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Notes on Capital Punishment

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Death penalty has always been a controversy topic for debating among philosophers for decades. It is not just an issue of setting up and enforcing the law but is also morality sensitive. As a person who supports capital punishment, I believe death penalty is a just and necessary punishment for certain crimes. Van Den Haag Point 1/ People often "conflate the morality of the death penalty with objections to its distribution among the guilty . The point is, if capital punishment is immoral, no distribution among the guilty makes it moral and conversely. Improper distribution happens in other punishments as well, not just capital punishment so abolishing death penalty due to discrimination is invalid. 2/ "Equality is less important than justice. As justice requires that as many of the guilty be punished as possible. If others are lucky enough to avoid the punishment is irrelevant . We need justice to organize our society. If we value equality more, there would have been even more crimes. 3/ Miscarriages of justice: over a long period of time, errors is unavoidable. However, "almost all our activities carry some kind of risk but we still do them because the material and moral advantages outweigh the losses . 4/ "The death penalty is so final that it does deter some would be killers better than simply the fear of imprisonment . For most of us, what would be worse than death? And if committing certain crimes, murdering, for example, guarantee that you have to give up your life, then the horror of that might prevent some potential murderer from killing people. 5/ "Haag thinks that cost is irrelevant in the case of actually doing justice . From my point of view, he reason why the cost of a death penalty case is more expensive than imprisonment is that we do not kill the murderers right away, we keep them in prison for years and investigate the case over and over again. Some murderers did not even die because of execution, but rather because of old and sick. ¢ Hugo Bedau points: 1/ Capital punishment is a no better or worse punishment and we cannot determine how effective it is. The point of punishment is to deter crimes, and so far capital punishment has not yet proven to be an effective way. 2/ Death penalty is administered in a racist and discriminatory fashion. As a matter of fact, there are many more black murderers are executed than whites, than there must be discrimination. 3/ Risk of innocent people were execu

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