Capital Punishment. Capital punishment, or “the death penalty,” is an institutionalized practice designed to result in deliberately executing persons in response to actual or supposed misconduct and following an authorized, rule-governed process to conclude that the person is responsible for violating norms that warrant execution 1 day ago · Essay bingo good research essays. Is life better in small town or big city essay analytical writing sample essays pdf plastic pollution persuasive essay capital punishment Intro to essay. Minar e pakistan essay in english for class 5. Essay for college admissions, multiple myeloma nursing case study essay translate in french Feb 21, · As you can see, the author of the argumentative essay about the death penalty above considers capital punishment to be an irrational and useless tool of the justice system. The death penalty doesn’t have any impact on the number of crimes and causes serious legal and moral issues
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Punitive executions also have been and continue to be carried out more informally, such as by terrorist groups, urban gangs, or mobs. But for centuries in Europe and America, discussions have focused on capital punishment as an institutionalized, rule-governed practice of modern states and legal systems governing serious criminal conduct and procedures.
Among major European philosophers, specific or systematic attention to the death penalty is the exception until about years ago.
Most modern philosophic attention to capital punishment emerged from penal reform proponents, as principled, moral evaluation of law and social practice, or amidst theories of the modern state and sovereignty.
The mid-twentieth century emergence of an international human rights regime and American constitutional controversies sparked anew much philosophic focus on theories of punishment and the death penalty, including arbitrariness, mistakes, argumentative essay capital punishment, or discrimination in the American institution of capital punishment.
As with questions about the morality of punishment, two broadly different approaches are commonly distinguished: retributivism, with a focus on past conduct that merits death as a penal response, and utilitarianism or consequentialism, with attention to the effects of the death penalty, especially any effects in preventing more crime through deterrence or incapacitation.
Section One provides some historical context and basic concepts for locating the central philosophic question about capital punishment: Is death the amount or kind of penalty that is morally justified for the most serious of crimes, such as murder?
Section Three considers classic utilitarian approaches to justifying the death penalty: primarily as preventer of crime through deterrence or incapacitation, but also with respect to some other consequences of capital punishment. Section Four attends to relatively recent approaches to punishment as expression or communication of fundamental values or norms, including for purposes of educating or reforming offenders.
Section Five explores issues of justification related to the institution of capital argumentative essay capital punishment, as in America: Is the death penalty morally justifiable if imperfect procedures produce mistakes, caprice, or racial discrimination in determining who is to be executed?
Or if the actual execution of capital punishment requires unethical conduct by medical practitioners or other necessary participants? Much philosophic focus on the death penalty is modern and relatively recent. The actual practice of capital punishment is ancient, emerging much earlier than the familiar terms long used to refer to it.
In the ancient world, the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi circa B. Athens punished most crimes by death, argumentative essay capital punishment, and later Athenian law famously licensed the trial and death of Socrates; the fifth century B. Twelve Tables of Roman argumentative essay capital punishment include capital punishment for such crimes as publishing insulting songs or disturbing the nocturnal peace of urban areas, and later Roman law famously permitted the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth.
Even in such early practices, capital punishment was seen as within the authority of political rulers, embodied as a legal institution, and employed for a wide range of misconduct proscribed by law. Medieval and early modern Europe retained expansive lists of capital crimes and notably expanded the forms of execution beyond the common ancient practices of stoning, crucifixion, drowning, beating to death, or poisoning.
In the Middle Ages both secular and ecclesiastical authorities participated in executions deliberately designed to be torturous and brutal, such as beheading, burning alive, drawing and quartering, hanging, disemboweling, using the rack, using thumb-screws, pressing with weights, boiling in oil, publicly dissecting, and castrating.
Such brutality was conducted publicly as spectacle and ritual—an important or even essential element of capital punishment was not only the death of the accused, but the public process of killing and dying on display.
Until the mid th century, the colonies employed elaborate variations of the ritual of execution by hanging, even to the point of holding fake hangings, argumentative essay capital punishment. Stuart Banner summarizes the early American practices:. Capital punishment was more than just one penal technique among others.
It was the base point from which all other kinds of punishment deviated. When the state punished serious crime, most of the methods …were variations on execution. Officials imposed death sentences argumentative essay capital punishment were never carried out, they conducted mock hangings…, and they dramatically halted real execution ceremonies at the last minute, argumentative essay capital punishment.
These were methods of inflicting a symbolic death …. Officials also wielded a set of tools capable of intensifying a death sentence — burning at the stake, public display of the corpse, dismemberment and dissection — ways of producing a punishment worse than death, argumentative essay capital punishment.
The dramatic change came with the birth of publicly supported prisons or penitentiaries that allowed extended incarceration for large numbers of people Banner, After the invention of prisons, for serious crimes there was now an alternative to capital punishment and to the practiced spectrum of torturous executions: prisons allowed varying conditions of confinement for example, hard labor, solitary confinement, loss of privacy and a temporal measure, at least, for distinguishing degrees of punishment to address kinds of serious misconduct, argumentative essay capital punishment.
Philosophic defenses of the death penalty, like that of Immanuel Kant, opposed reformers and others, who, like Beccaria, argued for abolition of capital punishment. During the 19th century the methods of execution were made less brutal and the number of capital crimes was much reduced compared to earlier centuries of practice. By the midth century, two developments prompted another period of focused philosophic attention to the death penalty.
Capital punishment also became a global concern with the post-World War II Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders and after the Declaration of Universal Human Rights and subsequent human rights treaties explicitly accorded all persons a right to life and encouraged abolishing the death penalty worldwide.
Any punishment — and certainly an execution — intentionally inflicts on a person significant pain, suffering, unpleasantness, or deprivation that it is ordinarily wrong for an argumentative essay capital punishment like the state to impose.
What conditions or considerations, if any, would morally justify such penal practices? Following a framework famously offered by H. To whom may punishment be applied? How severely may we punish? These different questions are, respectively, about the general justifying aim of punishment, about the conditions of responsibility for criminal conduct and liability to punishment, and about the amount, kind, or form of punishment justifiable to address actual or supposed misconduct.
It is the last of these questions of justification — about the justified amount, kind, or form of punishment — that is foremost in philosophic approaches to the death penalty. Almost all modern and recent discussions of capital punishment assume liability for the death penalty is only for the gravest of crimes, such as murder; almost all assume comparatively humane modes of execution and largely ignore considering obviously torturous or brutal killings of offenders; and it is assumed that some amount of punishment is merited for murderers.
The central question, argumentative essay capital punishment, then, is not often whether punishing murderers is morally justifiable rather than rehabilitation or release, for examplebut argumentative essay capital punishment it is morally justifiable to punish by death rather than by imprisonment, for example those found to have committed a grave offense, such as murder. Responses to this question about the death penalty often build on more general principles or theories about the purposes of punishment in general, and about general criteria for determining the proper measure or amount of punishment for various crimes.
Justifications are proposed either with reference to forward-looking considerations, such as various future effects or consequences of capital punishment, or with reference to backward-looking considerations, such as facets of the wrongdoing to be punished.
For retributivists, any beneficial effects or consequences of capital punishment are wholly irrelevant or distinctly secondary. Consequentialist or utilitarian approaches to the death penalty are distinguished from retributivist approaches because the former rely only on assessing the future effects or consequences of capital punishment, such as crime prevention through deterrence and incapacitation. There are many different versions of retributivism; all maintain a tight, essential link between the offense voluntarily committed and the amount, form, or kind of punishment justifiably threatened or imposed.
Future effects or consequences, if any, are then irrelevant or distinctly secondary considerations to justifying punishments for misconduct, including the death penalty. A classic expression of retributivism about capital punishment can be found in a late 18th century treatise by Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Elements of Justice ; Ak.
Judicial punishment… must in all cases be imposed on him only on the ground that he committed a crime. None other than the principle of equality…. Only the Law of Retribution jus talionis can determine exactly the kind and degree of punishment ; Ak. Kant then explicitly applies these principles to determine the punishment for the most serious of crimes:.
If… he has committed a murder, he must die. In this case, there is no substitute that will satisfy the requirements of legal justice. There is no sameness of kind between death and remaining alive even under the most miserable conditions, and consequently there is also no equality between the crime and retribution unless the criminal is judicially condemned and put to death ; Ak. Kant then employs a hypothetical case to insist that any social effects of the death penalty, good or bad, are wholly irrelevant to its justification:, argumentative essay capital punishment.
Even if a civil society were to dissolve… the last murderer argumentative essay capital punishment prison would first have to be executed so that each should receive his just deserts and that the people should not bear the guilt of a capital crime… [and] be regarded as accomplices in the public violation of justice ; Ak. So, even if social effects are not possible, since the society no longer exists, the death penalty argumentative essay capital punishment justified for murder.
But as often noted, any literalism about lex talionis cannot work as a general principle linking crimes and punishments. For other crimes—forgery, drug peddling, serial killings or massacres, terrorism, argumentative essay capital punishment, genocide, smuggling—it is not at all clear what kind or form of punishment lex talionis would then license or require for example, Nathanson Both practical considerations and moral principles about permissible forms of punishment, then, ground objections to invoking a literal interpretation of lex talionis to justify capital punishment for murder.
Some retributivists employ a less literal way of employing a principle of equality to justify death as the punishment for murder. The relevant equivalence is one of harms caused and suffered: the murder victim suffers the harm of a life ended, and the only equivalent harm to be imposed as punishment, then, argumentative essay capital punishment, must be the death of the killer. As a general way of linking kinds of misconduct and proper amounts, kinds, or forms of punishment, this rendition of lex talionis also faces challenges Ten, But what is capital punishment if not the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal act, no matter how calculated, can be compared?
If there were to be a real equivalence, the death penalty would have to be pronounced upon a criminal who had forewarned his victim of the very moment he would put him to a horrible death, and who, from that time on, had kept him confined at his own discretion for a period of months. It is not in private life that one meets such monsters.
Most argumentative essay capital punishment retributivists interpret lex talionis not as expressing equality of crimes and punishments, but as expressing a principle of proportionality for establishing the merited penal response to a crime such as murder. The idea is that the amount of punishment merited is to be proportional to the seriousness of the argumentative essay capital punishment, more serious offenses being punished argumentative essay capital punishment severely than less serious crimes.
So, one constructs an ordinal ranking of crimes according to their seriousness and then constructs a corresponding ranking of punishments according to their severity.
The least serious crime is then properly punished by the least severe penalty, the second least serious crime by the second least severe punishment, and so on. The gravest misconduct, then, is properly addressed by the most severe of punishments, death. To carry out such a general project of constructing scales of crimes and matching punishments is a daunting challenge, as even many retributivists admit.
Aside from these concerns, as a defense of capital punishment this approach to lex talionis simply raises the question about the morality of the death penalty, even for the most serious of crimes. There is no reason to think that current capital punishment practices are the argumentative essay capital punishment severe punishment. Such punishments would not likely now be on a list of morally permissible penal responses to even the most serious crimes.
The retributivist proportionality interpretation of lex talionis simply assumes capital punishment is morally permissible, rather than offering a defense of it. But Kant and other retributivist defenders of the death penalty rightly distinguish principled retribution from vengeance. Vengeance is typically personal, directed at someone about whom the avenger cares—it is personal. Retribution requires responses even to injuries of people no one cares about: its impersonality makes harms to the friendless as weighty as harms to the popular and justifies punishment without regard to whether anyone desires the offender suffer.
Even if desires for vengeance are satisfied by executing murderers, for retributivists such effects are not at the heart of argumentative essay capital punishment defense of capital punishment. And to the extent that such satisfactions are sufficient justification, then the defense is no longer retributivist, but utilitarian or consequentialist see sections 3 and 4.
For retributivists the morality of the death penalty for murder is a matter argumentative essay capital punishment general moral principle, not assuaging any desires argumentative essay capital punishment revenge or vengeance on the part of victims or others. One approach employs the idea of basic moral rights, such as the right to life, an expression argumentative essay capital punishment the value of life that seems to work against justifying capital punishment.
Yet John Locke, for example, in his Second Treatise on Governmentposits both a natural right to life and defends the death penalty argumentative essay capital punishment murderers. For Locke, murderers have, by their voluntary wrongdoing, forfeited their own right to life and can therefore be treated as a being not possessing any right to life at all and as subject to execution to effect some good for society.
This form of retributivism—rights forfeiture and argumentative essay capital punishment consequences of the death penalty—is also explicitly expressed by W. Ross in his book, argumentative essay capital punishment, The Right and the Good :.
But to hold that the state has no duty of retributive punishment is not necessarily to adopt a utilitarian view of punishment. It is morally at liberty to injure him as he has injured others, or to inflict any lesser injury on him, or to spare him, exactly as consideration of both of the good of the community and of his own good requires.
This kind of retributivist approach to capital punishment raises philosophic issues, aside from its reliance on empirical argumentative essay capital punishment about the effects of the death penalty as a argumentative essay capital punishment to deter or incapacitate offenders see section 3b.
Can this right, once forfeited, ever be restored? Second, given that the right to life is so fundamental to all rights and, as many maintain, argumentative essay capital punishment, held argumentative essay capital punishment by each and all because they are humans, perhaps the right to life is exceptional or even unique in not being forfeitable at all: the right to life is actually a fundamental natural or human right, argumentative essay capital punishment.
Even killers retain their right to life, the state remains bound by the correlative duty not to kill a murderer, and capital punishment, then, argumentative essay capital punishment, argumentative essay capital punishment a violation of the human right to life. Developed in this way, as a argumentative essay capital punishment of fundamental human rights, the merit of capital punishment becomes more about the moral standing of human beings and less about the logic and mobility of rights through forfeiture or alienation.
The notion… [is] perhaps the most misused term in our moral vocabulary. A recently revived retributivism about the death penalty builds not on individual rights, argumentative essay capital punishment, but on a notion of fairness in society, argumentative essay capital punishment.
Death Penalty \u0026 Anti Death Penalty: Is There Middle Ground? - Middle Ground
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Essays on Death Penalty. Capital punishment has existed ever since humans started to form the first communities. What is surprising is that it has not yet been abolished in many parts of the world, and it is a matter of heated debate even in the most developed nations 1 day ago · Essay bingo good research essays. Is life better in small town or big city essay analytical writing sample essays pdf plastic pollution persuasive essay capital punishment Intro to essay. Minar e pakistan essay in english for class 5. Essay for college admissions, multiple myeloma nursing case study essay translate in french 1 day ago · Ap bio exam essays. Case study on hotel management system pdf. A visit to a hill station essay for 10th class in english, essay on advantages and disadvantages of mobile phones in punjabi language about capital punishment Short essay. Essay writing of book: why md phd essay sample, five essays on philosophy mao zedong
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