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I was going to give military an honourable mention but I didn't want to make my comment any longer than it already was. Yes the military frequently does aim to kill people, but not always. Capital punishment is defined as putting someone to death.
If you don't kill any people, you won't kill innocent people. If you do kill some people, you might kill innocent people. Where is the equivocation?
Can you clarify why feelings of guilt are important here?
They aren't particularly, but
We mostly don't seem to care.
I thought we were talking about feelings, my mistake. I suppose the point was that I do care if innocent people die, so by extrapolation I assume other people do too.
I mean, I have no idea how much guilt executioners feel.
Please, pardon my rhetoric.
Also, I think got carried away with the whole "guilt" theme - feeling guilt, guilt by assocation...
But how much guilt they feel or don't feel doesn't play much of a role in my decision to support or not support medicine, commuting, law enforcement, military action, or capital punishment.
Only one of those things has the explicit goal of killing people, and it's the only one I'm arguing against here. I'm not too sure what you're arguing for or against or if you're just stimulating conversation, but regardless, thank you for responding to my first comments on LW :)
What you say is true, but when I get into my car I'm not planning to go out and find a suspicious looking pedestrian to hit hoping he'll turn out to be not innocent ;)
More seriously, the one time I was involved in a pretty serious collision the sensation of heart-squeezing dread I experienced in the moments I thought someone might have been killed or even just injured and that I might have been at fault... was not pleasant. If an innocent person were hurt as a consequence of my actions I would certainly feel the guilt of it. Does the hangman feel the guilt of his noose?
I enjoyed reading the essay, finding it insightful and well-written, which is probably why the bit I disagreed with prompted me to argue.
or because they know it has a gruesome history of occasionally killing the falsely accused. But I still don't think this is a good argument.
I've never understood how proponents of capital punishment can simply sweep aside the possibility of killing even a single innocent person as a negligible consequence.
But taking something with both costs and benefits and then placing it next to something that only has costs
Capital Punishment benefits:
Possibly reduces crime rate, presumably as a deterrent or by reducing criminal population (up for debate),
makes victims and their families feel better (sounds more like vengeance than justice),
saves on the costs of keeping convicts locked up and alive,
makes politicians who endorse it look "tough on crime" (it's a benefit for them if not for society)
I'm being cynical but I suspect the financial and political benefits are more significant factors in the continued implementation of capital punishment than the two benefits you suggested.
Archetypal Cold-blooded Homocide benefits:
Helps to counteract population growth,
can help keep us (i.e. the victim pool) from getting soft and incautious in cozy danger-free lives,
sometimes the victims are evil people and/or criminals in which case substitute the same benefits ascribed to capital punishment,
draws legal system resources away from targeting various victim-less crimes such as (depending on the jurisdiction): recreational drug use, sodomy, gambling, polygamy, etc. in which free individuals should be free to partake.
taking something with both costs and benefits and then placing it next to something that only has costs
They both have, let's say, possible benefits.
and saying "Look! It's exactly like this thing here!" misses the entire point of the argument.
I don't say that these two different things are exactly alike. But these two different things do have the same cost - the deliberate and forceful termination of a sapient being who isn't in a position to harm you - which many find unacceptable. That's the point of the argument.
If humanity can embrace formalised, institutionalised punishment-by-death, with the acknowledged possibility that some of those punished are innocent, I find that more worthy of condemnation than the fact that it occasionally spawns a murderously psychopathic individual.
If you want to argue that the costs are worse than the benefits, argue that
The thing is, the costs in this case are pretty much just "cold-blooded murder", and in many peoples' ethical systems that cost outweighs any benefit (with the most common exception probably being the reciprocal survival of others), so perhaps it just seems more efficient to condense the argument into "Capital Punishment is Murder"?
Now if you had said "Killing in self-defense is murder" is an example of Guilt by Association there would not have been a peep out of me :)
4 Marijuana is a drug.
Aspirin is a drug.
5 Taxation is theft.
Only when the people taking their cut don't command force of arms on a national scale, amirite?