Ethics of the Death Penalty
The death penalty is a majorly decisive issue. Some countries feel that it is a cruel punishment and have outlawed it, such as England. Others practice the punishment liberally with small caliber crimes receiving the harshest possible punishment. In the United States of America, the death penalty exists in some states but has been abolished in others. Crimes that qualify for the death penalty are serious felonies such as murder. Those on opposing sides of the issue often look to the philosophy of ethics to prove their own position or to subvert the opposition's perspective. Often those who support the death penalty argue that this is the only just punishment for someone who has committed heinous crimes against other people. The dignity of the victim is the only one they consider. Antithetically, those who oppose the death penalty argue that committing a crime like that should be punished, but that the death of another person does nothing to change the fact that the other person is already deceased. They believe that the death penalty is unethical in that it deprives the convicted person of their dignity and their right to existence. Comparing the two sides, the various arguments can be examined and a conclusion can be drawn. There are crimes which deserve more than a simple prison term and there are people who choose to commit crimes of such a disgusting character that the action makes them no longer human; therefore in cases of extreme crime, the death penalty is a viable punishment.
Immanuel Kant argues that every being is entitled to a level of dignity. Human beings deserve this because of their separation from objects. People, because of their ability to moralize have intrinsic worth. They are all valid, regardless of the caliber of their characters. Therefore, he might well argue that no one has the right to take a life, even if the one being killed has already done so. At the same time, he states that the criminal, when he does got to prison for his crimes, is complicit in his imprisonment. If he did not want to go to prison, then he would not have made the choice to commit a crime where the punishment is confinement in a
He writes, "It may be rendered by saying that the undeserved evil which any one commits on another, is to be regarded as perpetrated on himself" (Kant 104). By perpetrating the crime, regardless of the likelihood of his capture and imprisonment, the criminal is asking to be put in prison. Therefore, his execution or incarceration does nothing to diminish his personal dignity. He made the choice to commit the crime and therefore set about the path to his ultimate destiny. Furthermore, Kant states that unlike other crimes, there is no way to make up for a murder. With burglary, restitution can be made or vandalism can be cleaned, but there is no way to make amends for a murder. Therefore, he writes, "Whoever has committed murder, must die…There is no likeness or proportion between life, however painful, and death; and therefore there is no equality between the crime of murder and the retaliation of it but what is judicially accomplished by the execution of the criminal" (Kant 105). Punishment is only viable if the ramifications are equal to the seriousness of the crime. In the case of murder, the only equitable punishment is for that individual to die for his crimes.
Kant's perspective is obviously not shared by everyone; a great many of the world's finest thinkers believe the exact opposite. They think the death penalty ought to be universally abolished. Thurgood Marshall and Hugo Bedau argue that the dignity that Kant discusses is incongruent with the death penalty and that nothing justifies the death of another person. What that person has done is irrelevant. No action they could perform can dehumanize an individual to the point where you can consider their rights to existence as lesser than anyone else's. According to these men, the death penalty is an arcane relic of a past era when punishments were meted out based upon the need for revenge. Modern society has evolved, they argue, to the point where the concept of punishment as it was originally designed no longer has the same purpose. There is no way to rehabilitate someone after they have been killed…
