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> I think for most people the intuition is something like: the state is there to protect people (in principle at least); when someone is sufficiently dangerous to others they forfeit this right and it becomes just about protecting others from them; whereupon 'vengeance' is basically permitted against them

There's no connection between "protect[ing] people" and "vengeance", The latter is not necessary for the former.

The retributive instinct should not be "fed" by the State. It is perfectly normal to have that feeling, but we should recognize it for what it is and let it stay as such. You might think this isn't possible or stable but the Nordics would prove you wrong.

No they're just two different things. That's my point. On the one hand the state is delegated with using violence for protection. On the other hand the state is delegated with carrying out retribution.

If you had no state you would see people build the exact same delegations in private: first, people would enact their own protection and retribution; then, they would coordinate to make it more just by centralizing those powers and (theoretically) subordinating them to some system of justice that uses them more fairly than individuals would. We're just on the other side of that process, which is why I'm saying it's the explanation for why the state has those powers.

This has no bearing on the morality of "should the state do this"; it's just how it actually is, and why it makes sense of the minds of people who are okay with it (since the OP said they couldn't imagine a reason).

But, I think, if you aren't going to let the state carry out vengeance at all, you do need to figure out what you're going to do about people's desire for it to happen. (In practice though, you definitely are, you're just going to modulate how extreme it can be, i.e. killing people vs incarcerating them.) Just, IMO, the people who pretend like the justice system is not at all about retribution and only about rehabilitation/protection are... living in a fairy tale version of reality. Like I would love if that were the case, and if everyone was reformable and came out repentant for their behavior then it would be possible, but in practice, people want other people punished for their crimes. Consider that the point of jailing executives for fraud, which everyone wants more of, is not to prevent fraud but to actually punish them. Since it is the punishing that has a theoretical chance of stopping other people from fraud.

> But, I think, if you aren't going to let the state carry out vengeance at all, you do need to figure out what you're going to do about people's desire for it to happen.

You educate/culture it out of them, which is what the Nordics, and Western Europe more generally, choose to do. Seems to be working fine so far.

> Seems pretty natural to me unless you happen to have an infinite negative weight assigned to killing someone, which I do not. I mean, I have a large negative one, but it's not infinite.

What's your negative weight on killing someone who is innocent? A justice system cannot be perfect. There are too many people, too many motivations/biases, and too much nuance involved. If a justice system is not perfect and it executes people, innocent people will have their lives unjustly taken from them by us. If it's 99.9% accurate (I'd argue that even 99% is an impossibly high bar), then an innocent person has likely been intentionally killed by the federal and/or state governments in the last 20 years. Are you cool with that? After execution, it's not generally possible to file an appeal on behalf of the executed even if new evidence demonstrates innocence. This has the implication of multiple injustices - an innocent person is killed by the state, the true murderer gets no punishment, and society incurs the risk of wrongful execution with no protection from the true murderer.

Or we could take the less expensive, partially reversible route of putting the convicted in jail until they die.

If you'd like to understand the imperfection more concretely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wrongful_convictions_i...

you will be glad to know my weight against killing someone innocent is very high. personally i think the only defensible version of capital punishment uses it only in the case where there is literally no doubt about the guilt, like, many unbiased people saw it happen or there's a recording or they credibly confess or stuff like that. it boggles my mind that it is used outside of this. Feels like people say "beyond the shadow of a doubt" and then somehow don't mean it? Everyone is detective-story pilled like they think a watertight explanation of a thing is the same thing as eliminating doubt, and that's just not at all true.

I'd go so far as to say that the standard should be, if people agree on capital punishment and turn out to be wrong, then they should be tried for murder themselves. Not fair as things are currently designed because the standard is (apparently!) not that high, but that's how high I would set it.

but anyway I was not describing my own view but rather what I saw as the view of people who generally support it by default, since the OP did not seem to understood how that was possible.

The state has a monopoly on violence. In exchange for this great power we expect great responsibility. A state that is flippant with its use of violence signals something to its people. I believe that even if there are zero incorrect convictions that the state should use the minimum of violence to improve the safety of the populace. The death penalty (as opposed to lwop) does not protect anybody from crime. It does not deter people. Its only function is vengeance. And when the state uses violence in vengeance it degrades society.

yeah but then you quibble over the definition of "flippant". What if the state is maximally responsible about its use of violence, so there's no arguing that it could be any more violence. Now what? You have to find a different argument.

(Well, there is the "the limiting case of maximum responsibility is still nonzero errors therefore it is always unjust", which is a coherent stance, but I kinda get the impression that it's a fake one? Like it is not the actual reason that the people who profess it are opposed to the death penalty; instead it's a reason they kinda confabulate to justify their opposition even though it's not their actual reason. Their actual reason is closer to: nothing will ever get them to fully trust the state with killing. Which is much more reasonable, IMO, so I wish they would just state that directly. (this is all me trying to vibe out where other people are coming from, though, so I could be wrong)

I was describing the thought process: the reason for a death penalty (which, to be clear, I am not arguing for either way, I am describing why I think it has come to be at a practical level) is that given that vengeance/retribution is a thing that people 'want', the state assumes the responsibility of carrying it out (responsibly) so as to avoid vigilantism / preserve the monopoly.

> Their actual reason is closer to: nothing will ever get them to fully trust the state with killing. Which is much more reasonable, IMO, so I wish they would just state that directly.

Huh? I just told you that this is my opinion. There is nothing that will ever get me to fully trust the state with killing. Even if God Himself came down and said that so-and-so was definitely guilty I would still oppose executing that person.

I think you misunderstood me. I wasn't talking about you. I was trying to disentangle three arguments:

1. we can't trust the state with killing because it is always necessarily imperfect 2. we can't trust the state with killing abstractly, because we simply don't trust the state in principle 3. we don't want the state to do killing for moral reasons unrelated to trust

I was saying that people say (1) but, I suspect, they really mean (2) or (3). It's not the imperfection of the state, or its flippancy, that is the actual problem. It's other stuff, which is perfectly fine. I just think that's it a lot less confusing if people say the other stuff outright instead of talking about the imperfectness of the system which is just a distraction.

I personally know people (my mother is one of them) who legitimately are in category 1.

Motte: protection

Bailey: vengeance

uh... no? that's not what I said. I wasn't arguing for the position. I was describing how the position works. And I don't think it's a motte/bailey at all because they really do have the one thing for protection and the other thing for vengeance. It's not a case of using one to justify the other, it's just two separate things that they justify.

I didn’t realize you weren’t arguing in favor. Still I do see this formulation frequently used to argue for capital punishment. They will fall back on claims of protection whenever challenged, but the core argument (that not everyone accepts!) is that victims have a right to vengeance.

I think people are get very muddled when they attempt to put their positions into words. That doesn't necessarily mean they're being deceptive. Sometimes it's just a skill issue. I think that what I have described is the "coherent" version of the position (the steelman, if you like). I like to lay it out like that because it makes the discussion about the thing it is actually about, which is, as you said, whether a right to vengeance makes sense or is something we want to enshrine in our society.

Now that I'm thinking about it there is at least one other coherent position I know of for it, which is: if you start out thinking of life as rather 'disposable' (so humans are somewhat equivalent to animals, which we regularly raise to eat; war is okay; things like that), then the argument for keeping people alive is that they contribute to society or at least don't heavily detract from it, and the argument for putting them to death is that people have proven themselves not even worth keeping alive. This opens a whole different can of worms though where you have to explain where your bar for keeping people alive is. but I do think it is ultimately how a lot of people think about it, as well---at least in regard to people who are not part their personal community.

> This opens a whole different can of worms though where you have to explain where your bar for keeping people alive is.

This risk shouldn’t be understated—there’s a lot of unpersoning happening right now among those with political sway, and if it continues we could easily swing back around to the eugenics and mass killing of the early 20th century. The modern notion of human rights was explicitly created as a reaction to the mass death and atrocities of the world wars.

There’s a tendency among the powerful to view those at the bottom as “useless eaters,” so when you start making decisions about who should be “kept alive” this can become quite dangerous.

There's not really any need for sophisticated arguments, it's a constant shit show and we should abolish it for the simplicity.

I guess that or go full on Judge Dredd.