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Aswad -> RE: Japan hangs three death-row inmates (2/3/2008 2:48:07 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: luckydog1
Why is holding someone accountable for thier actions "wrong"?
It has nothing to do with holding anyone accountable. You can't be unaccountable for the retaliatory killing. There is a choice involved to kill the killer, and a premeditated one at that. No argument that this is a response can stand up to the reality that this response involves a conscious, rational choice with full knowledge and premeditation. Malice is optional, but very commonly seen expressed by judges, jurors, victims' families, and so forth. That's nothing unique, per se. So far, all the elements are equal between the crime and the response to it.
Which brings us to the next question, dealing with justification.
At this point, we have two killings, both of which presumably involve such a conscious, rational choice, as fewer places retaliate with killing against anything other than premeditated murder. If we look at the first difference, there is the matter of legal sanction; i.e. the distinction between killing and murder, the latter term explicitly referring to the lack of legal sanction. Now, if you wish to make a case that law dictates morals (i.e. that women who are raped in the Middle-East are immoral in being the victims of rape), then there isn't really anything more to discuss. But if there's anything wrong with bathing a woman in acid for accidentally dropping her veil, then law and moral are distinct.
I'm not interested in the legality of executions, as that's a given.
So we're left to examine the context. This poses a problem, as there is simply no objective standard to go by, and the humanist ethics of the West (and, basically, Japan) do not offer a satisfying resolution. Both parties will have considered themselves justified in carrying out their killing: the executioner will feel that (s)he has adequate reason to kill in retaliation, just as the condemned felt that (s)he had adequate reason to kill in the first place. What makes this further problematic, is that the circumstances of an execution are far more controlled and rational than the initial murder. Insofar as there is any validity to moral absolutism (which I reject, but that is held by many to be a matter of opinion, or- more accurately- of belief or even faith), it lies in its universal applicability. Executions violate this universal applicability, unless one appeals to agent-centric principles that defeat the validity of a fundamental assumption of all forms of moral absolutism: that they are culturally and temporally invariant.
Moral objectivism either condemns both, or neither. Moral relativism sees no difference, either. Moral consequentialism does see a difference, but depends on a thorough study of causal relationships; in that regard, my own country demonstrates some of the issues fairly well, with low crime rates and exceptionally low recidivism rates, and a marked improvement after abolishing the death penalty. In fact, we can iterate through the various schools of thought, and find that no prevalent system of morality justifies it without making some sort of exception that invalidates the morality itself, simply to appease a lust for vengeance. Lex Talionis is, to be blunt, immoral.
That leaves us with only the argument about self-defense, which does not hold under the controlled circumstances of an execution.
Now, we can of course consider naturalist ethics, such as those in the Gorean lifestyle. By and large, these would seem to support the notion that lex talionis is indeed morally valid. However, those same ethics also directly contradict the very foundations of Western morality on a number of central points, and are thus not suitable candidates for discussing this in the context of any regime that is in any way representative of its population (e.g. democracies). Consequently, we cannot consider this applicable to anything but the purely hypothetical, and contemporary use of the death penalty is certainly not hypothetical in the least.
In short, the death penalty is humanity's excuse to contradict their own morality when their emotions run high.
Or, to put it another way, the hypocrisy of disregarding morals as a consequence of moral outrage (basically, when it suits people).
So, yeah, I'd assert that it is wrong in both the West and in Japan, even before we consider the fact that it will occasionally entail the legally sanctioned killing of innocents. And there's something fundamentally repulsive about teaching our children that two wrongs don't make a right, while we simultaneously set out to commit wrongs in order to "counterbalance" those wrongs that others have done to us. Not only is it hypocritical, but it is also lying to the children in order to elicit compliant behaviour, which is pretty screwed up, IMO.
Your mileage could perhaps vary here, but more likely than not, it is your beliefs or your consistency in applying them that does.
Health,
al-Aswad.
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