main page
"To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
|
click here for a bigger sunset
One small voice in the proud tradition of FreeBlogging*
Tuesday, January 14, 2003
posted by gbarto at 12:27 AM:
Here's Cicero on the death penalty. He raises a lot of valid points, but has one or two problems. The biggest of these is in his efforts to demonstrate that the death penalty isn't dramatically different from any other. While it is true that the government can no more return twenty years of life to someone wrongly imprisoned than return life in its entirety to someone executed, this doesn't mean that they are errors of the same measure. Marcus goes an awfully long way out of his way to try to make killing someone as unremarkable as possible, but there is nothing unremarkable about it. Every other punishment carries in it the possibility of paying one's debt to society - doing one's time, as they say. Every other punishment - including life in prison - carries the possibility of redemption, of putting one's soul aright if nothing else. To say that a person needs to spend the rest of his life in prison may mean that he simply will never be fit for the outside world - or that it will take a lifetime to repay his debt. The death penalty, on the other hand, simply turns a person into a non-person. It puts government in charge of determining who is a human being and who is merely an animal to be destroyed.I'd like to repeat that: The death penalty puts government in charge of determining who is a human being and who is merely an animal to be destroyed. That's a point I should have mentioned in responding to Cicero's query last night, for it also speaks to why the president should be able to send men into combat where they may well die but not petition for citizens of his own country to be killed: Men and women going into battle are unquestionably human, unquestionably treasured and every effort is made to keep them safe to keep our country safe. They are not only human; they represent the humanity from which they come in the starkest manner possible. Their lives may be lost depending on how fate plays out; their humanity however is unquestioned. On death row, on the other hand, what is at issue is not the protection of and elevation of humanity; rather it is the nullification of humanity.
The death penalty should go.
* * *
French Elections, 1st round
Second round special page
Second Round Results Map
The TurkeyBlog main page contains only the 20 most recent entries.
To go further back, check the archive in the right hand bar.
