11 ms·

The difficulty with trying to argue down the death penalty is that you end up arguing on so many levels. This article mentions the dollars and cents expense of

The difficulty with trying to argue down the death penalty is that you end up arguing on so many levels. This article mentions the dollars and cents expense of the death penalty; this is an empirical fact, either it is cheaper to execute someone or cheaper to imprison them. This article mentions the ineffectiveness in protecting society; this is also an empirical question, although it is harder to measure than the monetary cost. Finally, the article speaks of the emotional and moral cost to those employed to carry out the execution. But the article only devotes a single sentence to the core of the argument, at the very beginning: the author has come to believe that life is either hallowed or not, and he prefers to believe that it is always hallow, and killing always wrong. This is the core of the problem. Some people believe killing is always wrong. Some people believe justice requires the execution of those convicted of a capital crime. Heck, sometimes these contradictory beliefs are held by the same person. All the other arguments don't matter. If killing is always wrong, you pay the cost of life imprisonment and don't execute people to save money. If justice requires a life for a life, you don't scrimp on that, either. You pay whatever monetary, emotional, and moral costs are necessary for justice to be done.

rayiner 10y ago
This is an excellent point, and I think much of the same principles apply to the abortion debate a well.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- fsloth 10y ago
  Not really. People will always get abortions and in some cases really need them. No-one forces the government to execute people.
  - akavi 10y ago
    Would you be ok with permitting murder on the basis "people will always do it."? Because if you take the arguments of pro-life advocates on good faith, that's what you're saying. You can't make your case against position by ignoring the underlying reasons people hold it.
    - fsloth 10y ago
      That's a strawman. Murder and abortion are different things. I don't have to take the arguments of pro-life advocates on good faith since they are obviously poorly informed on the matter, to put it kindly. I'm not saying the case is logically or morally obvious, but there is a large number of western states that hold this distinction. Up to a certain age, the embryo and later fetus are effectively considered to be a part of mother's physiology. What other stand could there be? If we consider an ova and a sperm sacred human life it means I cannot masturbate without murdering a gazillion future human beings. Enter Monty Python's "Every sperm is sacred...". So, I suppose we can then accept disjoint sperm and ova are not humans? That a bunch of matter, that under specific conditions, may become a human , is not a human - until it actually is. If we bring the sperm and the ovum infinitesimally closer to each other they are distinct. If we wait for the wee sperm bugger to dig in, they are not yet a human. A human (by my distinction) needs more neural cells than a tapeworm. We can wait for some cellular divisions to happen. A blastula is just a collection of non-specialized cells. Tapeworm is still more advanced. I'm not going to go on, anyone can induce the steps between a bunch of cells to a human from wikipedia. The point is, potential-for-humanity cannot be equaled with humanity - it's not applicable to human experience or human behaviour. Sex cells are not humans. An embryo less advanced than a tapeworm is not a human. As the fetus grows, there is a phase of transition where it gets human characteristics, after which the discussion actually starts to get ambiguous. But, a bunch of cells, in a womans uterus, is not a human until a certain point. I'm not saying abortion should be used lightly. I'm saying, that anti-abortionists are uneducated, mostly ignorant of the personal, physiological or moral situation of abortion candidates. [edit:I modified some parts afterwards which were really not that polite]
fsloth 10y ago
I would offer yet another point of view: people are generally so inept, that if it is justice one wants, a death penalty should be avoided since the chances of someone being wrongly condemned are quite likely. So, is it so important that the guilty are snuffed out that one is ready to accept collateral damage in the form of innocent being put to death.
- briandear 10y ago
  We could apply the same logic to life imprisonment. An innocent person forced to endure the absolute horror or life imprisonment -- I would rather die. What's the difference? Dead or locked in a horrible box for life? We euthanize sick cats; we don't make them suffer needlessly. I would argue life imprisonment is a punishment more severe than death. Just by way of disclosure, I have witnessed two executions in Texas back when I worked for Reuters. I spent a lot of time on death row, interviewing prisoners as well as families, so I don't have a positive feeling about the death penalty... however I contend that life inprisonment is even worse.
  - slazaro 10y ago
    If you're imprisoned for years and then found to be actually innocent, you can go home. That can't happen if they already chopped your head off.
    - gaius 10y ago
      No you can't - because your home no longer exists, and I don't just mean bricks and mortar.
      - geggam 10y ago
        You can however, make a new home.
        DanBC 10y ago
        The emotional damage makes that hard.
raverbashing 10y ago
If you think that killing is always wrong then you'll eventually be guilty of killing by omission As it was shown even this weekend in St. Cloud Society has a lot of self-contradictory situations like that. Hence why I think no value is absolute
- freerobby 10y ago
  There's a big difference between killing defensively and killing in the name of justice, though. There's no conflict in believing that (1) life is always hallowed, (2) retributive killing is always wrong, and (3) killing is justified in some situations to preserve life.
  - dsacco 10y ago
    Sure there is. What is your definition of "hallowed"? By implication, I believe the author used it to mean "killing is always wrong", or "life must always be preserved." Is that is indeed the definition, #1 and #3 are directly incompatible. This is the problem with using words like "hallowed" in philosophical debates. One person uses a word without defining it, and they intend it one way. Then the other party argues with their imperfect and improvised understanding of the word's definition, and no one gets anywhere. This is how we end up with six people debating whether or not "the good always matches the beautiful", and it's one of the reasons philosophy as a discipline has a bad reputation to outsiders. If you dig deep enough, what will often happen is one or more parties will try to create an empirical definition and the other parties will just use circular definitions until it's clear they're not saying anything at all. If "hallowed" doesn't mean "must always be preserved", I'm not sure it can mean anything of consequence to the debate. You could define it as "must be preserved unless there is a justifiable reason not to", but then you're not saying anything new. It's redundant.
    - emodendroket 10y ago
      There is no incompatibility at all. If life is hallowed, it follows that the only situation in which killing would be justified would be to prevent another killing. If anything, war makes a much more challenging case for this view, unless you accept a position of total pacifism
lloeki 10y ago
There is not much in France that I cherish more than the ideal and fight behind abolition of death penalty (useless trivia: it happened to be voted the year of my birth). Countless philosophers and thinkers through the course of the 20th century have written about it, culminating in the speech of Robert Badinter who fiercely defended this bill to be passed. Sadly, I have a hard time finding any of this material translated into English. Here are a few, though, for the curious: Those who believe in the dissuasive value of death penalty are unaware of the human truth. The criminal passion is not the more stopped by the fear of death than other passions which are themselves noble. — Robert Badinter, extrait d'un discours à l’Assemblée nationale - 17 Septembre 1981 So what is capital punishment but the most deliberate of murders, to which no infamy, however calculated, could be compared to? — Albert Camus Death penalty is an immoral punishment, or at the very least useless, because it make us used to the performance of torments, and because it repairs nothing; as, sadly, the death of the murderer does not give back life to the victim. — François Eugène Vidocq. What does Law says? Thou shalt not kill! How does she says it? By Killing! — Victor Hugo, Les misérables I looked into death penalty by both of its sides, direct action, indirect action. What remains of it? Only a horrible and useless thing, only a bloody assault called crime when the individual carries it, and called justice (oh pain!) when society perpetrates it. Know this, whoever you are, lawmakers or judges, to the eyes of God, to the eyes of conscience, what is crime for the individual is crime for society. — Victor Hugo, discours devant l’Assemblée constituante, 1848 As long as death penalty exists, we will feel cold when stepping into a Court of Appeal, enshrouded in night. — Victor Hugo Death penalty is opposite to what mankind, since two thousand years, has thought of higher and dreams of more noble. — Jean Jaurès To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, not justice. — Desmond Tutu Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination because there it is invested with the approval of the society. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind. — George Bernard Shaw
- omginternets 10y ago
  All these quotes basically amount to "I'm against killing people" usually with a reason amounting to one of the following: - Killing is bad - Killing constitutes revenge - Killing is unbecoming of society - Killing is disturbing Yes, they're from great thinkers, but on their own they don't constitute much of an argument, nor are they particularly elucidating. The devils advocate might respond: - pleasant dissuasion is oxymoronic - what is justice without revenge? - there's value in symbolism (a hornets nest of an argument, I willingly admit, but one that I think is nonetheless undervalued) - the disturbing nature of killing has little to do with anything - we recognize that lethal force is legitimate in self-defense, so clearly some intentional killing is acceptable. This is at odds with the sweeping condemnation of killing in the selected quotes. - the comparison of capital punishment to murder is fallacious since the former is done with careful attention to impartiality (in principle, anyway) - the state is founded on the monopoly of violence I'm as French as you are, cher ami, but there are few things I cherish less about our country than our penchant for empty grandiloquence (exhibit A: Bernard Henri Levi). Appeal to authority does not a strong argument make; just because Victor Hugo said it doesn't make it true. It also pays to remember that many of the individuals you cite are reacting to a very different brand of capital punishment: the kind in which people were tortured in the public square. To be clear, these intellecutals do have interesting things to say on the subject, but a handful of quotes does little to advance the debate. What we have here are just pretty words, I'm afraid.
sliverstorm 10y ago
But not everyone believes one of those two axioms. If you do not believe that killing is always wrong, and you do not believe that justice requires execution, you must inform your choice some other way.
gadders 10y ago
I think people should be given life with no danger of parole, but offered the option of euthenasia.
peteretep 10y ago
> the article only devotes a single sentence to the > core of the argument, at the very beginning: the > author has come to believe that life is either > hallowed or not, and he prefers to believe that it is > always hallow, and killing always wrong I'm not sure that's the core of the argument, simply as I don't believe life is hallowed, nor I do support the death penalty, and I don't think there's any dissonance in this position. I can't explain to you any sort of moral basis for feeling life isn't hallowed, and isn't indeed particularly special, but I know I've felt this way for most of my life. Death often causes loss and suffering in those around the dying, and often in those who know they're about to die, but the dead are incapable of caring that they're dead, and everyone's going to die. However: the death penalty seems simply ineffective in any of the goals it sets out to achieve, and so I don't support it.
niels_olson 10y ago
I'm a military physician, and I was a line officer before that. I have watched people die and brought one back to life. I have trained to kill and save. I have brought a ship alongside suspect vessels for boarding and sent men into flooded engineering spaces. In my mind, the most important of those is that I have sent my people into harm's way. I would argue, from a leadership perspective, the hallowed-vs-not argument is a red herring. The money is trivia. The indirect utility of deterrence is not measurable and therefore frankly doesn't matter. But the toll on your own people has real consequences that you can prevent. Killing someone is the sort of thing that makes you question your own right to life. Don't do that to people unless you have to, and by "have to", I mean there is an imminent threat to life. You don't "have to" pay taxes. Someone's going to come after you, but they're not going to kill you over it. You don't have to kill prisoners.
- syshum 10y ago
  >You don't "have to" pay taxes. Someone's going to come after you, but they're not going to kill you over it. While they may not kill you directly for paying taxes, if they come for you, or your property, and you attempt to defend yourself they will kill you Thus I believe that is in fact being killing because you did not pay taxes and that also means you in fact you "have to" pay taxes
  - John23832 10y ago
    You should really define "defend yourself". Sure, if an IRS agent comes with a policeman, and you pickup a gun and start waving it, you may get shot. But if you just don't give money to the IRS, nobody is going to actively try to kill you. Your life gets much, much worse, but you aren't killed.
    - colejohnson66 10y ago
      Well, you're figuratively killed in prison.
      - 10y ago
DominikR 10y ago
> If justice requires a life for a life, you don't scrimp on that, either. You pay whatever monetary, emotional, and moral costs are necessary for justice to be done. How exactly do you reach this conclusion, I mean what underlying principle is this based on? I ask this because the question that immediately comes to my mind is that if this principle were true (which I dispute) then it wouldn't matter at all whether the monetary cost was $100 or $100 trillion dollars per execution. This is obviously not true, therefore the cost a society is willing to pay must be based on something else. In my opinion it is based on a combination of factors like how much available resources does a society have, how great is the need to deter others from committing the same crime (some countries have such high crime rates that they are actually destabilised by it) and what exactly is the value of a human life to a society. > If killing is always wrong That is only a question for persons that live in societies where violent crime doesn't exist (utopia) or for those who wouldn't use lethal force to protect their own lives in face of a life threatening attack. For all others this cannot be a question. Killing is justified in many cases and being able to defend one self is a useful skill everyone should aspire have.
rconti 10y ago
I searched the article after reading it and then reading your post. I don't see anything about financial cost in the article except the line "despite the cost" which is not necessarily talking about financial.
kafkaesq 10y ago
This is the core of the problem. The core argument I see being made -- not even mentioned in your list -- is the effective impossibility that the death penalty can ever be fairly enforced in our justice system (given that it doesn't just err occasionally; it errs frequently and systematically). Combined, of course, with the uniquely irreversible nature of the death penalty itself. All the other arguments don't matter. Others disagree. If justice requires a life for a life, An assumption which not only everyone shares, but which is on its face quite problematic.

rayiner 10y ago

This is an excellent point, and I think much of the same principles apply to the abortion debate a well.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
fsloth 10y ago
Not really. People will always get abortions and in some cases really need them. No-one forces the government to execute people.
- akavi 10y ago
  Would you be ok with permitting murder on the basis "people will always do it."? Because if you take the arguments of pro-life advocates on good faith, that's what you're saying. You can't make your case against position by ignoring the underlying reasons people hold it.
  - fsloth 10y ago
    That's a strawman. Murder and abortion are different things. I don't have to take the arguments of pro-life advocates on good faith since they are obviously poorly informed on the matter, to put it kindly. I'm not saying the case is logically or morally obvious, but there is a large number of western states that hold this distinction. Up to a certain age, the embryo and later fetus are effectively considered to be a part of mother's physiology. What other stand could there be? If we consider an ova and a sperm sacred human life it means I cannot masturbate without murdering a gazillion future human beings. Enter Monty Python's "Every sperm is sacred...". So, I suppose we can then accept disjoint sperm and ova are not humans? That a bunch of matter, that under specific conditions, may become a human , is not a human - until it actually is. If we bring the sperm and the ovum infinitesimally closer to each other they are distinct. If we wait for the wee sperm bugger to dig in, they are not yet a human. A human (by my distinction) needs more neural cells than a tapeworm. We can wait for some cellular divisions to happen. A blastula is just a collection of non-specialized cells. Tapeworm is still more advanced. I'm not going to go on, anyone can induce the steps between a bunch of cells to a human from wikipedia. The point is, potential-for-humanity cannot be equaled with humanity - it's not applicable to human experience or human behaviour. Sex cells are not humans. An embryo less advanced than a tapeworm is not a human. As the fetus grows, there is a phase of transition where it gets human characteristics, after which the discussion actually starts to get ambiguous. But, a bunch of cells, in a womans uterus, is not a human until a certain point. I'm not saying abortion should be used lightly. I'm saying, that anti-abortionists are uneducated, mostly ignorant of the personal, physiological or moral situation of abortion candidates. [edit:I modified some parts afterwards which were really not that polite]

fsloth 10y ago

I would offer yet another point of view: people are generally so inept, that if it is justice one wants, a death penalty should be avoided since the chances of someone being wrongly condemned are quite likely. So, is it so important that the guilty are snuffed out that one is ready to accept collateral damage in the form of innocent being put to death.

briandear 10y ago
We could apply the same logic to life imprisonment. An innocent person forced to endure the absolute horror or life imprisonment -- I would rather die. What's the difference? Dead or locked in a horrible box for life? We euthanize sick cats; we don't make them suffer needlessly. I would argue life imprisonment is a punishment more severe than death. Just by way of disclosure, I have witnessed two executions in Texas back when I worked for Reuters. I spent a lot of time on death row, interviewing prisoners as well as families, so I don't have a positive feeling about the death penalty... however I contend that life inprisonment is even worse.
- slazaro 10y ago
  If you're imprisoned for years and then found to be actually innocent, you can go home. That can't happen if they already chopped your head off.
  - gaius 10y ago
    No you can't - because your home no longer exists, and I don't just mean bricks and mortar.
    - geggam 10y ago
      You can however, make a new home.
      - DanBC 10y ago
        The emotional damage makes that hard.

raverbashing 10y ago

If you think that killing is always wrong then you'll eventually be guilty of killing by omission As it was shown even this weekend in St. Cloud Society has a lot of self-contradictory situations like that. Hence why I think no value is absolute

freerobby 10y ago
There's a big difference between killing defensively and killing in the name of justice, though. There's no conflict in believing that (1) life is always hallowed, (2) retributive killing is always wrong, and (3) killing is justified in some situations to preserve life.
- dsacco 10y ago
  Sure there is. What is your definition of "hallowed"? By implication, I believe the author used it to mean "killing is always wrong", or "life must always be preserved." Is that is indeed the definition, #1 and #3 are directly incompatible. This is the problem with using words like "hallowed" in philosophical debates. One person uses a word without defining it, and they intend it one way. Then the other party argues with their imperfect and improvised understanding of the word's definition, and no one gets anywhere. This is how we end up with six people debating whether or not "the good always matches the beautiful", and it's one of the reasons philosophy as a discipline has a bad reputation to outsiders. If you dig deep enough, what will often happen is one or more parties will try to create an empirical definition and the other parties will just use circular definitions until it's clear they're not saying anything at all. If "hallowed" doesn't mean "must always be preserved", I'm not sure it can mean anything of consequence to the debate. You could define it as "must be preserved unless there is a justifiable reason not to", but then you're not saying anything new. It's redundant.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    There is no incompatibility at all. If life is hallowed, it follows that the only situation in which killing would be justified would be to prevent another killing. If anything, war makes a much more challenging case for this view, unless you accept a position of total pacifism

lloeki 10y ago

There is not much in France that I cherish more than the ideal and fight behind abolition of death penalty (useless trivia: it happened to be voted the year of my birth). Countless philosophers and thinkers through the course of the 20th century have written about it, culminating in the speech of Robert Badinter who fiercely defended this bill to be passed. Sadly, I have a hard time finding any of this material translated into English. Here are a few, though, for the curious: Those who believe in the dissuasive value of death penalty are unaware of the human truth. The criminal passion is not the more stopped by the fear of death than other passions which are themselves noble. — Robert Badinter, extrait d'un discours à l’Assemblée nationale - 17 Septembre 1981 So what is capital punishment but the most deliberate of murders, to which no infamy, however calculated, could be compared to? — Albert Camus Death penalty is an immoral punishment, or at the very least useless, because it make us used to the performance of torments, and because it repairs nothing; as, sadly, the death of the murderer does not give back life to the victim. — François Eugène Vidocq. What does Law says? Thou shalt not kill! How does she says it? By Killing! — Victor Hugo, Les misérables I looked into death penalty by both of its sides, direct action, indirect action. What remains of it? Only a horrible and useless thing, only a bloody assault called crime when the individual carries it, and called justice (oh pain!) when society perpetrates it. Know this, whoever you are, lawmakers or judges, to the eyes of God, to the eyes of conscience, what is crime for the individual is crime for society. — Victor Hugo, discours devant l’Assemblée constituante, 1848 As long as death penalty exists, we will feel cold when stepping into a Court of Appeal, enshrouded in night. — Victor Hugo Death penalty is opposite to what mankind, since two thousand years, has thought of higher and dreams of more noble. — Jean Jaurès To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, not justice. — Desmond Tutu Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination because there it is invested with the approval of the society. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind. — George Bernard Shaw

omginternets 10y ago
All these quotes basically amount to "I'm against killing people" usually with a reason amounting to one of the following: - Killing is bad - Killing constitutes revenge - Killing is unbecoming of society - Killing is disturbing Yes, they're from great thinkers, but on their own they don't constitute much of an argument, nor are they particularly elucidating. The devils advocate might respond: - pleasant dissuasion is oxymoronic - what is justice without revenge? - there's value in symbolism (a hornets nest of an argument, I willingly admit, but one that I think is nonetheless undervalued) - the disturbing nature of killing has little to do with anything - we recognize that lethal force is legitimate in self-defense, so clearly some intentional killing is acceptable. This is at odds with the sweeping condemnation of killing in the selected quotes. - the comparison of capital punishment to murder is fallacious since the former is done with careful attention to impartiality (in principle, anyway) - the state is founded on the monopoly of violence I'm as French as you are, cher ami, but there are few things I cherish less about our country than our penchant for empty grandiloquence (exhibit A: Bernard Henri Levi). Appeal to authority does not a strong argument make; just because Victor Hugo said it doesn't make it true. It also pays to remember that many of the individuals you cite are reacting to a very different brand of capital punishment: the kind in which people were tortured in the public square. To be clear, these intellecutals do have interesting things to say on the subject, but a handful of quotes does little to advance the debate. What we have here are just pretty words, I'm afraid.

sliverstorm 10y ago

But not everyone believes one of those two axioms. If you do not believe that killing is always wrong, and you do not believe that justice requires execution, you must inform your choice some other way.

gadders 10y ago

I think people should be given life with no danger of parole, but offered the option of euthenasia.

peteretep 10y ago

> the article only devotes a single sentence to the > core of the argument, at the very beginning: the > author has come to believe that life is either > hallowed or not, and he prefers to believe that it is > always hallow, and killing always wrong I'm not sure that's the core of the argument, simply as I don't believe life is hallowed, nor I do support the death penalty, and I don't think there's any dissonance in this position. I can't explain to you any sort of moral basis for feeling life isn't hallowed, and isn't indeed particularly special, but I know I've felt this way for most of my life. Death often causes loss and suffering in those around the dying, and often in those who know they're about to die, but the dead are incapable of caring that they're dead, and everyone's going to die. However: the death penalty seems simply ineffective in any of the goals it sets out to achieve, and so I don't support it.

niels_olson 10y ago

I'm a military physician, and I was a line officer before that. I have watched people die and brought one back to life. I have trained to kill and save. I have brought a ship alongside suspect vessels for boarding and sent men into flooded engineering spaces. In my mind, the most important of those is that I have sent my people into harm's way. I would argue, from a leadership perspective, the hallowed-vs-not argument is a red herring. The money is trivia. The indirect utility of deterrence is not measurable and therefore frankly doesn't matter. But the toll on your own people has real consequences that you can prevent. Killing someone is the sort of thing that makes you question your own right to life. Don't do that to people unless you have to, and by "have to", I mean there is an imminent threat to life. You don't "have to" pay taxes. Someone's going to come after you, but they're not going to kill you over it. You don't have to kill prisoners.

syshum 10y ago
>You don't "have to" pay taxes. Someone's going to come after you, but they're not going to kill you over it. While they may not kill you directly for paying taxes, if they come for you, or your property, and you attempt to defend yourself they will kill you Thus I believe that is in fact being killing because you did not pay taxes and that also means you in fact you "have to" pay taxes
- John23832 10y ago
  You should really define "defend yourself". Sure, if an IRS agent comes with a policeman, and you pickup a gun and start waving it, you may get shot. But if you just don't give money to the IRS, nobody is going to actively try to kill you. Your life gets much, much worse, but you aren't killed.
  - colejohnson66 10y ago
    Well, you're figuratively killed in prison.
    - 10y ago

DominikR 10y ago

> If justice requires a life for a life, you don't scrimp on that, either. You pay whatever monetary, emotional, and moral costs are necessary for justice to be done. How exactly do you reach this conclusion, I mean what underlying principle is this based on? I ask this because the question that immediately comes to my mind is that if this principle were true (which I dispute) then it wouldn't matter at all whether the monetary cost was $100 or $100 trillion dollars per execution. This is obviously not true, therefore the cost a society is willing to pay must be based on something else. In my opinion it is based on a combination of factors like how much available resources does a society have, how great is the need to deter others from committing the same crime (some countries have such high crime rates that they are actually destabilised by it) and what exactly is the value of a human life to a society. > If killing is always wrong That is only a question for persons that live in societies where violent crime doesn't exist (utopia) or for those who wouldn't use lethal force to protect their own lives in face of a life threatening attack. For all others this cannot be a question. Killing is justified in many cases and being able to defend one self is a useful skill everyone should aspire have.

rconti 10y ago

I searched the article after reading it and then reading your post. I don't see anything about financial cost in the article except the line "despite the cost" which is not necessarily talking about financial.

kafkaesq 10y ago

This is the core of the problem. The core argument I see being made -- not even mentioned in your list -- is the effective impossibility that the death penalty can ever be fairly enforced in our justice system (given that it doesn't just err occasionally; it errs frequently and systematically). Combined, of course, with the uniquely irreversible nature of the death penalty itself. All the other arguments don't matter. Others disagree. If justice requires a life for a life, An assumption which not only everyone shares, but which is on its face quite problematic.