Death Penalty Follow Up

I received a lot of critical feedback on my last video. In this one I try to speak to several of those criticisms.

My previous video:

The death penalty is racist: Stephen Nathanson's "Does it Matter if the Death Penalty is Arbitrarily Administered"--http://tinyurl.com/3mkel6p

The death penalty is too expensive: The Death Penalty Information Center's "Financial Facts About The Death Penalty"--http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty

The death penalty is cruel: Jeffery Reiman's "Justice, Civilization and the Death Penalty"--http://tinyurl.com/3ekme5y

Lancet study suggesting that as many as 43% of lethal injection cases involved inadequate anesthesia: http://tinyurl.com/3uhlyta

HonestDiscussioner's channel: http://www.youtube.com/honestdiscussioner

Total Lifer population count: "Number of Life Terms Hits Record", Solomon Moore, NY Times, July 22nd, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/us/23sentence.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=125...

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Death penalty
• miscarriage of justice
• innocence project
• exoneration
• Ernest van den Haag

[TheModerateViewer]

My argument for the death penalty:

If one steals a car and gets thrown to jail, no one would claim that that this is wrong. The reason being is that the punishment is proportional to the crime. Therefore, minor crimes deserve minor punishments. So why would it be wrong for a heinous crime to receive a heinous punishment? To say that minor crimes deserve minor punishments, which most people would agree with, but that heinous crimes don't deserve heinous punishments is kind of hypocritical.

[SisyphusRedeemed]

@TheModerateViewer By that argument we should be torturing torturers and raping rapists. But think about it: who would we hire to do that job? How could we institutionalize that punishment? Proportionality is a virtue in punishment, but it's not the only virtue, and it's really only a rough virtue at best.

[SephieRothe]

the timer on your note only gave me enough time to read the first sentence. I have a slow reading speed due to dyslexia so my experience is probably not typical but it was annoying to repeatedly rewind so as to read the entire note.

[SisyphusRedeemed]

@SephieRothe There's a pause button...

[Starcrash6984]

Arguments against interest are always more compelling than biased arguments. I thought your first video on the death penalty was brilliant and counter-intuitive, and this video is just as good. Thumbs up!

[Daruqe]

"I'm not a utilitarian..." And after taking Intro Philosophy, neither am I. *high five*

[ByteSugita]

My personal objection to death penalty is slightly different in that i think it strange that killing someone in this way could be considered more of a punishment than locking someone away for the rest of their natural life, And maybe even more important how a (any) society that claims to care for human life can choose to take away a live if it is deemed to be to troublesome in one way or another, intentionally killing people that are no danger (when locked up) is hurting society itself.

[ByteSugita]

Intriguing and more than merely disturbing that a heavier initial punishment might mean exoneration from a crime were the initial court case should have been able to sort guilt from innocence.

[1scy1]

That of course means that while I do raise some possible objections my view in regards to the death penalty is different. I just think that death can be a proportionate punishment to certain crimes, if a certain implementation is followed in which case death is only given as an option in mostly certain cases. If this is too expensive, cost alone can shoot the death penalty down as life imprisonment can be a pretty adequate punishment too even for terrible crimes.

[1scy1]

government. The policies that a nation follows is something that will obviously stir interest. Do numbers matter? Yes. Do intention matter? I would say that intentions also matter.

Now despite all that I actually am not against the mere idea of death penalty. Because I don't think the mere idea of death as punishment for some specific crimes to be immoral. In the case of the US the cost of it and other issues such as racism probably overshadows any positives in its current implementation.

[1scy1]

From the perspective of stopping deaths, that one is intentional means that we know the number of death penalty deaths we can stop. We don't really know the number of accidental deaths we can stop or necessarily to what extend we can limit them and how. We might be able to know but it might be harder. So that is one explanation.

Another is that other things matter too. Some people care about what the death penalty symbolizes, that it being intentional shows lack of proper morality from

[1scy1]

I can't find your previous video. Can someone post a link?