Nothing is gained from a death. Not even the satisfaction of revenge or closure, as the crime doesn’t undo itself. Some people may say they feel vindicated, but they are still mourning their loved one either way.
Now imagine if keeping a murderer alive enables learning why the events happened, and something is learned to help prevent other potential murders from happening. That is far more satisfying.
You are correct. My favorite argument against the death penalty is this: what if we are wrong about who committed the crime? If we were ever wrong even one time, that’s indefensible and horrific. Thing is, we know we’ve been wrong about many criminals.
Unfortunately there’s plenty of people who are perfectly fine with that. When given evidence of it happening before, they’ll go oh “it won’t happen here” or “it won’t happen again”. How do you convince people like them that simply don’t care for the value of life? Of course a number of these are also “pro-lifers”.
Or we could just abolish the death penalty
Nothing is gained from a death. Not even the satisfaction of revenge or closure, as the crime doesn’t undo itself. Some people may say they feel vindicated, but they are still mourning their loved one either way.
Now imagine if keeping a murderer alive enables learning why the events happened, and something is learned to help prevent other potential murders from happening. That is far more satisfying.
You are correct. My favorite argument against the death penalty is this: what if we are wrong about who committed the crime? If we were ever wrong even one time, that’s indefensible and horrific. Thing is, we know we’ve been wrong about many criminals.
Unfortunately there’s plenty of people who are perfectly fine with that. When given evidence of it happening before, they’ll go oh “it won’t happen here” or “it won’t happen again”. How do you convince people like them that simply don’t care for the value of life? Of course a number of these are also “pro-lifers”.
My favorite one is that we kill people who have killed, so we can show that killing people is bad.
I love how Article 3 of the declaration of human rights says
and then states just kill people. Like, why did we even bother to write it down?