Justifying the Death Penelty

[Angua]

So basically, what you are saying is that because prisoners may or may not have other rights, they shouldn't be allowed their right to life in case they manage to exercise their other rights.

That seems somewhat messed up.

[gmalivuk]

↶

...freedom of speech will be magically preserved in this hypothetical prison (even when it clearly isn't that protected in any real-world prison)?

Cutting of all communication with the outside world is a form of psychological torture. Prisons also have the right to talk to a lawyer.

So better to kill them and be done with it?

And again, in this real reality we actually live in, prisoners typically don't have enough freedom of speech to organize and recruit for genocide, so I still don't get why you're hypothesizing that imprisoned-for-life Hitler would have more rights than real prisoners that really exist now.

[ivnja]

...freedom of speech will be magically preserved in this hypothetical prison (even when it clearly isn't that protected in any real-world prison)?

Cutting of all communication with the outside world is a form of psychological torture. Prisons also have the right to talk to a lawyer.

So are you going back to the argument that it's less immoral to outright kill a person* than it is to imprison them under the conditions that would hypothetically prevent them from potentially continuing to express an ideology that has been deemed harmful / evil / what have you, and doing so on the grounds that you feel** the conditions in prison would be worse than being dead?

* I'm stepping back from the specific Hitler / Nazism example here to the general case.
** As far as I can tell, the prisoner doesn't have any say in determining this in the argument

[Edit: Sorry Angua, gmal, for repeating what you'd already said - I didn't realize we were on to a new page]

[Mutex]

I can't wait for j_s's next one sentence retort to the many major problems with his argument people have pointed out.

[doogly]

I can't wait for j_s's next one sentence retort to the many major problems with his argument people have pointed out.

Or to problems down the line, while entirely ignoring that his entire premise is to beg the question. Homie better restructure the entire thing. F.

[natraj]

i am honestly mostly just amused that j_s's entire hitler argument is built on a foundation of assuming that us concepts of "rights" and us ideas about prisons are apparently the only ones that exist and the ones hitler would clearly be subject to despite neither hitler nor hitler's victims being american.

but you can't put hitler in prison because... something something a weirdly idealized concept of usian "free speech" something?

[doogly]

we hold these truths to be self evident!

[Angua]

It's not like we didn't try pointing that out, however j_s does seem to be pretty much ignoring that.

The funny thing is, apparently even in the US it's illegal in some states.

[gmalivuk]

Yeah in Germany no one has the freedom of speech to promote Nazism. I suspect that even extends to people in prison.

[PAstrychef]

Also, prison is worse than death, for reasons to complex or something to go into.

[Weeks]

I can't wait for j_s's next one sentence retort to the many major problems with his argument people have pointed out.

My responses have not been of only one sentence every time. Brevity is not morally wrong. QED

[ObsessoMom]

jewish_scientist, even if I accept your eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth, life-for-a-life premise that anyone who commits murder deserves to die, the moral consequences for society if it becomes bloodthirsty, or if it wrongly executes someone (i.e., if it is wrong in assessing someone's guilt in a capital case), have long been considered intolerable in the Jewish tradition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_a ... in_Judaism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_p ... _in_Israel

I mention the Jewish tradition and Israel due to your use of Hitler as a hypothetical example. But you don't need a hypothetical example. You have a historical example: the execution of Adolf Eichmann in Israel, for his role in the Holocaust.

But if you point to Adolf Eichmann's execution, you also have to acknowledge how rare that execution was. Eichmann is the ONLY ONE PERSON has ever had a capital sentence carried out by modern Israel's judicial system. (One other person was sentenced to death in Israel--also for his role in the Holocaust--but that sentence was not upheld by Israel's Supreme Court, so he was not executed.)

So I don't think it makes sense to argue that capital punishment of any and all convicted murderers is morally unproblematic, just because executing ONE PERSON for having engineered a mind-bogglingly large-scale genocide was deemed acceptable by survivors of that genocide.

[gmalivuk]

Do you see any problems with it.

Don't come to the forum asking for feedback or answers to your question if you're going to ignore most of that feedback and reject most of those answers.

[jewish_scientist]

I came here with an argument. You offered counterarguments. I gave counterarguments to your counterarguments. You see the pattern.

That is what discourse is. That is one of the main ways ideas are developed and expanded upon. I responded to the objections the people here raised to the best of my ability. To ask more of me is to demand the unreasonable.

[gmalivuk]

Well if it's too unreasonable to expect you to state what you think the purpose of the death penalty is, if not self defense or deterrence, and if it's too unreasonable to expect you to justify the claim that imprisoned Hitler would somehow still have the freedom to organize genocide, then there's not really anything else to discuss here.