re political atheists livesey solntze wpd sgi com jon livesey writes much though it might be fun to debate capital punishment itself this is probably the wrong group for it the only relevance here is that you don t seem to be able to tell us what capital punishment actually is and when it is murder that is when you tell us murder is wrong you are using a term you have not yet defined well i ve said that when an innocent person has been executed this is objectively a murder however who is at blame is another question it seems that the entire society that sanctions any sorts of executions realizing the risks is to blame there is a probability of killing an innocent person by shooting at random into the air and there is a probability of killing an innocent person when the state administers a system of capital punishment so when you do either you know that they actions you are taking will sooner or later result in the killing of an innocent person yes but there is also a probablity that you will kill someone doing any raondom activity presumably you had not isolated yourself totally from the rest of society because of this and driving will kill people as will airlines but people continue to do both driving and flying are not punishments inflicted on unwilling prisoners by courts they are risks that we take upon ourselves willingly and i argue that our law system is a similar risk perhaps an innocent person will be punished someday but we work to prevent this in fact many criminals go free as a result of our trying to prevent punishment of innocents if our own driving kills someone else then sure there is a moral issue i know at least one person who was involved in a fatal accident and they felt vey guilty afterwards but such accidents are to be totally expected given the numner of vehicals on the road again the blame is on society no i m not this is what you said you were saying that if there were such a false witness that resulted in an innocent person being convicted and killed it would still be the fault of the state since it did the actual killing no i just commented that the state does the killing it does not depend on there being false witnesses how could it the state does the killing even in the case of sincere mistakes yes but the state is not at fault in such a case the state can only do so much to prevent false witnesses it is possible so what are you trying to say that capital punishment is always murder because of the possibilty of human error invalidating the system i m saying capital punishment is murder period not because of this that and the other but because it involves taking human life that s my definition of murder i make no appeals to dictionaries or to objective morals okay so this is what you call murder but the question is whether or not all such murders are wrong are you saying that all taking of human life is wrong no matter what the circumstances if we as a society decide to murder someone then we should say that and lists our reasons for doing so and live with the moral consequences we should not play word games and pretend that murder isn t murder and that s my opinion about how society ought to be run but this is basically how it works society accepts the risk that an innocent person will be murdered by execution and every member of society shares this blame and most people s definitions of murder include some sort of malicious intent which is not involved in an execution is it but we were trying to discuss an objective moral system or at least its possibilty what ramifications does your personal system have on an objective one no we were not discussing an objective moral system i was showing you that you didn t have one because for one thing you were incapable of defining the terms in it for example murder murder violates the golden rule executions do not because by allowing it at all society implicitly accepts the consequences no matter who the innocent victim is we re not talking about reading minds we are just talking about knowing the truth yes we can never be absolutely certain that we have the truth but the court systems work on a principle of knowing the truth beyond a reasonable doubt sorry but you simply are not quoting yourself accurately here is what you said and since we are looking totally objectively at this case then we know what people are thinking when they are voting to execute the person or not if the intent is malicious and unfair then the execution would be murder what you are doing now is to slide into another claim which is quite different the jury being persuaded beyond a serious doubt is not the same as us knowing what is in their minds beyond a serious doubt reading the minds of the jury would certainly tell whether or not a conviction was moral or not but in an objective system only the absolute truth matters and the jury system is one method to approximate such a truth that is twelve members must be convinced of a truth moreover a jury which comes from a sufficiently prejudiced background may allow itself to be persuaded beyond a serious doubt on evidence that you and i would laugh at but then if we read the minds of these people we would know that the conviction was unfair but would it be perfectly fair if we could read minds if we assume that it would be fair if we knew the absolute truth why is it so much less fair in your opinion if we only have a good approximation of the absolute truth it s not a question of fairness your claim which i have quoted above is a claim about whether we can know it was fair so as to be able to distinguish capital punishnment from murder yes while we could objectively determine the difference if we knew all possible information we can t always determine the difference in our flawed system i think that our system is almost as good as possible but it still isn t objectively perfect you see it doesn t matter if we know it is fair or not objectively it is either fair or it is not now there s a huge difference if we can read minds we can know and if we cannot read minds we can know nothing the difference is not in degree of fairness but in what we can know but what we know has no effect on an objective system i think it is possible to produce a fairly objective system if we are clear on which goals it is supposed to promote i m not going to waste my time trying to devise a system that i am pretty sure does not exist why are you so sure i simply want people to confront reality my reality remember why is your reality important in this case the reality is that ideal theories apart we can never know even after the fact about the fairness of the justice system for every innocent person released from death row there may have been a dozen innocent people executed or a hundred or none at all we simply don t know but we can assume that the system is fairly decent at least most likely and you realize that the correctness of our system says nothing about a totally ideal and objective system now what are we going to do on the one hand we can pretend that we have an ideal theory and that we can know things we can never know and the justie system is fair and that we can wave a magic wand and make certain types of killing not murder and go on our way well we can have an ideal system but the working system can not be ideal we can only hope to create a system that is as close an approximation to the ideal system as possible on the other hand we can recognize that all justice has a small we hope probability of punishing the innocent and that in the end we do bear moral responsibility even for the probabilistic consequences of the systems we set up and then say well here we go murdering again maybe some of us will even say gee i wonder if all this is strictly necessary yes we all bear the responsibility most people seem willing to do this i think that the second is preferable in that if requires people to face the moral consequences of what we do as a society instead of sheltering ourselves from them by magic ceremonies and word games we must realize the consequences of all our actions why do you keep separating the justice system from the pack and lest i forget i also don t think we have an objective moral system and i believe i only have to take that idea seriously when someone presents evidence of it i don t think our country has an objective system but i think such an objective system can exist in theory without omniscience an objective system is not possible in practice keith
