Chrono Compendium
Zenan Plains - Site Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Lord J Esq on October 21, 2009, 11:34:43 pm
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This is a thread to discuss the nature and significance of the concept of justice, to each of us personally and to all of us collectively as denizens of Civilization.
One bit of advice: Don't give a dictionary definition. Anyone who gives a dictionary definition will be met with the utter disgust and disappointment of all. If you have to use the dictionary definition, use it supplementarily.
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Naturally I looked this up in the dictionary when you suggested doing precisely the opposite, and it would be helpful to note that the dictionary is of little help:
Justice (jes-tes) n: The administration of what is just.
Literally, that's what Webster says. So, there!
But it could, perhaps, be useful down the road to note that "justice" is supposedly about "administration" of something. Implying that doing things in a "just" way could be an individual function, but only the state can mete out "justice." But that's only an extrapolation from Webster's exact language.
Anyway, all highfalutin guessing and joking aside, I guess I'll have to go with "justice" being the equal treatment of a.) all people or b.) all conscious beings. I provide a multiple choice because it really is quite shocking just how differently we treat non-human animals compared to fellow homo sapiens sometimes.
And it's also to highlight that justice may not always be desirable. If we wanted justice for all living beings, for example, we'd either have to begin eating people or else stop eating animals. When we talk about "justice" in the common sense, we're already talking about something that only applies to people for some reason, unless you're a vegetarian of course.
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The government's definition of Justice is screwed up, imo.
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Justice from any "superheroic" standpoint would be simply anyone who would willingly hurt another person getting hurt themselves. This is the inherent flaw, and the probable reason superheroes (at least in the Batman/Watchmen sense) don't exist in real life. By this definition, superheroes themselves deserve to be hurt. Similar to Dexter's ideals in the showtime show. He is a serial killer. But he ONLY KILLS SERIAL KILLERS! Does that make what he does right? Ethics is a bitch, either way.
My personal thoughts on justice are that the concept is nearly identical to karma. Justice is people getting what they deserve.
The American government's version is a bit more like "people getting punished for what they were caught for". Sometimes the two overlap, like in a venn diagram, but they are separate just as often.
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Justice in the individual is having all parts of your soul working in harmony and performing their appropriate roles.
Justice in the city is everyone doing their appropriate jobs and not trying to do someone else's.
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I am justice.
Now bow down before me and be judged.
Of course, if anyone wants my real thoughts on what justice is in my experience, I'll put them in my next post. If you ask me though, most of the responses here seem a bit too simple and impersonal. Half a dozen posts already, and yet there's not a single anecdote. I'm really interested in how people's concept of justice relates to what they actually feel in their day to day lives.
Just throwin' that out there so maybe the discussion changes direction a bit.
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Yes, I want your real thoughts. "A bit too simple and impersonal" is an understatement. With you I can hope for something more substantial.
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I'm the son of a corrections officer, so my notion of "justice" may be skewed down a hard-nose line when looking at criminality. I realize now, looking over my post in the other thread on the topic, that my explanation of justice was a bit too broad. When something is done for the greater good of humanity, it is a just action. That was my basic stance, but now I see that just actions and justice have very little to do with each other. All of us commit just acts when we pick up a piece of litter off of the streets of our neighborhoods, but the word justice is only thrown in when the original perpetrator is fined for throwing the trash on the ground in the first place. That's not to say that the two of them don't go together. Surely putting someone in prison for 30 years for littering is not a just act, nor does it serve justice.
Generally speaking, justice requires justness. With my background, I tend to think of justice whenever someone has committed an illegal, unethical or immoral act and deserves some sort of punishment for it.
I'll go into nerd-mode here for a second and use the manga/anime Death Note as an example. For those of you just tuning in, Death Note is basically the story of a bored student genius named Light Yagami who is outraged at the world around him and how perverse and violent it is. One day he finds a magical notebook on the ground, later revealed to have been dropped by a Shinigami, which says that if he writes someone's name in it, they will die(there are various other rules around it, but it's not important). The rest of the story involves his gradual decline into madness while he's wielding the power of the Death Note, calling himself "Justice," and even going so far as to proclaim himself "God of [his] New World."
The story's always interested me for it moral and ethical message(or lack thereof).
One of the questions posed was "Is it right/just to kill bad people?" Surely we can agree that the world would be a much better place if every murderer, serial killer, kidnapper, rapist, child molester, etc. suddenly all died of heart attacks. At the same time, killing someone in cold blood is equally as immoral. So, was Light Yagami's quest to become "God of the New World" really justice?
I, myself, would say no. He started out with honorable intentions, using the term lightly, but near the end he basically became a homicidal maniac, filled with much more sin than any of the people he killed.
To further elaborate, if I possessed a Death Note, not many people would disagree with me killing off people like Osama bin Laden or your friendly neighborhood child molester. However, if I were to start using it to kill off other people I find disagreeable, say Michael Moore or Little Timmy that picked on me in the fifth grade, this certainly wouldn't be a just act or justice.
I'm afraid my attempt to elaborate threw me off track here, so let me get back on.
Justice to me, means more about punishing bad guys than doing good. Just action means more about promoting or engaging in good behavior that benefits mankind. I'll try explaining better a bit later, but right now I'm strapped for time.
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Justice in the individual is having all parts of your soul working in harmony and performing their appropriate roles.
Justice in the city is everyone doing their appropriate jobs and not trying to do someone else's.
Plato, correct?
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I know a couple of things about justice:
Justice is never fair.
Justice is blind.
Justice is a concept involving the fair, moral, and impartial treatment of all persons. In its most general sense, it means according to individuals what they actually deserve or merit, or are in some sense entitled to. Justice is a particularly foundational concept within most systems of "law". From the perspective of pragmatism, it is the name for a fair result.
(Last one courtesy of Wikiquote. Hey, plagiarism isn't my style.)
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Does justice exist in definition, and how does it mean one thing to everyone:
If it cannot be contradicted that Justice can have more than one (unique (quick def'n: inherently singular)) definition (or worse, it is undefined), does that not imply further, a contradiction of the term definition? If so, by the laws of logic, the opposite is true--Justice cannot exist, at least not definatively. And since justice is a subset of Justice, than it is a faccade of definition as well: a prevailing conjecture.
So, by substitution:
Justice (jes-tes) n: The administration of prevailing conjecture.
That is what justice means to me. It can only be viewed just collectively if, exhaustively, everyone agrees of their own volition; good luck with that one.
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I'm sure you mean "contradicted" and "contradiction", BROJ.
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I'm sure you mean "contradicted" and "contradiction", BROJ.
Typos aside, do you have a real argument, other than just to troll.
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What have I done so far that you consider to be trolling? If you can't provide an example, is that a fair accusation? If not, then the spellcheck was a temporary inconvenience.
No need to make a mountain out of a molehill.
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What have I done so far that you consider to be trolling? If you can't provide an example, is that a fair accusation? If not, then the spellcheck was a temporary inconvenience.
No need to make a mountain out of a molehill.
a troll is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community
Is pointing out minor typos germane to a conversation about justice? That is all.
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What about the rest of the definition?
"...with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion."
I had no intent, motive, or whatever you wish to call it, of upsetting you, BROJ, nor did I intend to disrupt the discussion. So, by definition (as you pointed out earlier for the term "justice"), what I did wasn't trolling.
Once again, please don't make a mountain out of a molehill. Thank you. :)
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Anecdotes, anecdotes...in my elementary school, we had this thing called "Field Day" where fifth and sixth grade students from neighboring schools would compete in various athletics. The culminating event was the relay race, where the goal was to get a baton a certain number of laps around this huge school yard before the competing team did the same. Each participant was responsible for a certain stretch of the race course, and passed off the team's baton to the next team member waiting at the end of that stretch. Sort of like the Olympic Torch.
So, the school my school was up against one year had a handicapped student. He could walk but couldn't run -- this was a bit of a damper on that team's chances, but the student still wanted to participate. The solution the schools agreed upon was to make one of our school's runners run his section not once, but three times. He literally had to get to the end of his assigned stretch of the course, turn around and go back to the beginning, and run it again. Obviously my school chose the best runner it had for this task, but we also lost.
Was the infliction of a handicap on a non-handicapped runner a just solution in this case? I'm not quite sure, mostly because there might have been better ways to replicate that one runner's handicap; maybe we could have had a student do his or her section on crutches, for example. In any case, the students in my school were pretty adamant about what they felt was the injustice of making one runner run his section of the course three times.
I like using this anecdote because it has some application to the very serious question of affirmative action, methinks. Or does it?
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Well, Mister Wolf, it sounds like justice here is being defined by their terms, not an impartial set of terms.
Consider the position of the handicapped student. If the race was to run normally (i.e. everyone ran just the one stretch of track), wouldn't the handicap child call it unfair or unjust? After all, in ceteris paribus mode, he or she wouldn't have a chance of winning the race at all.
Like I said, justice is never fair.
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What about the rest of the definition?
"...with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion."
I had no intent, motive, or whatever you wish to call it, of upsetting you, BROJ, nor did I intend to disrupt the discussion. So, by definition (as you pointed out earlier for the term "justice"), what I did wasn't trolling.
Once again, please don't make a mountain out of a molehill. Thank you. :)
Pfft, whatever... so you did it altruistically; you're still being irrelevent (and a waste of my consideration).
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I appreciate your forthright honesty, BROJ, and I'm sorry if my actions seemed irrelevant.
I'm also sorry if I'm taken as a waste of your consideration.
Please don't burn a bridge over something this minute.
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I appreciate your forthright honesty, BROJ, and I'm sorry if my actions seemed irrelevant.
I'm also sorry if I'm taken as a waste of your consideration.
Please don't burn a bridge over something this minute.
Yeah, it's okay. I just find needless corrections annoying at best.
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Hey, it could've been worse.
For future inquiry, if I were to ever troll, it would most likely look something like this:
OMG contridict!???!? WUT R U a MORON!!!!1 Get sum ENGLISH classes and COME BACK, yOU NOOB!!!
For field reference only. :lol:
Anyways, back to the topic.
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Just to spite J...
Well, firstly, I want to just to ask the question why people are referring the Webster dictionary, as opposed to the OED? It seems to me that the latter is far superior as far as dictionaries go. Anyway, the first thoughts that come to my mind is very much a dictionary, or shall we say rather etymological, definition. It is in the same way that when someone uses the term 'epic' or 'heroic', there are several ways at once in which I take it: there is the colloquial, there is the eytmological (ie. what it originally meant), and also what I myself hold that word entailing.
Later, since I have to run, and if the mood for deeper thoughts strike me, I will consider the latter point of Justice. But for now I think it useful to say that Iustitia is somewhat different than Lex or Fas. And I am not making those words up, though looking at them now they do look silly. They are genuine Latin terms used often enough in antiquity. Iustitia is the more generally sense of what is right. It has a human, moral, implication to it, unlike Lex which is the Law, and Fas, which is almost impossible to tranlate, but might be something along the lines of Righteousness: the Law of the Gods (nb. we used the root of this most ancient word - ancient enough that it is indeclinable in Latin - in nefarious and, I suppose, fastidious.) Anyway, it is important to note, therefore, that from its origin Justice implies not just the administration of Law via the courts, but the more universal sense of what is right for humanity.
Now of course this is rather tangental to the question. That is, not so much what justice means, but what it means to us. The word is a description of a thing, and it is the thing that Lord J was asking about. Nonetheless, I thought it valid because, I think, it some ways we still hold to the same distinctions. When we say things like 'that's not right' or 'that's not just', we are not talking about things as the pertain to the law, neccessarially (since we can speak of an unjust law), nor are we speaking of divine law either (whose rightness has been questioned since ancient times.)
However, the existence of justice does assume the existence of a universal law. That is, if something is unjust, it can only be so if, according to a certain standard, things are amiss. And... I've gotta run, but I'll give this some more thought.
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Justice is one of those things that doesn’t get talked about much, so forgive me if this post is mostly just me teasing out what justice is. It is hard to discuss its place in the world if I don't first have a good grip on what it is.
Quite recently we had an exchange that was driven by justice right here on the compendium. I would refer you to TruthOrDeal's comments in the Frustration Thread:
http://www.chronocompendium.com/Forums/index.php/topic,4445.msg182203.html#msg182203
And also to Lord J’s response:
http://www.chronocompendium.com/Forums/index.php/topic,4445.msg182211.html#msg182211
To sum up a situation, Sajainta posted a wrong that was done to her, ToD posed a response in which physical retribution was wished upon the offending individual, and Josh followed up by stating that calling for physical retribution originates in the same “place” and the original offending action.
I must disagree with Josh in that regard as there is no indication that the original offender hurled the distasteful slur with a motivation of justice in mind. Truth’s reaction, however, did. He perceived a wrong done and wished for that wrong to be righted. That is, in part, a foundation of the concept of justice. ToD wished for the offending individual to get his “just desserts,” to put it deliciously.
Physical retribution for a wrong committed is a very old form of justice. We see it in the Code of Hammurabi and other historical law codes: do X, and Y will be a punishment. Call someone a slut, get kicked in the nuts. However, Josh’s objection highlights a problem with this depiction of justice; not everyone agrees one what constitutes a proper response. If one does “X,” should “Y” occur, and if so, what form should “Y” even take? Truth essentially claimed that kicking the offending in the nuts was a just form of “Y,” while Josh disagreed; he portrayed such violence as unjust.
So justice is an exchange, attempting to make up for a deficit though the adding of a punishment. By hurling an insult, the offender incurred a debt to Sajainta (and, one could argue, to society). Getting kicked in the nuts, under ToD’s perception, is an attempt to pay off that debt. Pain caused, pain received. But note, it was emotional pain caused and proposed physical pain that would have been received. There is a concept of an exchange rate, then, that is part of justice.
This might lead us to suppose that justice is fair, and while it may be in some cases, we generally seem to hold that it is not so in all cases. This point is best illustrated by an extreme: consider a serial killer who tortures in various manners all his victims. He is caught, put to trial, and found guilty. We cannot say that the loss of his life would be an exchange of like values (aka, fair) for the lives of those he killed. If we were generous we might say a life for a life is fair, but a single life for ten people? Hardly. Nor, as a society, do we tolerate such an individual being put through the same experiences that he put his victims through. It would be unjust of us to torture the man as he tortured others.
But what about all those words that can appear before the word “justice?” I am surprised that, given the nature of those present, no one has yet discussed social justice. This ties into the conceptions illustrated above, but takes a more… positive approach. While we often perceive justice as “if you do X, then Y will be the punishment,” but social justice takes the approach of “if you have not done X, then Y should not be the punishment.” Or, in other words, it might be just to restrict the liberties of an individual if they have committed crimes, but it is unjust to restrict the liberties of an individual if they have not committed crimes. If we combine this with the perception that all humans are, at a base level, entitled to the same liberties, we come to the idea that blacks shouldn’t be slaves, that women should have the right to vote, etc.
Social justice, then, causes us to attempt to remove elements from society that are unreasonably oppressing a group. As this includes laws, it helps elucidate the relationship between laws and justice. Justice is not subservient to laws, but it is the other way around; laws exist in the hopes of promoting justice. Thus we can have good laws or unjust laws.
That part of the American pledge of allegiance states that there should be “liberty and justice for all” indicates that this is not merely a wishing for legal equality, but rather that there is an equality more fundamental, something that laws can only hint at because it is so basic we tend to be unaware of its existence.
Returning to TruthorDeal, I would suppose that his reaction was not an intentional one but a reflexive one. Anger and violence are common instinctual reactions when humans are faced with something that is wrong. The Hulk resonates with readers because the Hulk (particularly the unthinking version) is so believable. How many of us, when we are greatly offended by a wrong, have never had the reaction of “HULK SMASH!”?
Of course, instinct isn’t always a good thing --hold your breath and after a minute you’ll have the instinct to breathe again, which is a very bad idea if you are under water -- but the cause of the instinct tends to be (breathing is good, after all, and tends to be necessary for life).
Since justice is an exchange, Y for X, and such an exchange is subjective (even in extreme cases of X, a less extreme Y may be called for), we might be tempted to say that justice is the reflex of our ethics or morals. But those seem to be too high-ordered for the cause of our Justice Reflexes. Perhaps the word “sensibilities” might be a bit more valid. Certainly, it is still influenced by our ethics and morals, but we might describe those as ourselves intentionally doing what we perceive as right while our sensibilities cause us to unintentionally do what we perceive as right. This is not a static thing, but rather a part of us that grows with the rest of ourselves.
Our sense of justice is almost like our sense of balance; it can be trained to endure a variety of perspectives, but it instinctually keeps us upright in an uneven world of social interactions. Indeed, we might even go so far as to say it is fundamental to the social universe. Just as for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, for every social violation there is an equal and opposite social repercussion.
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Funny, I don't remember my name being GenesisOne. I could be mistaken about that though. :P
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Very interesting exchange theory of justice! When it comes to criminals I tend to want an "extraction" approach, where value is extracted from the offender through some kind of slave labor or forced community service, to replace the societal value the offender has destroyed. It would seem more societally efficient to me that a murderer should be put to work forever purely for the benefit of others rather than be offed through execution. And what do we call it when someone on Death Row just sits in prison limbo, neither receiving immediate punishment nor producing?
I may be mistaken in assuming that the very worst offenders are holed up in prison without having useful work extracted from them; anyone know what happens in the typical maximum security prison?
But it's interesting to note that in either case (exchange or extraction), it's literally impossible in some cases to a.) Give the criminal a punishment commensurate with the destruction he or she has caused (if you kill a serial killer once, that's one societal vengeance down, but on behalf of which of the x victims that person killed?); or b.) To extract value equal to the societal value the offender destroyed (how do you measure when enough community service has been given to make up for x lives?).
Reflecting on this, is justice in fact an impossible thing to achieve in some cases?
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I view a just act is one which brings things closer to how they "ought" to be. Therefore justice is the reconciliation of the real and the idealized.
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Funny, I don't remember my name being GenesisOne. I could be mistaken about that though. :P
What ever do you mean? I totally didn't get you mistaken with GenesisOne in my previous post. Also, these are not the droids you are looking for.
It would seem more societally efficient to me that a murderer should be put to work forever purely for the benefit of others rather than be offed through execution.
What if mandatory organ donation was imposed on all individuals on death row?
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Wow, Thought. Wow. I...might just support that, actually. I'm slightly worried about whether the common murderer has high quality organs though.
I guess that would give a whole new meaning to: "An Eye for an Eye."
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id support that as well. but wed have to change our execution methods too. what good is a kidney when its been processing poison? how useful is a lung that was breathing poison? why keep a heart that got boiled by the blood it pumps?
i often think that the best justice is guilt. you forgive someone, but thye might not forgive themselves. they have to live with that for a long time.
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It would seem more societally efficient to me that a murderer should be put to work forever purely for the benefit of others rather than be offed through execution.
What if mandatory organ donation was imposed on all individuals on death row?
How confident are you in the justice of the death penalty? Hell, we presently have Scalia and Thompson arguing that it is just and proper to execute an innocent man.
Side question: Why just death row inmates? If we're going to take the step of assuming state or societal custody of cadavers, why not use every suitable corpse for organ donation, scientific research, or if nothing else fertilizer?
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It would seem more societally efficient to me that a murderer should be put to work forever purely for the benefit of others rather than be offed through execution.
I have to disagree, Mister Wolf. I believe that the death penalty is the most proper form of justice given to a murderer because, well, he took something that cannot be given back, and no amount of community and social service will ever amend his actions. Besides, the cost alone to house him, feed him, and perpetuate his activities is nonsensical in itself. Why should my tax dollars be used to keep a murderer alive?
I argue that the death penalty doesn't degrade the value of human life, but instead affirms its value. Think about it. Can a rapist give back the virginity of the woman he raped? Can a murderer give back the life of the person he killed? Can Squeenix give back those five years they took from the CE team with their C&D Letter?
No, no, and no. By sentencing a murderer or rapist with anything less than what they have committed, we are simply degrading the value of the victims. In the case of the murder victim, his or her life means less than the killer who, while sentenced to life-long community service, still gets to live. See what I'm getting at?
As such, it is my personal belief that the death penalty should be more fully applied to such offenders, not only because it's more cost effective, but also because it affirms the value of the victims of their heinous crimes.
Anyways, that's my view of it. What says you?
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Well, hey, if we cut 'em up into little pieces and distribute them to people who need those pieces, that solves both problems, doesn't it? You get your life reaping, I get my value extraction, and budda bing! Everyone walks away happy. :lol:
But on a more serious note, I think Genesis brings up an excellent point about the valuing of the victim. This is exactly why I once supported the death penalty, before I started considering the possible extraction of value from criminals. On a philosophical level it probably depends on whether the cost (in terms of lost work) of offing the criminal exceeds the perceived benefit of dealing out life-ending punishment, i.e., honoring the victim(s) in cases of murder, violent rape, and whatever other crimes we currently inflict the death penalty for.
Why just death row inmates? If we're going to take the step of assuming state or societal custody of cadavers, why not use every suitable corpse for organ donation, scientific research, or if nothing else fertilizer?
The way I'm reasoning this to agree with Thought's proposal, it's because criminals, as a matter of fact, are treated differently from non-criminal individuals. We have a right to liberty but we take that away from criminals in virtually all cases; even if we just slap a tracking device on them, we have removed some measure of freedom. If the criminal is placed on probation and given virtually full freedom, now that's something I can't apply that reasoning to.
Thought's proposal represents an extension of loss of freedom from "freedom of movement" to "bodily freedom." The punishment becomes more invasive, and doesn't really even have to involve death; we could, for example, force the removal of a kidney or lung from a death row inmate, which doesn't necessarily entail death. Consider it a compromise between life in prison and the death penalty. Although the question will hopefully be practically moot soon thanks to stem cell research, were this the 1950s, I think it would be an important thing to consider. Perhaps hundreds of non-criminal people's lives could have been saved if this had been implemented back then.
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The way I'm reasoning this to agree with Thought's proposal...
Just to note, Thought may not agree with Thought's proposal. Your comments just happened to coincide with an episode of House (Season 2, "Sex Kills") that gave me the fundamental idea. I haven't really had time to fully think it out yet to decide if I support it.
How confident are you in the justice of the death penalty? Hell, we presently have Scalia and Thompson arguing that it is just and proper to execute an innocent man.
Side question: Why just death row inmates? If we're going to take the step of assuming state or societal custody of cadavers, why not use every suitable corpse for organ donation, scientific research, or if nothing else fertilizer?
Your first question is a bit of a red herring. I made no comment on the justice of the death penalty, just that if we are basing justice on extracted value, and if organs are valuable, then the extraction of organs from a dead criminal could be just. It is taking it as a given that the death penalty is just since that is the way the system currently works. If separate arguments show that it is not just, then that becomes a relevant question.
As for the second series of questions, Faust basically hit it on the head. Criminals have their rights restricted and revoked depending on crime. Non-criminals are not so treated. Though reasonably this would probably have to be a special circumstance defined at sentencing, rather than across the board.
Besides, the cost alone to house him, feed him, and perpetuate his activities is nonsensical in itself. Why should my tax dollars be used to keep a murderer alive?
You are assuming that it costs more to keep a murderer alive than to kill him, which is not correct. Given the legal fees incurred by the justice system and various other expenses, it is usually cheaper to keep them alive.
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I have a hard time with the death penalty, because once put to death, they have no hope for grace or redemption.
I read a book several years ago called "The Stranger" by Albert Camus and it totally threw the way I viewed the death penalty for a loop. I didn't agree with many of the existential themes of the book, but it unintentionally changed the way I thought about the death penalty. It's hard to put my finger on it, but that book did a lot for me. As such, my personal belief is that justice is rarely justice - the concept of the worldview changes everything.
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I'll have to read that sometime Boo -- The Plague by Camus was interesting and had an anti-death penalty overtone although that wasn't the focus as I recall. Dead Man Walking would be an interesting read too, because it's anti-death penalty from a religious perspective (Prejean was a nun I think).
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Well, Thought, if indeed it is cheaper to keep a murderer alive than to execute him, it doesn't change the fact that my tax dollars are still being used to keep him alive. After all, he killed his victim for free.
I mean, assuming that my tax dollars are going toward his life-sentence, housing, food, activities, etc., it just means that I'm intrinsically placing more value on the murderer's life than that of his victim(s). That is why I find it to be nonsensical.
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Since when is the spending of your tax dollars an indication of your values?
And since execution is more expensive, wouldn't executing a criminal be spending more of your tax money on them, and thus, by your logic, indicating that you value their life even more than if less money was going in to keeping them alive?
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Um... Charity donations? Relief funds for earthquake & tsunami victims? The food I buy at my local grocery store? All of these involve my money (the latter including my tax dollars) are an indication of my values and the values of those I donate to and buy my food from.
Every purchase you make, every dollar you donate is an indication of who and what you value. Buying from a specific grocery store every time means you most likely value their goods (or their services) over those of other competing grocery stores.
Donating to charities and relief funds indicate that I value the lives of those in poverty or who have just lost everything they had. Since I can't help them out physically over there, my donations can.
Having my tax dollars paid to house a murderer, in essence, means that I must value the murderer more than the victim (or the family of the victim), and that to me is a misuse of my values with my tax dollars imposed by the state and federal government.
"[The] cost is not inherent in the [death] penalty, but imposed by judges. It is not cheaper to keep a criminal confined, because most of the time he will appeal just as much causing as many costs as a convict under death sentence. Being alive and having nothing better to do, he will spend his time in prison conceiving of ever-new habeas corpus petitions, which being unlimited, in effect cannot be rejected as res judicata. The cost is higher."
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Big fallacy here, GenesisOne, comparing private expenditures with your taxes. Paying your taxes is an indication that you value our system of governance and the services and protections which government provides. It is not a commentary on specific expenditures. To make those kinds of comments, you wield your vote. RD's question is completely legitimate, and you evaded it completely.
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Lord J, I do believe I made myself clear when I separated my private expenditures from spending my tax dollars (e.g. buying groceries).
By the way, could you name the specific fallacy which I just committed? If not, isn't that an unfair accusation? If so, then perhaps you could provide an answer which was more merit.
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The fallacy in question is typically referred to as a false analogy or false comparison. In this case you made the argument that, as your private expenditures are an indication of your priorities, so too are your tax returns. They are, but only inasmuch as they indicate your support of our system of government, as tax returns are a legal obligation.
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Since when is the spending of your tax dollars an indication of your values?
Um... Charity donations?
This is not an answer to my question. I honestly want to know why you think that the expenditure of tax money is a reflection of your personal values (beyond the given example of support for our system of government). I have never encountered such an assertion before, and I'd like to know how you came to this conclusion.
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In that case, Radical_Dreamer, I haven't an answer for you. I honestly don't.
If indeed my conclusion was arrived at from an off-beat approach, then perhaps the premise I'm simply trying to answer is: Why should the death penalty be more expensive than LWOP?
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Ah, the silence of defeat. I'm detecting a pattern from you, GenesisOne. No response on global warming, and now no response on your logical fallacy. A more gracious person would have offered at least a cursory acknowledgment, but I suppose I must take what I can get in that at least you've got enough sense to shush up when cornered, unlike certain folks in the Truthordeal mold who just prattle on no matter what.
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In that case, Radical_Dreamer, I haven't an answer for you. I honestly don't.
If indeed my conclusion was arrived at from an off-beat approach, then perhaps the premise I'm simply trying to answer is: Why should the death penalty be more expensive than LWOP?
One reason is that when a death penalty is handed down, there is an automatic appeal. Despite what Scalia and Thomas would have you believe, most people want to be sure that if they are executing someone, that person is in fact guilty of a heinous crime. Are you opposed to your tax money going to ensure the guilt of those we execute?
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An automatic appeal? Why waste the money and time? The guy's obviously guilty enough in light of the evidence which demonstrates his guilt.
I'm not opposed to paying for a murderer paying the highest punishment for the taking of the highest valued thing on the planet: human life. I am, however, opposed to the exorbitant amount that must be paid in order to carry out said execution.
The only reason the death penalty costs so much is because the prosecutors, attorneys, psychiatrists, and all other professional parties involved (when I say professional, I mean they are paid for their services) set the prices of their services so high it's ridiculous.
One claim against the death penalty I most often hear is "We might execute an innocent person by mistake." Yes, there is an arbitrary chance that an innocent person might be executed by mistake, but this is just false sentimentality based on the most remote cases of this ever happening.
Let me put it this way: If government only functioned under the premise that the possibility of error didn't exist, then government wouldn't function at all. The same goes for our current capital punishment system.
Did you know that, as of 2006, the average time served for first-degree murder in California (where I live) after 1978 is twenty-five years? The median time is just a year more. I kid you not:
http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/Reports_Research/Offender_Information_Services_Branch/Annual/TIME6/TIME6d2006.pdf (http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/Reports_Research/Offender_Information_Services_Branch/Annual/TIME6/TIME6d2006.pdf)
Seeing how LWOP is less expensive than the death penalty, then shouldn’t we be seeing more convicts with LWOP? According to the above link, apparently not. You want a screwed-up justice system? Try one that releases a first-degree murderer in as little as twenty-five years, and this isn’t taking into account that, even though they may have LWOP, they can still kill. Google the names Richard Beigenwald and Lemuel Smith as evidence of this. Neither from California, but their stories are true all the same.
Human life is precious and deserves protection from such people, and the death penalty is the best guarantee that we have that such people will never kill again.
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One claim against the death penalty I most often hear is "We might execute an innocent person by mistake." Yes, there is an arbitrary chance that an innocent person might be executed by mistake, but this is just false sentimentality based on the most remote cases of this ever happening.
Ah, you are willing to put a price on an innocent life, then? Given that remote cases do occasionally happen, albeit rarely, this should be a simple cost/benefit analysis. How much money should we spend ensuring that an individual is guilty before that costs exceeds that price of an innocent life? Of course, given that in a vaguely competent system there will be many more guilty individuals being executed than innocents, you should consider the price of an innocent life distributed across the guilty population.
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A proper examination of a non-guilty going to prison: http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/10/26/chicago.love.innocence.1/index.html
Oh, and make sure you read the second part.
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Well, on the bright side, his innocence was finally proven, and he got to marry the love of his life. A happy ending if I ever saw one.
The blame here lies in the victim for misidentifying her attacker. Blame also lies in the evidence not being presented correctly at the trial (not having an alibi for that night = guilty??). Blame also lies in the detectives and police force for not doing their jobs correctly to catch the real culprit who could very well still be out there.
And they call this justice.
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Does this not indicate that the justice system is sufficiently flawed that a mere conviction (without any subsequent appeals and follow up) should be insufficient to result in the death penalty being executed?
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Tentatively, I would say that most broadly justice is, with respect to judicial criteria, accordance with those criteria in dealing with responsibilities and allowances.
Justice has to be with respect to judicial criteria because these set standards relevant to such decision-making by which accordance can be determined. Determining accordance is necessary because justice is a descriptor for things that accord to our take on justice. This accordance is in dealing with something because it is the process that is just or otherwise, as opposed to the result. This dealing is in responsibilities—what one should do—or in allowances—what one may do.
In a typical case in a legal system, justice is when, with respect to the laws of that system, the case is carried out correctly. Typically, this will result in—again with respect to the laws—a correct allowance (e.g. planning permission or rights) or correct responsibility (e.g. compensation or imprisonment) being conferred.
Criticism to help me refine this start wanted…
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If I am reading your post correctly, MsBlack, it would seem that your conception of justice is largely tied into the proper execution of a judicial system. If I am reading this correctly, than the flaw that I see is that it provides no notion of how to determine whether the law itself is just or not.
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It indicates that, as that article you posted demonstrated, our justice system can put an innocent person on death row. However, the fact that he was eventually freed from his false imprisonment shows that his story is no valid reason to abolish the death penalty. That's like abolishing the ownership of cats as domestic pets because a random owner somewhere in the country got attacked by one. It's over-reactive.
Another common reason I hear for abolishing the death penalty is that no other major democracy practices the death penalty. True, but then again, no other major democracy has the homicide rates that we have here in the U.S. The latest statistics reveal that every 5.6 people per 100,000 are homicide victims.
You can read about them here:
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/homtrnd.htm#contents (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/homtrnd.htm#contents)
Also consider that different countries have different judicial systems, punishment and fine systems, etc. If these countries had the homicide rates of the U.S., wouldn't they want to issue the death penalty?
The latest Gallup Poll is also in. A 2/3 majority of Americans polled support the use of the death penalty:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/1606/Death-Penalty.aspx (http://www.gallup.com/poll/1606/Death-Penalty.aspx)
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It indicates that, as that article you posted demonstrated, our justice system can put an innocent person behind bars. However, the fact that he was eventually freed from his false imprisonment shows that his story is no valid reason to abolish the death penalty.
Not to abolish, but certainly to attempt to improve the judicial system so as to not take a person's life away from them unjustly. Indeed, please do note that it was the individual's efforts, not the judicial system's, that freed him.
A responsible judicial system thus costs money. The greater the penalty, the greater the responsibility, and thus the greater the cost.
If these countries had the homicide rates of the U.S., wouldn't they want to issue the death penalty?
Alternately, if the US didn't have the death penalty, would we have these homicide rates? Ill breeds ill, they say.
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RD: You’re right that it doesn’t say exactly what makes for fair laws—indeed, that was the whole point of explicitly making it ‘with respect to’ something. I don’t think that makes it—in a general sense—invalid. In the same way that it’s valid that what is ‘ethical’ can be dependent on personal values, so too can justice be dependent on judicial values.
However, with both ‘ethical’ and ‘just’ (and indeed any continuous descriptor), both can be used without specifying a frame of reference. In such cases, it would be presumed that the person using the term would be referring to an arbitrary level of correspondence with their own criteria or success in the results of the proceedings in question. Strictly, the justice of a whole system is indeterminable from the system’s results regarding anything less than everything the system concerns; what generates those results must be evaluated to determine justice. (In practice, one could be reasonably confident in the justice of a system if all of its results and many of them married up with what one’s own system would dictate.)
For example, someone might say that a legal system is just even if one for every hundred people it sentences to death were sentenced incorrectly and even if it’s sentencing process differed from their own. One sees this when people say that justice has been done, even if, by their own version of justice, things would have been done differently and the result would have been different. In such cases, the judicial process was sufficiently suitable to their justice criteria that it was justice.
Your point is taken, though, that this all tells nothing of what, in practice, these ‘justice criteria’ should be. To answer also this broadly, the criteria should, to the best practical degree of success, generate effective results. In practice (and to briefly address the question as you see it), this necessitates criteria such as impartiality and pragmatism. However, I’ll avoid going into any more depth firstly because I think that it’s a distraction from my more general answer and secondly simply because I couldn’t go into satisfactory depth on such specifics. Specific and practical implementations can never satisfactorily define justice simply because they aren't definitions but examples.
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A responsible judicial system thus costs money. The greater the penalty, the greater the responsibility, and thus the greater the cost.
Perhaps, except a rapist raped his victim for free, a murderer killed his victim for free, etc.
If these countries had the homicide rates of the U.S., wouldn't they want to issue the death penalty?
Alternately, if the US didn't have the death penalty, would we have these homicide rates? Ill breeds ill, they say.
Who's they? Also, what correlation do you draw between the use of the death penalty and its influence on homicide rates? If indeed a murderer doesn't fear being caught, tried, and executed for his heinous crime, then what's wrong with using the death penalty on him?
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Perhaps, except a rapist raped his victim for free, a murderer killed his victim for free, etc.
And that is the problem: it is always more costly to be good and just.
Who's they?
People. It's an old saying (at least where I grew up). Sort of like "it takes one to know one" or "never start a land-war in Asia."
Also, what correlation do you draw between the use of the death penalty and its influence on homicide rates? If indeed a murderer doesn't fear being caught, tried, and executed for his heinous crime, then what's wrong with using the death penalty on him?
Me? I do not draw a correlation, I was merely pointing out that one objection to the death penalty is that it is indicative of a violent society. That we are so violent to use it is indicative that we are so violent as to need it.
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Actually, you bring up another common reason for one to oppose the death penalty: It's barbaric.
On June 22, 1984, the New York Times published an editorial that sarcastically attacked the new “hygienic” method of death by injection, and stated that “execution can never be made humane through science.”
In short, it’s not the method that really troubles opponents. It’s the death itself they consider barbaric.
True, the death penalty isn't a pleasant topic to discuss. However, one does not have to like the death penalty in order to support it any more than one must like radical surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy in order to find necessary these attempts at treating cancer. We may someday learn how to treat cancer with a simple pill, but that day has not yet arrived.
Today we are faced with the choice of letting the cancer spread or trying to treat it with the methods available, methods that one day in the future will almost certainly be considered barbaric. But to give up and do nothing would be far more barbaric and would certainly delay the discovery of an eventual cure. The analogy between cancer and murder is imperfect, because murder is not the “disease” we are trying to cure. The disease is injustice.
We may not like the death penalty, but we need it to punish crimes of cold-blooded murder, crimes in which any other form of punishment would be inadequate and, therefore, unjust. If we maintain a society in which injustice is not tolerated, incidents of murder—the most flagrant form of injustice—might diminish.
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GenesisOne, there seems to have been a misunderstanding. I was not asserting that the possibility of executing an innocent man is sufficient cause to abolish the death penalty. You have previously questioned the need for appeals in cases where the death penalty is handed down, and asserted that the initial conviction is evidence enough of guilt. I was asking you to reexamine this stance in light of the article that Boo posted, not your general pro death penalty stance.
I find it odd that you seem to be fixated with the economic cost of the death penalty being a major factor in whether or not it is just. You have tremendous wrath towards murderers, but what act defines a murderer? The taking of an innocent life. Surely it is worth some percentage of the tremendous value you place on innocent life to make sure that when applied, the death penalty results in an execution, and not in a murder, isn't it?
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Something we haven't really addressed is the tension between justice-for-society and justice-for-the-victim.
Going back to that article that Boo posted, on the second page, it talks about the victim of the crime that was misattributed to Mr. Cage. Justice for her has been miscarried for 14+ years.
Now one might claim that the system can't be faulted for that delay, at least not intentionally, since it thought it had found the culprit. Well then, what of justice for Mr. Cage? He too was a victim who had to wait extensively for justice.
Is justice time sensitive? Justice, for the victim at least, can never come soon enough. The American judicial system (and to my understanding, the judicial system in other countries as well) is incredibly slow and plodding, thus one could argue that it further wrongs the victims of crime. We can attribute a small portion of this geological pace with due diligence; cases must be constructed, evidence gathered, trials held, appeals, etc. But another significant factor is lack of "man-power" as well as plain old not caring. Too few people work for swift justice, and even thorough justice is at times beyond us.