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I believe the death penalty is immoral but suicide is not. With some asterisks. Suicide is bad if it harms your family. Then it's an offense against your family. If you have no family or it's a benefit for your family (for example, you are terminally ill) then it's not wrong. The death penalty is bad when imposed by a stranger because it's tantamount to murder. That doesn't mean killing is always bad, but it is generally bad. Self defense is okay, including in the extended sense.
Interesting how different our moral intuitions are. I would say, for example, that the teenage boys who kidnapped, raped, brutally tortured, and murdered Junko Furuta should have been immediately executed, and the fact that they weren’t was a terrible injustice. Likewise the murderers of Iryna Zarutska and Debrina Kawam, the would-be murderer of Bethany MaGee, and everyone involved with the Pakistani rape gangs. Allowing any of them to live, let alone to ever see the outside of a prison cell, strikes me as a horribly anti-social policy. I honestly can’t understand the mind of someone who disagrees.
You don't have a basis to condemn their behavior if you're willing to stoop to that level though.
I agree that life in prison is a reasonable penalty for murder. I don't understand the additional point of state executions. I do think that prisoners should be allowed to commit suicide as I would likely do this if I were incarcerated for life for whatever reason. There is no point to living in a prison.
The issue is more what is the basis of your moral superiority? How do you condemn the man killing Iryna Zarutska only to stoop to his level and kill him in return? It makes more sense to incarcerate him for life although the present state is a deadly one that murders a lot of innocent people (particularly overseas where they do not need to be convicted for a crime they did not commit, although a lot of people are falsely convicted, usually by accident but not always).
With no more moral difficulty than I'd have with forcibly arresting someone for assault, imprisoning a kidnapper, or fining an embezzler. Whether an action is morally or legally a crime depends on the full context, not just on the immediate action. It is not okay to kill someone for sitting in front of you, but it it is okay to kill someone for wantonly murdering an innocent.
Practically, I'd still rather not have a death penalty, because our justice system makes mistakes and when it does I prefer the mistakes to be as reversible as possible. "As possible" is doing a lot of work here (if those assault and murder suspects turn out to be innocent, we can't undo a forceable arrest or a false imprisonment, even if we make recompense), but we can do the best we can, and giving life imprisonment to murderers is part of that under most circumstances.
For sure. However in practice people ignore this and say badge means it's okay, no badge means less rights. They are not taking into account full context of actions, rather they are establishing a perverted, travesty caste system between state employee and individual.
How do you determine who is innocent? If someone receives the consequence of their own principles, such as believing in equality and then receiving equality on public transport, was that person innocent? The full context is not considered when we focus on spilling schizophrenics' blood. Rather, the entire concept of public transport, riding it, voting for it, the system of who lives where and why, the system of who is born when, where, and at all, and why, must be interrogated. Otherwise we're playing justice dress up, where limited and select context is taken into consideration and at the end of the process, the common man pats himself on the back and considers himself «good.»
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