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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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