The Death Penalty
The question of whether or not we should use the death penalty should be a strictly moral one. There are certain arguments that are used, which I have used, such as that it costs more to execute someone than it does to keep him in prison for the rest of his life, but when it comes down to it, if you feel that capital punishment saves lives, or has some other moral strengths that are significant to overwhelm its moral shortcomings (which are great), then that justification is more than likely enough to cover the extra cost.
That being said, that statistic leads us to the first point, that cetaris paribus it would be better not to execute someone. The burden of proof lies on those attempting to justify the execution.
But anywho, I've concluded that the death penalty cannot be used well, and thus should not be used at all, in true democracies (and similar forms of government, such as the representitive republic).
What could justify the death penalty? Personally, if the death penalty was a deterent, and thus we'd be in effect trading the life of a convicted murderer for the life of an innocent who would otherwise be murdered, I'd view it as justified. The problem with this is that for the death penalty to be a deterent, the death penalty has to be used in a way that it would be a significant enough concern to play a part in the criminal's decision making process, which we know to not be the case in the American system (except perhaps in Texas).
I've grown up around liberals, and they all like to point to Texas as the example of wacked out hicks lynching criminals, but I would argue that if you're going to use the death penalty, you have to use it like Texas. I'd actually argue that Texas is a little light on it, but at least they get the point that is lost on the other states that use capital punishment. For the death penalty to deter me from any action, then the risk of me getting executed must be significant enough to play a role in my decision making process, and if I'm planning on murdering someone who's trying to ruin my career, the possibility of being convicted despite only needing reasonable doubt to get off, then the substantially smaller possibility of being sentanced to death, then the substantially smaller possibility of making it through the appeals process without getting off, then 10 or 15 years before they actually kill me, probably not a huge concern (and there's even less marginal value, if you consider how much more of a concern the death penalty is than life in prison without the possibility of parole). In short, for it to be a deterent, I'd have to think there's a pretty good chance you're going to kill me if I do what I'm planning to do.
But is that right? What would we have to do to our system in order to do this the way it needs to be done? First, it would have to seem likely that I would be caught. As an aggregate, I think the police forces in the United States tend to be pretty good (with a few notable exceptions, certainly). On the other hand, this leads us to another point that murders tend to happen, more often than not, in areas where other murders happen relatively frequently, and thus there is also a higher standard of fear of death that would be necessary for the death penalty to prove to have deterent effects, because for the fear to have any sort of deterent effect, it must be at the very least more than their day to day fear of death. Anywho, I'd imagine that we tend to catch a lesser proportion of murders in areas where murders are frequent, so we'll move on.
Next, it has to seem likely that I'll be convicted. This is where the problems start. Considering our legal standard is that of reasonable doubt for an aquittal, this obviously means that there are a substantial amount of people who in fact commit crimes and get let off. We deem this as acceptable because we would rather let the guilty be free than punish the innocent, and the harder it is to prove the standard of innocence, the more innocent people who will be convicted. The problem with this is that it makes me less concerned about anything the government threatens to do, because it's less likely that they'll actually do anything.
Let's think of this from a strategy perspective
We'll consider the benefit to me of committing the murder to be 5 (obviously there is a benefit to me in committing the murder, because if you assume that I am rational, then you have to assume that there was some benefit to me in my actions). So let's say that the death penalty would carry the utility of -10. Now if this is the case, if I knew that I would be executed if I committed this crime, then I would never commit the crime.
But now let's say that there's only a 45% chance of me actually being convicted of this crime. Then in my rational decision making process, I'd weigh the deterent effect of the death penalty at -4.5, at which point I would still murder that person. Now if we changed the legal standard necessary to prove innocence, making it a 57% chance of being convicted, then all of a sudden the deterent effect of the death penalty is -5.7, making it so that I'll never murder that person.
So for us to have an effective death penalty, we'd have to change the legal standard, and thus admittedly send more innocent people to be punished for the actions of others.
Next there's the probability of actually being executed once you're convicted. Now we have many safeguards in place to try to ensure that we never execute an innocent. There are typically a number of appeals, and I think a fair amount of people sentanced to death either have their sentances commuted to life without parole, or get let go altogether. So this decreases the deterent effect of the death penalty.
Next we have the time value of benefits. As a species, the human race has been defined by valuing things now a lot more than things in ten or fifteen years. So thus the longer the time people typically have to wait to die, the less relevent the fear of death in the decision making process.
From these two we establish that we'd need to, at the very least, cut back substantially on the time and effort we dedicate to making sure no one innocent is executed (which one can reasonably assume would lead to innocent people being executed).
Let's go back to the decision of the would be murderer. Let's say that if you commit a murder, there's a .7 chance of being caught, a .6 chance of being convicted, a .8 chance of staying convicted, and a .4 value of the effect due to time. I'd say that those numbers would be close enough to being conservative guesses based on nothing. Anywho, what we see is that, due to this system, the deterent effect of anything is immidiate reduced to 13.44% of its original self.
So thus we can either give up on using it as a deterent, or completely overhaul our legal system while sacrificing a number of ideals which, as a society, we value more than the lives of a few (thus why we fought the revolutionary war).
So if we give up on using it as a deterent, why would we still use it at all? Well we use it all over the place, without any real deterent effect, so if it's not reforming the criminal, and it's not convincing other criminals not to do as he has done, and if cetaris paribus it'd be better not to execute someone, then we are left with two possible justifications, justice for the sake of justice, and revenge.
It's a thin line between the two, the primary difference is that with justice for the sake of justice, the feelings of those who were left behind by the victim are not the primary concern. If we are discussing justice, I believe you could justify a belief in the death penalty, if we can agree that that is what the criminal deserves for his actions, but it's definately a hard sell. First we must separate justice from its utilitarian effects, which are deterence and revenge, thus allowing us to examine justice for the sake of justice. Now there is a utilitarian benefit to justice for the sake of justice, and that is building faith and confidence in a system of justice. That being said, as far as justice goes, what is the benefit of killing someone over taking away all of his freedom? How much better can it be to take away someone's life than taking away his ability to live? From a perspective of pure justice, it seems to me that it more just to have the murderer to live out his days behind bars while the people around him avoid lowering themselves to his level than it is to do the exact same thing that we're punishing him for (well not the exact same thing, he killed an innocent, while we kill murderers, but in the end we're all killing). Speaking about justice for the sake of justice, the marginal value of executing a prisoner seems vastly outweighed by the marginal cost.
So then we're at revenge. This is how we all justify the death penalty to ourselves "Think of the mother, she's not going to have her son anymore, what kind of people are we if we don't avenge her?" Although I like to consider myself somewhat more of a hawk than Ghandi, the quote "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind" has relevence here. We've seen it on a macro level over an over again, violence begets violence, revenge is avenged, and it never stops. The Irish and the Ulstrians (if that's what they're called), each has ample claim to revenge against the other, and thus the violence went on for hundreds of years, until eventually the IRA decided to be mature and say "We don't want revenge anymore, too many people have died", in effect. We see the same thing between the Israelis and the Arabs, each has ample claim to revenge against the other (and if either were intellectually honest about the matter they'd see that), and the violence won't stop until they both lay down their claim to vengence. This is because revenge has nothing to do with justice. Revenge isn't:
what you did to him
- What he did to you
______________________
= Amount of revenge you deserve
People don't think this way. In reality, they don't really think at all, it's all emotion. You hurt someone I love, and thus I must hurt you, that's all it is. It comes from a good place, actually, but as they say, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". The devil is the temptation to do what is easy instead of what is right, and thus revenge is the devil. If we can accept that there are extrordinarily few, if any, people who are inherently bad, then we can accept that people become bad as a product of their decisions, which typically won't be Batman villain shit, instead it will almost always be people giving into the temptation to do what is easy instead of what is right. From this we can take that how good we are, as a people, is defined by our ability to be do what is right instead of what is easy. The reason why there's nothing good about the rampant liberal humanitarianism coming out of Hollywood is that none of them advocate anything that is hard (not to mention the majority of them who ignore the complexities of the issues on which they speak, and so thus they are actually doing what is easy instead of what is right, and thus they are doing bad things in advocating this shit). Why doesn't advocating against what's happening in Darfur make you any better of a person? Because it's easy! It's so blatantly obviously wrong in every possible way that it doesn't say anything about you to observe that fact. What defines us as a people isn't what we decide when the questions are obvious, it's when we're faced with two options, one of which appeals to all of our most basic wants and needs, and the other which is unpleasant, but right. It's when we decide to not vote for politicians who promise to give us money, it's when we accept that our agriculture subsidies are ruining nations all over the world, it's when every bone in our body is aching to torture this motherfucker in the middle of the town square for the pain he has caused people that we love, but we say "No, because it's the wrong thing to do."
Don't think I'm arguing that people who are opposed to the death penalty are better people than those who support it, because that's not what I'm saying in any way, shape, or form. Many people who are opposed to the death penalty oppose it because they don't have the sack for it. Many people simply don't have the sack to accept that the cost of being rich, free, and alive, all at the same time (yes, I stole that from the West Wing) is that most of our decisions aren't whether we're going to kill someone or not, but how many are going to die. Environmentalists ignore that the suicide rate goes up with unemployment, and thus environmental regulations which hurt the economy are in fact killing people. People who want to pull out of Iraq to save American soldiers ignore how many more will die because of this. I'm certainly not saying this about all liberals, there are certainly some who have considered all of this and come to different conclusions than I have, but the vast majority of them willfully ignore all of this obvious shit. If you're only opposed to the death penalty because you refuse to have blood on your hands, then you are too timid for matters of government, and you are most certainly not morally superior to anyone.
It is safe to say that anyone who acts self satisfied and morally superior isn't actually morally superior, because no one with superior moral abilities will ever feel satisfied with themselves. This is because those who are truly morally superior regularly make decisions which disgust themselves.
Anywho, back to the death penalty.
To sum up the conclusions, we've concluded that the marginal sacrifices necessary in order to have an effective domestic death penalty are significantly greater than the marginal benefit of having capital punishment which functions as a deterent.
The death penalty for the sake of revenge is morally unjustifiable.
The death penalty for the sake of justice is potentially justifiable, but it would take an argument for it stronger than mine against it.
Now in the beginning I mentioned that this was almost entirely a moral argument, and it may seem that I've been a little too cold and logical in my analysis for this to be a moral argument. I would beg to differ. Everything must be governed by reason, morality is no exception. Once we have decided on what morality is (and in the Judeo-Christian tradition, morality is typically defined by how much better we make things for everyone around us), then we need to use reason to figure out what we can actually do to reach that goal. Ever notice how there are never any hippies nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize? The guy who won last year, I forget his name, he was from Bangladesh. What he won it for? Banking. He used technical knowledge and combined it with logic and reason, and actually made life ridiculously better for a large amount of people. If we do not critically analyze the actual effects of our actions, then there is no reason to believe that we'll ever get anywhere closer to the end we are pursuing (namely because we have no way of knowing where we're going in the first place). The road to hell is paved with good intentions because intentions stem from emotion. We feel this is a good thing to do, and so we do it, when we should've first looked into it and seen if it was actually a good thing to do.
That being said, that statistic leads us to the first point, that cetaris paribus it would be better not to execute someone. The burden of proof lies on those attempting to justify the execution.
But anywho, I've concluded that the death penalty cannot be used well, and thus should not be used at all, in true democracies (and similar forms of government, such as the representitive republic).
What could justify the death penalty? Personally, if the death penalty was a deterent, and thus we'd be in effect trading the life of a convicted murderer for the life of an innocent who would otherwise be murdered, I'd view it as justified. The problem with this is that for the death penalty to be a deterent, the death penalty has to be used in a way that it would be a significant enough concern to play a part in the criminal's decision making process, which we know to not be the case in the American system (except perhaps in Texas).
I've grown up around liberals, and they all like to point to Texas as the example of wacked out hicks lynching criminals, but I would argue that if you're going to use the death penalty, you have to use it like Texas. I'd actually argue that Texas is a little light on it, but at least they get the point that is lost on the other states that use capital punishment. For the death penalty to deter me from any action, then the risk of me getting executed must be significant enough to play a role in my decision making process, and if I'm planning on murdering someone who's trying to ruin my career, the possibility of being convicted despite only needing reasonable doubt to get off, then the substantially smaller possibility of being sentanced to death, then the substantially smaller possibility of making it through the appeals process without getting off, then 10 or 15 years before they actually kill me, probably not a huge concern (and there's even less marginal value, if you consider how much more of a concern the death penalty is than life in prison without the possibility of parole). In short, for it to be a deterent, I'd have to think there's a pretty good chance you're going to kill me if I do what I'm planning to do.
But is that right? What would we have to do to our system in order to do this the way it needs to be done? First, it would have to seem likely that I would be caught. As an aggregate, I think the police forces in the United States tend to be pretty good (with a few notable exceptions, certainly). On the other hand, this leads us to another point that murders tend to happen, more often than not, in areas where other murders happen relatively frequently, and thus there is also a higher standard of fear of death that would be necessary for the death penalty to prove to have deterent effects, because for the fear to have any sort of deterent effect, it must be at the very least more than their day to day fear of death. Anywho, I'd imagine that we tend to catch a lesser proportion of murders in areas where murders are frequent, so we'll move on.
Next, it has to seem likely that I'll be convicted. This is where the problems start. Considering our legal standard is that of reasonable doubt for an aquittal, this obviously means that there are a substantial amount of people who in fact commit crimes and get let off. We deem this as acceptable because we would rather let the guilty be free than punish the innocent, and the harder it is to prove the standard of innocence, the more innocent people who will be convicted. The problem with this is that it makes me less concerned about anything the government threatens to do, because it's less likely that they'll actually do anything.
Let's think of this from a strategy perspective
We'll consider the benefit to me of committing the murder to be 5 (obviously there is a benefit to me in committing the murder, because if you assume that I am rational, then you have to assume that there was some benefit to me in my actions). So let's say that the death penalty would carry the utility of -10. Now if this is the case, if I knew that I would be executed if I committed this crime, then I would never commit the crime.
But now let's say that there's only a 45% chance of me actually being convicted of this crime. Then in my rational decision making process, I'd weigh the deterent effect of the death penalty at -4.5, at which point I would still murder that person. Now if we changed the legal standard necessary to prove innocence, making it a 57% chance of being convicted, then all of a sudden the deterent effect of the death penalty is -5.7, making it so that I'll never murder that person.
So for us to have an effective death penalty, we'd have to change the legal standard, and thus admittedly send more innocent people to be punished for the actions of others.
Next there's the probability of actually being executed once you're convicted. Now we have many safeguards in place to try to ensure that we never execute an innocent. There are typically a number of appeals, and I think a fair amount of people sentanced to death either have their sentances commuted to life without parole, or get let go altogether. So this decreases the deterent effect of the death penalty.
Next we have the time value of benefits. As a species, the human race has been defined by valuing things now a lot more than things in ten or fifteen years. So thus the longer the time people typically have to wait to die, the less relevent the fear of death in the decision making process.
From these two we establish that we'd need to, at the very least, cut back substantially on the time and effort we dedicate to making sure no one innocent is executed (which one can reasonably assume would lead to innocent people being executed).
Let's go back to the decision of the would be murderer. Let's say that if you commit a murder, there's a .7 chance of being caught, a .6 chance of being convicted, a .8 chance of staying convicted, and a .4 value of the effect due to time. I'd say that those numbers would be close enough to being conservative guesses based on nothing. Anywho, what we see is that, due to this system, the deterent effect of anything is immidiate reduced to 13.44% of its original self.
So thus we can either give up on using it as a deterent, or completely overhaul our legal system while sacrificing a number of ideals which, as a society, we value more than the lives of a few (thus why we fought the revolutionary war).
So if we give up on using it as a deterent, why would we still use it at all? Well we use it all over the place, without any real deterent effect, so if it's not reforming the criminal, and it's not convincing other criminals not to do as he has done, and if cetaris paribus it'd be better not to execute someone, then we are left with two possible justifications, justice for the sake of justice, and revenge.
It's a thin line between the two, the primary difference is that with justice for the sake of justice, the feelings of those who were left behind by the victim are not the primary concern. If we are discussing justice, I believe you could justify a belief in the death penalty, if we can agree that that is what the criminal deserves for his actions, but it's definately a hard sell. First we must separate justice from its utilitarian effects, which are deterence and revenge, thus allowing us to examine justice for the sake of justice. Now there is a utilitarian benefit to justice for the sake of justice, and that is building faith and confidence in a system of justice. That being said, as far as justice goes, what is the benefit of killing someone over taking away all of his freedom? How much better can it be to take away someone's life than taking away his ability to live? From a perspective of pure justice, it seems to me that it more just to have the murderer to live out his days behind bars while the people around him avoid lowering themselves to his level than it is to do the exact same thing that we're punishing him for (well not the exact same thing, he killed an innocent, while we kill murderers, but in the end we're all killing). Speaking about justice for the sake of justice, the marginal value of executing a prisoner seems vastly outweighed by the marginal cost.
So then we're at revenge. This is how we all justify the death penalty to ourselves "Think of the mother, she's not going to have her son anymore, what kind of people are we if we don't avenge her?" Although I like to consider myself somewhat more of a hawk than Ghandi, the quote "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind" has relevence here. We've seen it on a macro level over an over again, violence begets violence, revenge is avenged, and it never stops. The Irish and the Ulstrians (if that's what they're called), each has ample claim to revenge against the other, and thus the violence went on for hundreds of years, until eventually the IRA decided to be mature and say "We don't want revenge anymore, too many people have died", in effect. We see the same thing between the Israelis and the Arabs, each has ample claim to revenge against the other (and if either were intellectually honest about the matter they'd see that), and the violence won't stop until they both lay down their claim to vengence. This is because revenge has nothing to do with justice. Revenge isn't:
what you did to him
- What he did to you
______________________
= Amount of revenge you deserve
People don't think this way. In reality, they don't really think at all, it's all emotion. You hurt someone I love, and thus I must hurt you, that's all it is. It comes from a good place, actually, but as they say, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". The devil is the temptation to do what is easy instead of what is right, and thus revenge is the devil. If we can accept that there are extrordinarily few, if any, people who are inherently bad, then we can accept that people become bad as a product of their decisions, which typically won't be Batman villain shit, instead it will almost always be people giving into the temptation to do what is easy instead of what is right. From this we can take that how good we are, as a people, is defined by our ability to be do what is right instead of what is easy. The reason why there's nothing good about the rampant liberal humanitarianism coming out of Hollywood is that none of them advocate anything that is hard (not to mention the majority of them who ignore the complexities of the issues on which they speak, and so thus they are actually doing what is easy instead of what is right, and thus they are doing bad things in advocating this shit). Why doesn't advocating against what's happening in Darfur make you any better of a person? Because it's easy! It's so blatantly obviously wrong in every possible way that it doesn't say anything about you to observe that fact. What defines us as a people isn't what we decide when the questions are obvious, it's when we're faced with two options, one of which appeals to all of our most basic wants and needs, and the other which is unpleasant, but right. It's when we decide to not vote for politicians who promise to give us money, it's when we accept that our agriculture subsidies are ruining nations all over the world, it's when every bone in our body is aching to torture this motherfucker in the middle of the town square for the pain he has caused people that we love, but we say "No, because it's the wrong thing to do."
Don't think I'm arguing that people who are opposed to the death penalty are better people than those who support it, because that's not what I'm saying in any way, shape, or form. Many people who are opposed to the death penalty oppose it because they don't have the sack for it. Many people simply don't have the sack to accept that the cost of being rich, free, and alive, all at the same time (yes, I stole that from the West Wing) is that most of our decisions aren't whether we're going to kill someone or not, but how many are going to die. Environmentalists ignore that the suicide rate goes up with unemployment, and thus environmental regulations which hurt the economy are in fact killing people. People who want to pull out of Iraq to save American soldiers ignore how many more will die because of this. I'm certainly not saying this about all liberals, there are certainly some who have considered all of this and come to different conclusions than I have, but the vast majority of them willfully ignore all of this obvious shit. If you're only opposed to the death penalty because you refuse to have blood on your hands, then you are too timid for matters of government, and you are most certainly not morally superior to anyone.
It is safe to say that anyone who acts self satisfied and morally superior isn't actually morally superior, because no one with superior moral abilities will ever feel satisfied with themselves. This is because those who are truly morally superior regularly make decisions which disgust themselves.
Anywho, back to the death penalty.
To sum up the conclusions, we've concluded that the marginal sacrifices necessary in order to have an effective domestic death penalty are significantly greater than the marginal benefit of having capital punishment which functions as a deterent.
The death penalty for the sake of revenge is morally unjustifiable.
The death penalty for the sake of justice is potentially justifiable, but it would take an argument for it stronger than mine against it.
Now in the beginning I mentioned that this was almost entirely a moral argument, and it may seem that I've been a little too cold and logical in my analysis for this to be a moral argument. I would beg to differ. Everything must be governed by reason, morality is no exception. Once we have decided on what morality is (and in the Judeo-Christian tradition, morality is typically defined by how much better we make things for everyone around us), then we need to use reason to figure out what we can actually do to reach that goal. Ever notice how there are never any hippies nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize? The guy who won last year, I forget his name, he was from Bangladesh. What he won it for? Banking. He used technical knowledge and combined it with logic and reason, and actually made life ridiculously better for a large amount of people. If we do not critically analyze the actual effects of our actions, then there is no reason to believe that we'll ever get anywhere closer to the end we are pursuing (namely because we have no way of knowing where we're going in the first place). The road to hell is paved with good intentions because intentions stem from emotion. We feel this is a good thing to do, and so we do it, when we should've first looked into it and seen if it was actually a good thing to do.
posted by Galen at 7:53 AM
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