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The objection based on cost seems insincere, and an invented practical justification for a more ideological belief. This is like people that oppose the death penalty and cite the increased cost relative to life in prison. If perfectly tracking disenfranchisement was implemented at zero cost, would your opinion change? If the death penalty cost less than life, would death penalty opponents suddenly change their mind? I really doubt anyone is deciding this issue based on cost
What kind of insane country is run such that execution is more expensive than life in prison?
Guillotines exist. There are many guns in America. Killing people is not some complex technical feat. Any idiot can do it. Apparently the execution costs about $100,000 (4 orders of magnitude too high), the majority is legal fees and the costs of a higher security prison. These costs could be avoided if the legal niceties were bypassed. Given the cost of execution is ridiculous nonsense, I'm willing to be the legal niceties have a similar ratio of waste.
https://www.nbcrightnow.com/news/what-costs-more-the-death-penalty-or-life-in-prison/article_2d18f8a1-d1ce-5382-8bd6-15471a1b4194.html
China made a profit on its executions, harvesting organs at the same time. I fully expect someone to have an objection about the incentives of killing people for profit. But surely it's much more perverse for there to be a gigantic legal-bureaucratic-medical farce around the death penalty, squandering huge amounts of money.
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I can think the death penalty's financial costs are sufficient reason to oppose it without thinking they're a necessary reason. That is, in no way, "insincere".
Except 99.99% of that cost is caused by opponents of the death penalty. So it is insincere, because its a "heads I win, tails you lose" argument.
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Sounds like arguments as soldiers, tbh. But "insincere" is, if one doesn't also attempt to increase the cost of execution by suing to make cheap painless methods such as the firing squad illegal, inaccurate.
Suppose I thought my child should quit smoking to live longer. I might also believe they should quit smoking to save money. I can believe each of these reasons are sufficient to quit smoking. Finally, suppose I wrote letters to my senator urging for higher taxes on tobacco products.
There is no contradiction, hypocrisy, or insincerity here.
My child might dislike me for writing to my senator to enact a policy that will hurt their wallet, but they can hardly accuse me being contradictory, hypocritical, or insincere.
Humans are not ideal spherical cows.
If I managed to convince a death penalty opponent that the death penalty was in fact very economical, he wouldn't give up on his ideological reason. But if somehow he were to lose the ideological reason, he'd automatically discard the economics reason. Pretty much nobody (short of the lizardman constant) would actually care about the economics reason on its own, so trying to refute it is pointless.
Yes, it's logically possible. But nobody (again, short of the lizardman constant) actually behaves that way. And the answer to "do people in real life behave that way" can be different for smoking and for the death penalty (especially since it's common to object to other things, like rolls in gacha games, that are expensive but don't cause cancer.)
I doubt it. The economics reason is pretty rock solid for me, and I don't feel any particular ideological attachment to not executing, say, Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy (beyond, perhaps, that they plead guilty and so spared everybody the rigamarole of their trial).
There's no appropriate, just way to do executions more cheaply - if you speed up the process to cut down the legal fees, you also greatly increase the unconscionable possibility of an innocent man being executed for a crime he didn't commit.
That's a moral reason disguised as an economics reason. You're not denying it can be done cheaply, but that it can be done cheaply and morally.
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I don't doubt that insincere objections exist, but why do you suspect I'm guilty of that here? If perfectly tracking disenfranchisement was implemented at zero then yes I would change my mind. I would still question why people should lose the right to vote but as I said I don't really care about voting in general, and at least in your hypothetical scenario we wouldn't be burning up resources for what to me seems to be a pointless endeavor.
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