Comment by the_ancient | Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_ancient | Hacker News Reader

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>>>I'm not against the Death Penalty on general principle grounds

You should be...

When you kill someone outside the conditions of self defense that is murder and is immoral. I do not care if the government doing it as some kind of "punishment" or a person doing it for another reason, murder is murder, "capital punishment" is murder.

If we want a peaceful, just and free society, it can not include capital punishment. A free and civilized society does not have Capital Punishment.

History will not judge us by how we treat the acceptable people, the people that follow the rules, the nice people... No history will judge our society by how it treats the worst of us, the evil people that given the opportunity would slice your throat open and laugh as you bleed out...

It is likely that in 100 years, this time will be viewed by people living then like we view the barbarism of Early American history. People will be asking "how could anyone support that kind of treatment of others". This of course is not just about capital punishment but the entire prison system.

It's very easy for me to have a preferred moral code that is almost like yours except that I do not axiomatically declare that capital punishment is equivalent to murder.

Governments are made by people out of people. The whole system is just people, telling one another what to do, with the carrot of reward and the rod of violence, as necessary. An organization isn't a shield against personal morality. Capital punishment is a bunch of people telling another person to kill yet another person. That's all it is.

(And yes, war is murder too.)

I agree with most of that, except for the "is" in "war is murder".

What do you mean by "is"? At the end of the day we have decided as a society that "Killing people is called murder and it's Very Bad", and we can also decide that "killing people who don't deserve it is murder and it's Very Bad" if we prefer.

Personally, I vacillate between thinking that capital punishment and life-imprisonment is quite immoral (and that we should fine something like 'exile' as an alternative), and a more utilitarian stance that, well, we have to find something to do with dangerous people and it doesn't really bother me if getting rid of them entirely is it.

[n.b. these stances are all in a vacuum and do not reflect my policy beliefs, which are specifically attuned to our society's pisspoor implementation of life-imprisonment and capital punishment.]

Why? Because it is "legal". Do you base your morality on what is legal and what is illegal?

How do you define murder?

Sincere question. Why are you allowed to murder someone in self-defense, but not as a punishment for crimes? What moral code do you rely on that draws the line there? Why is that moral code more correct than one that draws the line between punishment and capricious violence?

FWIW, I'm somewhere between you and OP in my thoughts. Definitely against the death penalty in practice, and somewhat ambivalent in theory. But it's interesting to really think about the axioms we construct our morals and ethics from, and why they're the way they are.

>>Why are you allowed to murder someone in self-defense, but not as a punishment for crimes?

The principle of Self Ownership, which is the basis of the philosophy of liberty

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9srplWe_QQ

It would not be murder to protect your own life from the aggression of others. However any use of violence must be in proportion to the threat to your life. I.e I do not believe you have the right to kill someone for trespassing, but only in those circumstance where there is a reasonable believe your life to be direct and immediate danger.

Great answer. Do you consider lifetime imprisonment to be immoral for the same reason?

That depends, in general yes.

Generally I believe the only persons that should be in "prison" are those that are a clear danger to society Serial Killers for example.

Not for punishment, but for the protection of society.

I think the legal system should be less about punishment, and more about Restitution and Protection.

Self-ownership... Then you could theoretically "cede" that ownership of your own body to someone else like a family-member / spouse (perhaps a will, or have it done prior-to-death). And thus, in that frame of reference murder becomes an extreme form of theft.

If capital punishment is murder, then taxation is theft.

Is paying for services theft?

Why don't you rephrase that with the appropriate level of detail and not leaving out important facts: Is not wanting to pay for something that you were given and didn't explicitly request theft? And yes, I'm an anarcho-capitalist and jumping in here.

There are a slew of assumptions that are being made when arguing for a pro-state stance. Eventually, you'll stumble on this thing called the "social contract", and then magically all questions of validity are somehow answered. It's a convenient answer devoid of any first-principles, that many are content with using as a basis to defend the status-quo of the existence of a state.

There's no such thing as no state. For any conflict, whoever wins is the de facto state.

I think you'd get disagreements from both sides of the fence on that definition of a state.

All of the theories of who is a state or not fail as soon as real geopolitics is involved.

Taiwan is not a state in the eyes of the US simply because China wouldn't play nicely if we said otherwise.

Saudi Arabia during its formation in the early 1900s would have been indistinguishable from the ISIS of today.

If your window is broken and I replace your window but take your TV as payment, did I steal your TV?

Maybe you had a different window you wanted, or maybe you did not want to replace it at all.

"Paying for services" implies some kind of voluntary exchange. Government is not voluntary, government is violence, and any "service" provided by government is done so at gun point under the threat of violence and paid for in the same manner.

Yes, yes, you and the guy above are Americans, I get that. Me, I'm from Europe. I guess we see things differently.

Of course, none of us here has a country that would demand such ridiculous things as income taxes from expats, so I see where that may come from.

I dunno, I'm not a libertarian :)

Correct

Frankly, I don't even understand what's the purpose of capital punishment?

It is not to punish someone -- they are already dead, so they can't feel the punishment It is not to set an example -- its been proven over and over again - when people are ready or commit crime, the last thing they think of is that they will get caught or get punished. That's why death penalty does not stop people from committing heinous crimes. It is not to give relief to the family of a victim. Countless examples of (mostly Christians) that publicly said they forgive the murderer and are against death penalty for him/her are always being ignored by justice.

Its very scary to think a civilized country have something as horrible as death penalty, which imho means we gave up on someone. Sure I've seen animals in human skin but what stops us from putting them in jail for the rest of their lives (not money I can tell you that).

One obvious answer is that capital punishment guarantees that the criminal will not commit another crime, which isn't true of any other sentence.

Lifetime solitary without any means of communication. This is probably worse than death.

People escape from prison.

Haha, not from supermax they don't.

If you used a time machine to bring some people from a 1600s English colony here in America to the present time, they would think our punishments are cruel and unusual. To them, prison itself was cruel and unusual punishment, so they didn't have them: they just executed people or did other harsh, but quick punishments, depending on the crime. To them, it was far more merciful to execute someone than to stick them in a prison cell for years and years. (They did have jails, though, but only for people awaiting trial.)

So any time I see someone criticizing the death penalty as "uncivilized", I think it's a bit silly because there have been whole cultures that completely disagreed.

okay so taking your logic forward, I dont get it why we need houses, forks and cars? We used to be just fine living in caves, using stones to chase and crash each other skulls for food, and we been fine riding horses too!

So you think prison really isn't all that awful then? And that everyone who tries to simply commit suicide instead of spending their life in prison must have "mental problems"?

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