't much beyond this strict categorization. That's why, in my original post, I cited hoffmeister as having an argument I disagreed with, but still respect.
I look at justification of beliefs to be a problem of recursion. "I believe x based on y ... I believe y based on z ..." At the end of the day, a lot of belief (and justification for it) boils down to what you place your value in and how various value-having things rank relative to one another. I put human life at the tippy top. Perhaps you don't, or your relative ranking is weaker. Either way, it's fine as long as your own argument is cohesive, which I believe it to be. But you won't be able to reason me out of my belief unless you reason me out of my value rankings. If you have an argument for why human life ought not be my number one value, I'll hear and consider it.
[^1]: When you have issues outside or between societies you're talking about war or something extra-judicial that by its very definition cannot be handled by the same codes and laws as within a society. Let's just leave this as is for now and not try to get into just war theory.
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To "steelman" the opinion you're reacting to, I imagine that the person who wrote "rest in power" didn't do so in spite of recognising that Littlejohn and his accomplice really were collectively responsible for the murder in question. If pressed, I imagine that the person who wrote that would argue that, institutional racism being what it was, he or she doesn't recognise Littlejohn's conviction as legitimate, followed by confecting some conspiratorial just-so story about the cops planting fingerprints on the murder weapon and hiring a lookalike to commit the murder etc. etc. you've all seen the ending of JFK, you know how this story goes.
The reason I put "steelman" in scare quotes is because this alternative interpretation isn't much more generous to the person who wrote that than your interpretation is. Either they're a nutcase who thinks that we should remember this villain fondly in spite of the indisputably monstrous crime he committed (your perspective); or they're more paranoid and deluded about the state of the American criminal justice system in particular (and American society in general) than the average person with QAnon in his Truth Social bio. Either evil, or hopelessly conspiratorial and deluded - not a good look either way.
The anti-death penalty campaigner position is that no one should be executed, and all of the obfuscating about ‘this guy is innocent! He was at the scene of the crime because he stopped to help an old lady change her tire on the way back from volunteering at the homeless shelter!’ Should be read in that light- they don’t want him back out of the streets, they want him not executed, and if calling him a choirboy gets him not executed then they’re happy to do that.
Well, maybe. It's one thing to say "We concede that Joe was a monster, but he still shouldn't be executed, because no one should be." I can imagine a progressive person saying that about a particularly monstrous white person e.g. Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy.
I agree that "this person is a monster but they shouldn't be executed" is a harder sell than "this person isn't a monster, therefore obviously they shouldn't be executed" so I can understand why someone would feel motivated to lie for tactical reasons. But I don't know - surely that can't describe everyone saying "rest in power" about a black criminal where overwhelming evidence exists that they are guilty of the heinous crime they were convicted of. Surely some of those people must really believe that they are innocent, even if they have to resort to extremely tenuous and unlikely distortions of the evidence to get there (or retreat into the methodic doubt of "a black man will never get a fair trial in Amerikkka").
I do think it’s likely that such a conspirator exists. Do you have any evidence this guy, in particular, is in that category?
It’s a genuine question, because I don’t have a Twitter account and can’t peruse his posting history. But I think a “steelman” should never look so much like straw.
Well for starters, I'd like to point out that your interpretation of this person's motivation for expressing this sentiment (advocating for life in prison without parole instead of capital punishment, and hence knowingly lying about this criminal's virtues for tactical reasons) is only marginally more sympathetic than mine (conspiratorially deluded about the state of the American criminal justice system), which was in turn only marginally more sympathetic than the OP's (straight up expressing admiration for a violent criminal).
As to whether any evidence exists that this specific tweeter is conspiratorial in the way I described, he recently retweeted (I believe in reference to Marcellus Williams):
and
and:
After scrolling through about four months of tweets and retweets, I have not been able to find a single example of this specific tweeter claiming that a non-black person was wrongfully executed (despite several men meeting that description having been executed this year) or unjustly shot by police officers (although I will concede it's possible that this person is trapped in an echo chamber/media bubble in which he genuinely never hears about white or Native American men who've been executed). This strengthens my opinion that the tweeter's outrage over the executions of Williams and Littlejohn has more to do with BLM than with principled opposition to capital punishment in general.
Yeah, @gattsuru had a pretty damning quote, too.
My interpretation of the original quote was not “knowingly lying.” It was “genuine preference for LWOP over death.” Given the rest of the statements, it’s clear I was being too charitable. I concur with your interpretation that he is culture warring first and foremost.
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