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Comment by nomilk | Hacker News Reader

<thought experiment> Suppose we lived in a world where it was possible to know someone's guilt or innocence with strictly 100% confidence. Curious to know if your views would change?

Note the cost of incarceration is around ~$70k/year; enough to save lives, house people, heal people, feed people etc if put to other uses.

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You assume that the laws are flawless. They are not. It is hard to un-kill a person if you realize a law was bogus.

The first law I would introduce would be that the death sentance only applies to people who demanded it publically before.

Guilt or innocence is irrellevant to the discussion about whether the death penalty is justified though, for several reasons; it's binary thinking (there's a right and a wrong, there's good and bad people); it's dehumanizing (a bad person is forever bad and will forever be a burden to society); it's reductionist (a prisoner unit costs X per year at no benefit to society), etc. I don't know enough philosophy to list everything wrong with this premise.

Think hard about why someone commits a crime. What is their background, their circustances, and what would have prevented it from happenign. Then think about what you think the purpose is of a sentencing? Is it for revenge, revalidation, setting an example, or removing undesireables from society (temporarily, indefinitely, or permanently)?

> Think hard about why someone commits a crime. What is their background, their circustances, and what would have prevented it from happenign.

I think that the kind of crimes which lead to a death sentence happen because the perpetrator is a bad person who likes to hurt others. There's no "background" or "circumstances" that would make you break into a woman's house and stab her to death - to do such a thing, you have to either not know or not care that it's wrong.

That doesn't by itself prove that the death penalty is right, or even that people who commit these kind of murders can never be rehabilitated. But it's really disturbing to me how often people whitewash the specific crimes death row inmates are accused of, as though we're all a couple missed paychecks away from randomly murdering people.

Even if we had 100% certainty what crimes are 100% worth death? Not even that is simple.

If you want to consider cost, it costs literal millions to execute someone.

Plus what of the potential profit? The guilty person could be a teenager making a silly mistake who could grow up to become the next Einstein. Insert Bill Gates' mugshot here, who is responsible for hundreds of thousands of jobs and bringing billions into the US / worldwide economy.

But he was guilty and it would probably have been better to execute him because what if he did something else wrong?

They don't give the death penalty to teenagers making 'silly mistake's. It's a sentence not handed out without weighty thought and only to those who knowingly and intentionally take life.

I'm so tired of the "next Einstein" pithy replies. These are adults who have done heinous crimes against innocent people. Justice requires severe consequences.

> Curious to know if your views would change?

It wouldn't. There are cases where we do know someone's guilt with 100% confidence, but in my country we still don't execute them.

Suppose we could see everything that happened in the past, perfectly, and see in to the minds of everyone. We could save dollars!

Here’s another thought experiment. We have ample evidence that the death penalty hasn’t made America safe from murder. But we don’t know if it has deterrence value for lesser crimes.

I propose death by hanging for repeat littering and speeding near a school. I bet that’d be effective.

Hanging? Why not shoot on sight, like the second amendment absolutionists/extremists think is the way to go?

> We have ample evidence that the death penalty hasn’t made America safe from murder. But we don’t know if it has deterrence value for lesser crimes.

You seem to be suggesting that because murders still happen, we know the death penalty has no deterrence value? That's not how deterrence works.

If murder is illegal, then it makes no difference if the state does it as punishment for committing murder. You’ve still sanctioned a murder, admittedly of a murderer. A civilised country accepts this simple logic and doesn’t sanction murder under any circumstances.

In that case, would a civilised country have a military? Any military operations is state sanctioned killings.

I love the moral direction, but this sadly doesn’t hold up to philosophical scrutiny. Is it murder to

1. Kill someone who’s about to kill someone?

2. Kill someone in a defensive war to defend your freedoms?

3. Kill someone by prioritizing things other than their medical care, eg in hospice?

4. Kill someone by letting them smoke/drink/overeat?

5. Kill someone by letting them starve?

If you want to say that no country is civilized yet then hey I’m with ya. Otherwise, it’s not quite so simple. The death penalty is a tragic injustice, I agree, but just saying “it’s murder” is not a serious engagement with the issue IMO.

No. Murder is not the same as killing, just like not all taking is stealing. Even the most civilised society imaginable admits that killing is sometimes acceptable (in self defense, for example). Killing done by the state is trivially not murder by definition, and less trivially there are justifications you can argue about. But you have to argue about it, your "simple logic" is unfortunately too simple.

You're right that it is too simple, but it's an easy rule of thumb with which to think about and frame the problem.

If it's illegal to kill a human being, then it's illegal. The existence of a death penalty where the state is able to do it in certain cases, as in the main case where someone themselves has broken the rule and murdered, for me, still does not justify any kind of legalistic justification for sanctioning they be killed. While "the state" is this abstract entity formed by all of us, the state has to act through people, who then have to be involved in taking a life. The state's premeditation of the killing of the murderer is even more premeditated and drawn out form of murder. It's easy to be blinded by the language used around this towards what is happening. I believe even further that if the state is allowed to do it, it opens a loophole in thought that could actually cause more murders to happen, because if the state can do it, then maybe I'll do it too...

This goes much further into philosophy, politics, and legality than I'm comfortable with but there's lawful and unlawful killing, the difference being... well, one is allowed and the other isn't, as per the law (be it national or e.g. international / warfare laws).

I can't even make a statement whether killing is always morally injustifiable or not.

By this logic, holding someone against their will is illegal too. When a state does it, we call it incarceration. Is it wrong for the state to sanction incarcerating someone?

Incarceration can be appealed.

Robbery is also ilegal and yet, each month, the government takes about 50% of my wage in taxes.

If I could fly by flapping my arms, I wouldn't need airplanes.

In such a world (which is, by any means likely ever to be available, impossible), we’d still run against the issue that the state has the authority to kill people. This world would also have to be free of political corruption, and be so politically stable that what constitutes a crime worthy of the death penalty could never change.

What’s the point of this analogy? We can’t know 100% so it doesn’t matter.

The point is to distinguish between an act that is immoral in and of itself and one that is immoral because we aren't sufficiently smart/honorable/efficient. This informs the argument - in the latter case killing could be permissible if only we become more advanced - in the former case it would never be permissible.

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