The Death Penalty: Defining Justice And Its Application

Brendan Taylor Taylor-1 Professor Reynolds Ethics 03 March 21, 2013

The Death Penalty: Defining Justice and Its Application

The death penalty is an ongoing ethical debate that transcends any specific time period. It permeates multiple aspects of our culture, from movies to modern day media. It has been in practice for hundreds of thousands of years, and even though it is used currently as an ends to the means of societal injustices, it is important to look at its moral permissibility under a finer magnification by looking at it in pieces. Throughout the course of this thesis, I will be dissecting the ethical values of the death penalty and why it would be allowed to end a person's life, presumably one who has committed crimes against another.

In this essay, I will delve further into this premise with thoughts from Immanuel Kant and the Categorical Imperative. The second premise logically follows that, "any and all policies put in place to protect the innocent and condemn the guilty to death is just". The sole purpose of laws is to protect innocent citizens from the harmful and potential deadly actions of criminals. I use the term "just", which would imply that there is some greater, overarching theme of "justice" that dictates what is good and what is bad in society, this will also be covered. Lastly, and most importantly, the thesis. From the first two premises, it can proposed that inferentially, and therefore ultimately, the death penalty is a just action. We will begin with the first premise and work through from there. "The death penalty is a policy which results in the death of the guilty". This seems simple enough at first glance, however, there are some imbalances in this statement and raises a few questions such as, "When should the death penalty portion of law be utilized?" or "How do we determine if a guilty individual is deserving of death?" The premise is loaded with unsolved definitions that must be refined further. We will refer to a specific stance on the death penalty in order to base our idea, called "retributivism". This is the view that "offenders deserved to be punished, or "paid back", for their crimes and to be punished in proportion to the

Socrates' sentence, according to lex talionis, does not match the crime he committed. Another, more recent case of miscarriages in justice was the trial of Italian immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti. They were treated unfairly and with a good influence of racial bias, and were wrongly sentenced to death in the early 1900s for a murder they did not take part in. It is important, therefore, to realize that some small margin for human error does exist in the law system when it comes to capital punishment and the condemnation of those presumed to be guilty of crime. The second premise is ultimately the hardest premise to define for my argumentation for the ethical soundness of the death penalty. Everything in the syllogistic argument that I have provided hinges on one key word within the premise: "just". The second premise, referring back to the justness of any policy that applies the death penalty, implies that there is an overarching moral compass that each crime is held against. In this case, the theme of justice is that which each crime worthy of the death penalty is being held to. Inferentially moving from the first premise to the second, it can now be said that the only crime that, under the policies of the law, is worthy to be "just" in and of itself, is the act of murder. We must now equivocate the ending of a murderer's life with that of justness and how the two can relate to