Capital Punishment Arguments
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Arguments over capital punishment and the rightness or wrongness of it have been made for decades in the United States. Capital punishment was eliminated for a time by a Supreme Court decision in the 1970s, but laws reinstating capital punishment were drafted to conform to that opinion. In spite of a number of challenges in recent years, capital punishment has been affirmed by the Court and continues to be enforced. There is considerable public support for the death penalty, much of it related to a general trend toward demanding harsher penalties for criminals because of a fear of street crime and violence. Yet, such popular emotional responses should not be the deciding factor in public policy decisions, particularly decisions involving lives. The death penalty is held out as a deterrent, and yet there is as much evidence that there is no deterrent effect as there is that such an effect exists. Though proponents and opponents of the death penalty may argue over such data as can be found on issues of this sort, a more basic question is simply whether capital punishment is the right sort of thing for an advanced society to use. Of the theorists to be discussed, Glover and Reiman oppose capital punishment for different reasons, and my own view is closer to Reiman's than Glover's. For one thing, Glover's view is somewhat elastic in that it could be changed if a way were found to make executions the deterrents some want them to be or if some balance could be found betw
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t on those grounds the death penalty is a just punishment for murder; however, he further indicates that this fact does not mean that capital punishment should be carried forth in a civilized society. From his point of view, it is more important for the modern state to proceed toward a more civilized stance and to eliminate capital punishment as a moral act than for that state to indulge in this form of punishment out of retribution or for any other reason. The retributive rationale has a long history, much of which Reiman details. At various times in history the state has also inflicted other punishments accepted at the time but considered barbaric today, such as torture. The retributive system is based in part on the view that the offender is only getting his just deserts with a given punishment, and society's worst crime deserves its worst punishment. Reiman bases his argument on a broader view of the evolution of society and of the effect of that evolution on members of society and on the actions of the state which represents them:
Progress in civilization is characterized by a lower tolerance for one's own pain and that suffered by others. And this is appropriate, since, via growth in knowledge, civilization brings inc
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Approximate Word count = 1584
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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