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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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If it were about justice, why would it not matter who pulled the trigger?

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.

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 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.