Thoughts on the death penalty?

[Professor S]

Originally Posted by TheGame

So what it boils down to is morality, and you just have a different set of values then I do. "That life is not mine to take" is not a good arguement in my opinion. I think the fact of the matter is that keeping a man in a cage for the rest of their life is a less efficient way of handling punishment then the death penalty is.

While I agree in cases in which there is no 110% solid evidence that proves the person took another life (or multiple other lives) that they should be put in prison, I disagree with the fact that the death penalty is something that's immoral.

When the person who is killed decided to kill an innocent baby, mother, daughter, brother, sister, cousin, nephew, niece, etc they took their own life in my book. That's where I moraly stand on it.

Then thats just a simple disagreement on a subjective topic, which is why I think Bond and I both maintain that this should be a states rights issue.

And lastly, I think its hipocracy to say "that life is not ours to take" to any crime that a person commits in the US, but still have the ability to justify a war that's not fought on your home turf. I belive in either case that some actions need retaliations. And sometimes I feel like its worth dying, and worth killing to punish people for crimes that they commit.

I'm not sure how my statements were hipocritical when I made efforts to explain that pre-emtive self-defense is a morally dubious activity. And to use your own terminology, was the US's involvement in the European theater in WW2 immoral? We certainly were not on our home turf by any means. We were across the Atlantic, and Germany never ever attacked the US!

Of course it was moral because to do nothing ran the risk of an openly agressive Nazi Germany ruling Europe and Asia and in the position to threaten the US and the rest of the free world, exterminating who they pleaed along the way. This is why preemption is so muddled... you'll never know the moral consequence of the alternative because it was never given the option of existing.