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I feel that Ian Hislop sums up my view pretty well: https://youtu.be/_DrsVhzbLzU For you to use the death penalty, you must have perfect proof. You can't get perfect proof therefore you cannot use the death penalty because you will inevitably kill innocent people which is itself murder. I'm not particularly worried about the morality or hypotheticals at the moment because we don't live in a hypothetical world, so until you can get Ultra Proof it's just so much window dressing. (Keep in mind, too, that even if you point out cases where people where totally guilty, massive miscarriages of justice are totally a thing).
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Feb 28, 2017 21:43
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twodot posted:Why the double standard? There's a bunch of activities the government does which definitely kill innocent people sometimes. I've never heard anyone argue that the government either needs to acquire perfect knowledge, or Ultra Proof, whatever we call it, that what it's doing won't kill an innocent or not perform the activity for anything else. There's trade offs certainly. The fact that the police occasionally murder innocent people doesn't mean we should throw out the concept of patrols. And very arguably the innocent person murder rate of the death penalty is high enough to not justify whatever benefit people think it has (very arguably it actually has no benefit, but if you thought that you wouldn't need to argue about standards of proof). But I don't see why the government needs to meet an impossible standard in whether an innocent person dies as a result of the death penalty versus any other activity that can foreseeably kill innocent people. That's an interesting point. I think the difference lies (at least to me) is that in the instance you've cited (police patrols) you might argue that the police have little time to act and so mistakes (or otherwise) are made - this may also be considered the case with drone strikes, although I think those are wrong as well. Here in the UK the occasional murder of innocents by police is at least a reasonably big deal (see the fact that the Charles de Menenzes scandal is still dogging the new Met commissioner), and I think that mitigation is achieved by reducing the number of police with guns to a specialist unit rather than everyone with a badge. That was a bit rambly, but the tl;dr is that the difference between those cases and someone in court is that people are (supposedly) having to act immediately to prevent further harm -stopping a gunman / terrorist / what have you. Once someone is caught and in prison, that immediate threat is gone, so why kill them?
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Mar 1, 2017 00:11
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