3 ms·

Not to be too argumentative, but wouldn't that be an reason for the death penalty? That is, if the stakes are higher (life and death), people naturally care far

Not to be too argumentative, but wouldn't that be an reason for the death penalty? That is, if the stakes are higher (life and death), people naturally care far more than they otherwise would. Were there no death penalty, then people would more naturally fall into that bureaucratic mental trap of "there's still time", when the time they're thinking of is the time of a human's life. Personally, I find the concept of life in prison to be one of the greatest injustices made by man, and would vastly prefer people to be killed under false premise, or by outright mistake, rather than wasting away for decades under harsh conditions, surrounded by misery, despair, and hopelessness. This modernist quirk of "'life' behind bars" comes off with some strange stink of clinically accepted torture, under the understanding of the ineptitude of a system of justice run by human beings. Just my two cents though, I know some would strongly disagree for various reasons.

PetitPrince 3y ago
The dissuasive value of death penalty have already been discussed a lot, but the discussion that immediately come to mind is the eloquent speech given by the French ministrer of justice (Robert Badinter) when they abolished death penalty in 1981 (if you speak French, have a listen; it's one of the great speeches). The arguments were: - There's no correlation between death penalty abolition and a reduction or increase in criminality curve - The most death penalty-able crimes are crimes of passion or folly. People are not rational actors in these case, and have a death penalty - "Cold-blooded" criminal (trafficker, pimp, maffiosi and such) would never put themselves in a situation where they could get death penalty - "Criminal passion are no less stopped by the fear of death than other more noble passion. If the fear of death would dissuade people to act, then we would have neither great soldiers nor great sportmen. We admire them, but they do not hesitate in face of death. Nor will other people, taken by other passions. It's only for death penalty that we think that death will prevent people in their most extreme passions. This is not true."
autoexec 3y ago
> Not to be too argumentative, but wouldn't that be an reason for the death penalty? That is, if the stakes are higher (life and death), people naturally care far more than they otherwise would. Not really. Locking an innocent person up for the rest of their life is high stakes enough, and plenty of people care about it. That's why we don't only ever overturn the sentences of people who are on death row. There's no requirement that we take a lax attitude towards innocent people being caged for any length of time. While life behind bars might sound like torture, it doesn't have to be. It's unfortunate but there will always be some people who need to be kept apart from the rest of us for our safety. There's zero reason for those people to be kept in "harsh conditions, surrounded by misery, despair, and hopelessness". We can treat all prisoners humanely and allow them to live a decent (if heavily restricted) life locked away from the rest of us. If we did that, any innocent person we mistakenly locked up would have zero reason to choose to die rather than stay locked up while fighting to get their sentence overturned. We'd still have every incentive to make sure we don't screw up.

PetitPrince 3y ago

The dissuasive value of death penalty have already been discussed a lot, but the discussion that immediately come to mind is the eloquent speech given by the French ministrer of justice (Robert Badinter) when they abolished death penalty in 1981 (if you speak French, have a listen; it's one of the great speeches). The arguments were: - There's no correlation between death penalty abolition and a reduction or increase in criminality curve - The most death penalty-able crimes are crimes of passion or folly. People are not rational actors in these case, and have a death penalty - "Cold-blooded" criminal (trafficker, pimp, maffiosi and such) would never put themselves in a situation where they could get death penalty - "Criminal passion are no less stopped by the fear of death than other more noble passion. If the fear of death would dissuade people to act, then we would have neither great soldiers nor great sportmen. We admire them, but they do not hesitate in face of death. Nor will other people, taken by other passions. It's only for death penalty that we think that death will prevent people in their most extreme passions. This is not true."

autoexec 3y ago

> Not to be too argumentative, but wouldn't that be an reason for the death penalty? That is, if the stakes are higher (life and death), people naturally care far more than they otherwise would. Not really. Locking an innocent person up for the rest of their life is high stakes enough, and plenty of people care about it. That's why we don't only ever overturn the sentences of people who are on death row. There's no requirement that we take a lax attitude towards innocent people being caged for any length of time. While life behind bars might sound like torture, it doesn't have to be. It's unfortunate but there will always be some people who need to be kept apart from the rest of us for our safety. There's zero reason for those people to be kept in "harsh conditions, surrounded by misery, despair, and hopelessness". We can treat all prisoners humanely and allow them to live a decent (if heavily restricted) life locked away from the rest of us. If we did that, any innocent person we mistakenly locked up would have zero reason to choose to die rather than stay locked up while fighting to get their sentence overturned. We'd still have every incentive to make sure we don't screw up.