There is plenty of coverage everywhere you look about how Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon have announced plans to livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the Army officer who shot up Fo…
Historically that’s also why we moved away from execution methods like hangings.
We kind of distilled down a way to remove people from the equation as much as possible to both I guess spread responsibility (making a large group of people have a hand in the execution to the point where no one person is singularly responsible), but also we seem to have gone out of our way to automate a lot of what goes into an execution to sterilize it of guilt as much as possible. This is at least part of why I don’t believe in it.
I feel that execution is vengeance based. It’s not about making the person pay for their crimes (because very often prison is a worse experience than death).
Justice is about repaying a debt to society and being rehabilitated. If rehabilitation is off the table then the next best thing is to incarcerate a person so they can’t be a threat to themselves or others.
The US is terrible at both somehow and I don’t like or believe in our justice system but for a bar that was already in the basement we sure did find an elevator headed down didn’t we.
Lately I’ve come to have doubts about the ethicality even of prison, though I don’t yet know what I’d suggest instead.
In general Ive come around to the idea that the very notion that causing suffering creates a “debt” that must be repaid with more suffering on the part of the perpetrator is itself toxic, because if some way can be found to cause a person to live a life that will not inflict more harm without hurting that person, then that method would be better, at least in a utilitarianist sense, than something more “fair” relying on punishment. The challenge of course is in finding that way is.
Historically that’s also why we moved away from execution methods like hangings.
We kind of distilled down a way to remove people from the equation as much as possible to both I guess spread responsibility (making a large group of people have a hand in the execution to the point where no one person is singularly responsible), but also we seem to have gone out of our way to automate a lot of what goes into an execution to sterilize it of guilt as much as possible. This is at least part of why I don’t believe in it.
I feel that execution is vengeance based. It’s not about making the person pay for their crimes (because very often prison is a worse experience than death).
Justice is about repaying a debt to society and being rehabilitated. If rehabilitation is off the table then the next best thing is to incarcerate a person so they can’t be a threat to themselves or others.
The US is terrible at both somehow and I don’t like or believe in our justice system but for a bar that was already in the basement we sure did find an elevator headed down didn’t we.
Lately I’ve come to have doubts about the ethicality even of prison, though I don’t yet know what I’d suggest instead. In general Ive come around to the idea that the very notion that causing suffering creates a “debt” that must be repaid with more suffering on the part of the perpetrator is itself toxic, because if some way can be found to cause a person to live a life that will not inflict more harm without hurting that person, then that method would be better, at least in a utilitarianist sense, than something more “fair” relying on punishment. The challenge of course is in finding that way is.