Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007
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ORIGINAL: luckydog1
See to me that is subjective evaluation.
It is not subjective, as it is an attempt at applying logic to determine whether their professed morals are internally consistent.
However, I will readily cede the possibility that it may be a flawed argument. 
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The only thing you have given to back that opinion up is that many countries/ people agree with you.
Public morals are never clearly delineated, as they are- pretty much by definition- a consensus morality, derived from the individual morals of the citizens. And as such, there appears to be sufficient congruence between public morals in countries in the West to say that there is a single consensus morality in the West, but that it is interpreted slightly differently from one country to another, with the USA interpreting it to permit executions, and the bulk of the remaininng countries interpretiing it otherwise.
That is not hard evidence, to be sure. But I would posit that it merits examining the possibility that the use of capital punishment may well be dissonant with the morals of the US public, if consistently applied. In order to determine whether that is the case, it seems to me that it would be sensible to analyze the traits of those morals, as well as their content and governing principles. Some questions in that regard would include:
Is a double standard morally offensive in those morals?
Would those morals be properly classified as situational?
Are they primarily absolutist, objectivist, relativist, or other?
Can an act that is immoral when carried out by one agent, be moral when carried out by another agent, all other things being equal?
That last one is one of the pivotal questions, and also raises the question of whether all other things are indeed equal. It comes down to whether it is the fact that executions are carried out by a certain agent that justifies them in your view, and whether that view is shared, or whether it is the circumstances, the method, the justification, or any other components of the context that justifies them in your view, or a combination of these factors. With that discerned, one can move on to whether these considerations are consistent with the moral consensus or not.
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But you do not get to define what other people's Morals are.
Of course not, just as I don't get to say what gravity is. But I can observe that things tend to fall down. And scientists can make further observations, succcessively approximating a reasonable model of gravity. In the field of ethics, there have been any number of works written on the subject of modelling the consensus morality of the West. And how exact the model needs to be, depends on what the arguments are, at a fundamental level.
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To me that seems similar to you putting definitions (absolutist) on me.
I recanted that point, as you recall.
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In the USA and Japan, the prevailing morals hold that the death Penalty is proper in some situations, despite what you outsiders might think of it.
More properly, it is the case that you hold that your morals hold this position. If your morals are a set of arbitrary rules without any governing principle to them, then this is a perfectly reasonable position, as everything is an exception. If they are an optimization problem, as most morals are, then it becomes a question of which governing principle wins out, and what the optimization goal is. And so forth. My position is that there is a conflict at the level of governing principles. Perhaps one might say that it is a matter of morals not corresponding to ethics, and the former being applied to the law, rather than the latter. But it would seem that ethics are indeed raised as a point (e.g. "ethical treatment" and such), and that supports the notion that there are governing principles.
I posit that, logically, these are the premise from which the morality or immorality of capital punishment either follows or does not.
Would you dispute that position?
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(over time you might convince us, or as the violent crime rates in Norway keep rising you (meaning norwegians) might change your opinions)
Morals do not vary with changes in statistics.
Your appeal here speaks to the point I made that I think this is a matter of expediency, in effect letting moral correctness fall by the wayside in order to satisfy other concerns than morals. And that is something humans do, no question about that. But my position is that not all human traits are necessarily moral in a humanist paradigm of morals. Thus, so as to be clear on that, I point out that my argument does not deal with any other concerns than whether capital punishment is consonant with the morals that are espoused; if one wishes to leave it at other concerns trumping the moral ones, that is fine by me, but does not affect the point I am trying to make.
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Your claiming an inconsistency is based on your asserting that Murder and execution after a trial in a representaive Governemnt are the same thing.
I asserted that legal sanction does not necessarily make an act inherently moral.
As an example of my point, I raised the flawed example earlier, until I realized it would be simpler to use history as an example. There are many acts throughout history that have been carried out wiith legal sanction that, when viewed in hindsight, should illustrate that the legal sanction does not reduce the perceived absurdity. After the Enabling Act of 1933, the Nazi government of Germany did indeed have legislative power, for instance, yet I doubt you would assert that their actions were moral. If you do, I am afraid I will have to spend my time on a different debate. But if you do not assert that they were, then you have to cede that legal sanction does not in effect lend moral consonance to an action.
As a counterargument, you posited that the equivalence of legal sanction and moral consonance depends on that legal sanction being derived from a representative government. But the DNVP was part of a legally elected coalition, a representative government. What happened to allow them to seize power was in accord with laws enacted by representative government. This is no different than how the US constitution permits the declaration of martial law. And legal sanction by a representative government thus applies to the full extent of the Holocaust. Now, I'm not generally given to reductio ad hitleram, and such is not my intent here, either. It is simply the case that they offer an instance of what you have posited as the requirement for their actions to be moral.
Do you stand by the position that the actions of the Nazi Party were morally sound, or dispute the reasoning presented here?
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I know you admitted you were wrong, but you did base a couple of your arguments on that confusion of language.
Either you have misread me due to that, or I have not made myself clear; my argument is not contingent on it.
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If you want to give antoher reason why it is inconsistent, Go ahead.
See the above example with regard to legal sanction from representative government.
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But that is precisley what legitimacy is. Representative Governments have balances and checks, but ultimatly the Legitimacy of the state is a given fact. So you are in fact questioning the legitimacy.
No, it is a subtle distinction. Legitimacy is the belief among the citizens of a country that the government has moral authority to govern. I am questioning whether they actions are morally sound, not whether their mandate is morally sound. Note also that Princeton's wordnet defines the word as lawfulness (by virtue of being authorized or in accordance with law) in this context, and that I do not dispute that the goverment is legitimate by that definition. In this sense, Nazi Germany was also legitimate, and I would again question whether they actions can be held to be moral. Perhaps that makes the distinction clearer.
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Violence in the context of Law Enforcement includes far more than the death penalty.
Yes, but what I tried to point out here, is that capital punishment has been demonstrated as unneccessary in the context of law enforcement.
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And Norway does indeed claim the right to enforce the law using violence.
The state does claim the right of police officers to exercise their right to self defense (or defense of another citizen, as a self defense by proxy- arguably the primary foundation argument for law enforcement in the first place) during the course of their work, as is extended to all citizens. And it claims the right of police officers to use "appropriate" force, which is basically to say that they are permitted to manhandle you if you resist arrest or make a non-lethal attack on them. In effect, the notion that they can respond in kind, something that is also extended to other citizens. As with other citizens, a line is drawn at grievous bodily harm, which can only be rendered in a self-defense scenarioo. It does not claim the right for them to use lethal force outside the context of an immediate and credible threat.
As can be seen by the scope, the right to enforce the law using violence does not cover killing a restrained criminal.
Arguably, executions are performed on restrained criminals.
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This blog has pictures of Norwegian Police using violence in Oslo.
Thanks for the link. I will comment on the pictures. Note that I have four police officers in my immediate family (one in vice, one beat cop, one undercover narc, one special force unit). I have friends who live in Oslo, and am aware that there is more violent crime there than in the part where I live. The crime rates are indeed six times higher among immigrants from the East Bloc, Middle East, Somalia and a few other places, and the bulk of those people end up in Oslo.
Picture one: Drug addict holding an illegal firearm in a public place.
Picture two: One police officer wrestling with a man during arrest, while another stands by.
Picture three: A man (dress would support a gang affiliation, as the description suggests) kicking someone.
Picture four: A man laying on the ground after having been kicked.
Picture five: A man packing knives, one drawn, talking to police in civilian clothing.
Picture six: A man has his wallet stolen while distracted.
Picture seven: The man tries to get his wallet back.
Picture eight through ten: Man running with the plank and hitting someone with it.
Picture eleven: A man attacks undercover police.
Picture twelve: Same police officers restraining and cuffing the man.
Picture thirteen: A man is held by a police officer after trying to rob a drug store.
Picture fourteen and fifteen: A gang fight; one of them gets stabbed in the back with a knife.
Among these pictures, five of them depict police officers, none of which are carrying a firearm, and none of which are using violence in excess of what is strictly necessary to do their work. That said, I am well familiar with police brutality, which does occur here as well, and which is usually prosecuted when reported.
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The idea that Norway would not use violence to enforce the law is simply not reality based.
The forwarded position is not that police will not occasionally need to use violence in the course of their work; it is that lethal force is not employed outside the context of an immediate and credible threat. As an example, it was thoroughly investigated when a police officer fired at bank robbers that had just shot someone, to make sure he had due cause to suspect that they intended to kill others; the conclusion was that he had been fired upon himself and had been aware of that, and thus had due cause to shoot back. For a citizen who is not a police offiicer, the matter would never have gone to court, but police are held to a higher standard of restraint when it comes to self defense.
Again, a criminal on death row does not constitute an immediate and credible threat.
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Please show me an example of a society that exists with out violence backing its laws?
As far as I know, there is only one such society. A tribal group in Africa that ostracizes criminals, but does not act against them. That could be termed relational violence or emotional violence, of course, but we're discussing capital punishment here, so it's hardly in the same ballpark..
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And I am not an expert on Norway, but everything I have seen looking at this stuff, says that Violent crime is on the rise there, despite the Death Penalty not being used.
Yup, in central areas, this is the case. The three main factors I have seen are increasing levels of organized crime due to stricter policies on drugs (compare with when the US outlawed alcohol, but note that this rise generally remains confined to those who are actually in that scene), increasing numbers of immigrant gangs from more violent cultures (these groups are documented as being nearly an order of magnitude more violent, yet are admitted for humanitarian reasons, prompting an unfortunate growth in xenophobia), and last, but not least, the equality of genders has advanced to the point that female youth is rapidly gaining on their male peers in terms of violence, thus activating a subpopulation that has previously been non-violent for the most part.
Measures are underway to deal with the first two problems, but results are never immediate.
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Perhaps it is not the Death Penalty that is the determining factor in Norways crime rates. Perhaps it has to do with having a rich, low population density, (essentially) mono culture, sort of like Japan which has low crime rates while having a Death Penalty. Or opposed to the UK which has much higher rates of crime than Norway, but has no Death Penalty.
As you point out, the death penalty does not have an impact on crime rates, and is thus unneccessary from that point of view.
The low crime rates can, in part, be ascribed to a very successful rehabilitation angle in the prison systems, and as you rightfully point out, there are obvious problems with certain minority groups that the population is hesitant to deal with in a realistic manner, preferring political correctness. And, yes, it would appear that the US has a more violent culture, and in my personal opinion, the death penalty exists in part because of that, and also feeds into it.
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I don't think you learn by defining others positions in order to feel that one has a logical proved opinion on moral issues.
I have ceded the areas where I have done that, and remain open to the idea that I may be wrong in other areas.
Thus, if we pinpoint those areas, I can learn from this discussion.
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I have pointed out several things that you claimed existed which don't.
You pointed out one, as I recall, namely the example which turned out to be 200 lashes, rather than an execution..
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That your assertions of fact are often incorrect, you seem to gloss right over these.
When my assertions are correct, I correct them and reevaluate my position; that is not glossing over them, but taking new information and correction of old information in stride. I would think that is a desireable trait, in itself. Note, for instance, that I used to be a strong proponent of the death penalty, but changed my position based on new information. Currently, my take is that it's simply not the most productive way to deal with the problem, but that I remain isolationist.
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To bring it back your assertion that murder and Capital Punishment are the same (apples and apples) is the base of most of your argument.
Alumbrado dealt with this.
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You admitted you missused the words, but continue to argue as if you were correct in that.
No, I continue to argue as if what I meant to say had been said; if you'd like clarification on whether a word was used correctly or not in a given passage, feel free to quote the relevant passage, and I will try to keep the words straight this time.
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Pretending that false facts are an intregal part of the perfection you strive for (especially when they have been refuted) is very dangerous mental ground to tread, seriously I do not mean this as an insult, and hope I do not get kicked off the forums for it.
I have ceded the false facts as they have been pointed out, and am always glad to find myself corrected in matters of fact. I have not claimed (except when joking, of course) to be infallible, nor that my facts will always be correct. I doubt you would, either. That said, there are other points still unrefuted that I think are up to the task of supporting the position forwarded.
And no insult was taken; I agree that it is dangerous to build on lies, and thus seek to uncover them in myself and others.
I see no reason why that should result in being kicked off anything.
Health,
al-Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: Japan hangs three death-row inmates - 
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