Ethical Perspective of Capital Punishment

There is no doubt that from the earliest period of organized civil society capital punishment was employed as an instrument of state authority, prestige, and power. The unjust condemnation of Socrates, deplored, as Socrates predicted in the Apology, throughout history, vividly shows that exacting the ultimate price for severe infractions against the public order has been embedded into political analysis throughout the history of the West. As Socrates said to the men who condemned him:

Me you have killed because you wanted to escape the accuser, and not to give an account of your lives. But that will not be as you suppose: far otherwise. For I say that there will be more accusers of you than there are now; accusers whom hitherto I have restrained. . . . If you think that by killing men you can prevent someone from censuring your evil lives, you are mistaken; that is not a way of escape which iseither possible or honorable; the easiest and the noblest way is not to be disabling others, but to be improving yourselves. This is the prophecy which I utter before my departure to the judges who have condemned me (Apology 58

. . .
tate authority. A famous statement by Thomas Hobbes is that where absolute government does not control the conflict between ordinary people, the lives of everybody are "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short" (Hobbes 186). In other words, the state is entitled to execute those who upset the systems of social control that the government establishes. One modern interpretation of that idea is that capital punishment will "vindicate the law and the social order undermined by the crime" (Van den Haag 287). Obviously there is a respectable philosophical discourse that justifies capital punishment. However, compelling and opposite views of state power exercised against criminals have also emerged. These views come from social theorists who say that the relative positions of social power that state authorities and private citizens hold have a lot to do with whether a private citizen is likely to become a candidate for capital punishment. For example, social commentators have for decades argued that there is a relationship between level of income and convictions for crime, and that those accused and convicted are more likely to be nonwhite. Indeed, the most controversial aspect of American capital punishment has to do with the residue
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Bernard Shaw's, Thomas Hobbes, Furman Georgia, Supreme Court, Ten Commandments, Dr Johnson's, , Decalogue Exodus, West Socrates, England Midwest, capital punishment, den haag, van den haag, van den, death penalty, belmont calif wadsworth, belmont calif, calif wadsworth, public policy, supreme court, executing innocent, favor capital punishment, theory contemporary issues, contemporary issues, debate capital punishment,
Approximate Word count = 3317
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)