Many political debates here have included references to The Political Compass, which uses a set of 61 questions to assess one’s political orientation in terms of economic left/right and social libertarianism/authoritarianism (rather like the “Libertarian diamond” popular in the US).
And so, every so often I will begin a thread in which the premise for debate is one of the 61 questions. I will give which answer I chose and provide my justification and reasoning. Others are, of course, invited to do the same including those who wish to “question the question”, as it were.
It would also be useful when posting in these threads to give your own “compass reading” in your first post, by convention giving the Economic value first. My own is
SentientMeat: Economic: -5.12, Social: -7.28, and so by the above convention my co-ordinates are (-5.12, -7.28). Please also indicate which option you ticked. I might suggest what I think is the “weighting” given to the various answers in terms of calculating the final orientation, but seeing for yourself what kind of answers are given by those with a certain score might be more useful than second-guessing the test’s scoring system.
Now, I appreciate that there is often dissent regarding whether the assessment the test provides is valid, notably by US conservative posters, either because it is “left-biased” (??) or because some propositions are clearly slanted, ambiguous or self-contradictory. The site itself provides answers to these and other Frequently Asked Questions, and there is also a separate thread: Does The Political Compass give an accurate reading? [size=2]Read these first and then, if you have an objection to the test in general, please post it there. If your objection is solely to the proposition in hand, post here. If your objection is to other propositions, please wait until I open a thread on them. (And for heaven’s sake, please don’t quote this entire Opening Post when replying like this sufferer of bandwidth diarrhea.)
The above will be pasted in every new thread in order to introduce it properly, and I’ll try to let each one exhaust itself of useful input before starting the next. Without wanting to “hog the idea”, I would be grateful if others could refrain from starting similar threads. Finally, I advise you to read the full proposition below, not just the thread title (which is necessarily abbreviated), and request that you debate my entire OP rather than simply respond, “IMHO”-like, to the proposition itself.
To date, the threads are:
Does The Political Compass give an accurate reading?
Political Compass #1: Globalisation, Humanity and OmniCorp.
#2: My country, right or wrong
#3: Pride in one’s country is foolish.
#4: Superior racial qualities.
#5: My enemy’s enemy is my friend.
#6: Justifying illegal military action.
#7: “Info-tainment” is a worrying trend.
#8: Class division vs. international division. (+ SentientMeat’s economic worldview)
#9: Inflation vs. unemployment.
#10: Corporate respect of the environment.
#11: From each according to his ability, to each according to need.
#12: Sad reflections in branded drinking water.
#13: Land should not be bought and sold.
#14: Many personal fortunes contribute nothing to society.
#15: Protectionism is sometimes necessary in trade.
#16: Shareholder profit is a company’s only responsibility.
#17: The rich are too highly taxed.
#18: Better healthcare for those who can pay for it.
#19: Penalising businesses which mislead the public.
#20: The freer the market, the freer the people.
#21: Abortion should be illegal.
#22: All authority must be questioned.
#23: An eye for an eye.
#24: Taxpayers should not prop up theatres or museums.
#25: Schools shouldn’t make attendance compulsory.
#26: Different kinds of people should keep to their own.
#27: Good parents sometimes have to spank their children.
#28: It’s natural for children to keep secrets.
#29: Marijuana should be legalised.
#30: School’s prime function is equipping kids to find jobs.
#31: Seriously disabled people should not reproduce.
#32: Learning discipline is the most important thing.
#33: ‘Savage peoples’ vs. ‘different culture’
#34: Society should not support those who refuse to work.
#35: Keep cheerfully busy when troubled.
#36: First generation immigrants can never be fully integrated.
#37: What’s good for corporations is always good for everyone.
#38: No broadcasting institution should receive public funding.
#39: Our civil rights are being excessively curbed re. terrorism.
#40: One party states avoid delays to progress.
#41: Only wrongdoers need worry about official surveillance.
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**Proposition #42: The death penalty should be an option for the most serious crimes.
SentientMeat** (-5.12, -7.28) ticks Strongly Disagree.
Fallacies and strawmen abound on both sides of this debate. “Killing people, to show that killing people is wrong, is wrong” is a platitude commonly mouthed by anti-DP folk. And yet, strangely, imprisonment for the crime of kidnapping and false imprisonment is appropriate.
The issue here is similar to that of #23. As I said there, the judiciary must attempt to match the severity of the crime with the severity of the punishment, but not the nature of the crime with that of the punishment. I believe that in all cases that severity can be matched solely by deprivation of property or liberty. To attempt to match the nature of the crime would be to fall prey to medieval sadism in the name of justice.
When examining whether a given penalty is appropriate, I consider that there are three central issues:
[ul][li] Deterrence: Above all, the purpose of the criminal justice system is to somehow prevent future crimes by providing an important input into the decisions of human minds: If this crime then that punishment. We must ask ourselves whether the death penalty deters people from committing those crimes for which it may be invoked. Unfortunately, time after time in comparison after comparison, no deterrent effect over and above that demonstrated by imprisonment is observable (indeed, there is arguably a negative effect) - the DP’s deterrent effect is simply not supported by statistical evidence. (And I realise that DP prevents crimes that a released prisoner might otherwise commit - this is, however, a statistically fallacious way to look at it, since eg. capital punishment for trivial misdemeanors, or even for suspected crimes, would similarly “prevent future murders”.) [/li][li]Punishment: Does a life sentence punish the criminal less than killing him or her? It would seem that decades in a small room in a brutal and oppressive institution is no let-off compared to granting the criminal a painless but dramatic martyrdom which allows them to curse the state and consider themselves the victim to the very end. How much harder to wake up and face one’s guilt every morning for thousands of mornings, perhaps eventually even coming to accept responsibility for one’s actions and seeking to make amends somehow? No, I cannot say that a life sentence is less of a punishment than a death sentence.[/li][li] Revenge: Here lies the rub, I believe. If deterrence and punishment provide no additional justification over imprisonment, and I do not believe that they do, then we are left with revenge as the sole justification. And, as I stated in #23, I do not feel that a destructive thirst for vengeance, understandable though it may be, should motivate the actions of a civilised state government. An informed democracy must ask itself whether it wants its elected officials to act purely on the basis of revenge. I’m afraid I cannot condone such righteous wrath on their part, indeed the very thought fills me with dread: the entire reason I vote for those officials is in the hope that they don’t fall prey to the visceral human passions which sadly might naturally overwhelm me in extremis.[/li][/ul]
These, I believe, are the fundamental issues, consideration of which lead me to reject the death penalty under any circumstances. But you will of course notice that I have not yet made any mention of the practical issues, which to me make the death penalty simply absolutely unthinkable in a civilised democracy in the real world.
These (literally) fatal flaws in the reality of the death penalty were brought home to me in a documentary of the life and death of Aileen Wuournos, the female “serial killer” portrayed in the film Monster. Here we have a child repeatedly tortured and raped by brother, father, grandfather and their friends, who gives birth to the grandfather’s child at 13, is subsequently thrown out to live in the woods for months of harshest winter, and who only knows how to relate to others by sexual intercourse. She becomes a highway prostitute, the kind who are reportedly raped on average 33 times per year. When in the course of a year she kills 6 men (one a convicted rapist) in, she says, self defence, she is allocated a pathetic excuse for a defence lawyer who does not even argue that she is as mentally ill as she obviously is, nor even that she acted in self defence even though her taped confession says so 60 times (indeed, he did not even play those parts to the jury). On death row, clearly delusional and ashamed of her horrific childhood, she whispers to the documentarist that she acted in self defence in case she is overheard, because she wants to die. An appeal (which she disowns) to the governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, is unsuccessful - any latitude shown to a female multiple murderer will be met with accusations of sexism by his conservative core support, and so she is if anything treated more ruthlessly in a hasty and bizarre anti-PC-gone-mad ruling.
And what do we end up with? A life of unthinkable abuse and mental illness terminated and then utterly misrepresented by an Oscar-winning movie.
I argue not that Aileen did no wrong, but that the whole sorry tale sickens one to the very stomach to the extent that no reasonable person could advocate the death penalty in light of it: I believe that more enlightened future generations who liked the movie and explored the facts might view the documentary rather like one on slavery or medieval torture. Nevertheless, there are people who most definitely did no wrong. 767 people have been executed in the US since the DP was reinstated in 1976. Recently, the one hundredth Death Row inmate to be exonerated was released. It simply beggars belief that these statistics can be true of the supposed “Land of the free”, standing alongside such archetypes of primitive savagery as Yemen, China, Iran and DR Congo.
This is not a question of principle - you can agree or disagree with my earlier contemplations as you wish - this is a question of simple reality: innocent people have been, and will be, killed by the state. The necessary appeals procedure is vastly expensive, and vulnerable to blatant political manipulation. We cannot seek to understand how some people can come to commit horrific crimes if we dispose of the very subjects essential to that research.
I consider that a society which implements the death penalty is socially and politically retarded, and politicians who advocate it are guilty of pandering to the basest elements of humanity: Most of the industrialised democratic world grew out of such barbarism more than half a century ago. A society which considers revenge to be a valid moral basis for state action has no case for being called “civilised”.