I am of the idea that it isnt cruel because we can alleviate the pain from the procedure and he would not be handicapped as he would have access to all the medical advances the victim would to make him/her whole. The small difference would be that he would have to undergo all the slight inconveniences of having a foot removed, replacing it with a prosthesis instead of the victim. the only cruelty I can see is the cruelty the victim had to experience. We don’t have to be cruel in replacing the foot if that’s what the victim wants.
My problem is not with this hypothetical situation but with our current justice system. If I were raped or mutilated, our current justice system does not fit with justice to me. Imprisonment would fit robbery or minor assault ( punches etc) but once my body has been so thoroughly violated to the detriment of my psyche, imprisonment seems so unjust to me. The punishment does not fit the crime.
And you would be wrong because that’s still cruel. Put it this way: say the criminal gives his victim pain medicine and then breaks his foot so badly that he can’t walk anymore. Is that non-cruel because the pain is reduced, or is it still cruel because it’s being done against the will of the victim? (I also think you might have an unrealistic picture of what pain drugs do. They reduce pain. They don’t make severe pain disappear.)
So someone who loses a leg and gets a prosthesis is not handicapped?
A more accurate version of this would read “most of society has rejected barbaric punishment, and I disagree.”
i posit my passing grade in Pharmacology as evidence that I have a realistic picture of what pain meds do. You do realize there are different levels of analgesia right? And we can make an amputation procedure pain free by anesthesia and manage the subsequent pain adequately. It is done everyday. I have actually done one myself and no the patient did not complain about cruel pain. And it was an amputation from the knee at that.
“most of society has rejected barbaric punishment”
please do qualify this statement. I find it hard to believe as China with the world’s largest population has no problems with what i find barbaric and obviously in the middle east and with our american wars, barbarism is alive and well. Saying I don’t think imprisonment is a just punishment for a violent crime is not equivalent to saying i like barbarism. I won’t be reduced to your level of word twisting. If you would like to have a knock down drag out fight, you’re going to have to look elsewhere.
So people who receive the appropriate level of pain medication suffer no pain at all? That seems to be what you’re arguing. I’m not just talking about pain during the procedure.
Let me guess: your patient already had a medical problem with the leg, and he or she consented to the operation. Maybe you can spot how this would be different from the idea that’s being discussed here. I do think you’re not acknowledging some points that make it obvious that forced amputations are cruel.
I was talking about the society you and I live in, not the entire planet.
It sounded to me like you were arguing that assault or violence would be better. What would be a just punishment, in your opinion?
You stated that I was wrong in saying that he would not be in pain, i answered that we have ways to mitigate pain and gave a concrete example, then you change the point to cruelty. When I give an answer to a question, I am focused on that question. I understand that you think it’s cruel. My opinion is different in that I do not think it’s cruel as we have ways to mitigate the pain as I do not think amputation is itself cruel as I have helped with one. The procedure itself is not cruel. Obviously my idea of cruel is quite different than yours. it would be cruel to me to know that the person who raped me is out in 4 years and raped another person.
As far as American society being nonbarbaric, again I beg to differ. Capital punishment as it stands which this society accepts, can be barbaric. War, which we are engaged in, is barbaric. i wished you to qualify because I disagree that the most of society rejects barbaric punishment.
Just punishment in my opinion is the perpetrator fully understanding the level of harm done to the victim and being remorseful of it, and the removal of the weapon used from his possession such that he is unable to repeat the offense. In the case of rape, the weapon is a penis and should be removed.
I didn’t change the point at all. You said that a procedure like this would not be cruel because it wouldn’t hurt the criminal (and because he would be able to use a prosthesis). I said that it absolutely would hurt, and it sounds to me like you’re agreeing, because in your last few posts you’ve said we can “alleviate” and “mitigate” pain, which is not the same thing as being free of pain. The surgery might not hurt because the criminal would be unconscious, but the aftermath would certainly hurt - and that would only be mitigated by pain medication. So yes, it’s still cruel even before we get back to the issue of forcibly mutilating someone.
I didn’t say amputations were objectively cruel. That would be stupid. There are times when they are necessary medical procedures. I said an amputation against the person’s consent is cruel.
Yes, it is. But I think we were also talking past each other a bit: I was thinking mostly of the pain that’s involved in recovering from an injury or an operaton and it sounds like you were talking about the pain of just the surgery.
I never said rapists should be out of jail quickly. You’re excluding the middle here, since you were arguing that jail is in itself an inadequate punishment for rape- even a life sentence. You go on to argue that rapists should be mutilated.
I’m opposed to the death penalty, and I didn’t say American society was nonbarbaric. I said it has rejected barbaric punishments like the ones being discussed in this thread. Criminals don’t get their hands cut off, debtors aren’t forced into prison. There’s no question that doctors would find this to be a violation of the Hippocratic Oath and that the courts would find it a violation of the eighth amendment.
I don’t think you have to chop off a person’s hands or feet to make him understand he did something wrong or prevent him from committing other crimes. And I think that for most crimes, you can’t prevent people from repeating what they did no matter what you chop off. You’d need a much bigger prison system since you’re incarcerating a lot of people for life, and it goes without saying you would need a lot of psychotic people with MDs.
you asked what my idea of just punishment was. I answered. going off on a tangent on the merits of chopping off hands and what you think might happen and psychotic MDs are of no relevance.
Upon second thought, removal of the weapon is not justice but prevention which is important in my view. My idea of justice is a balance. The criminal should be made aware of the pain they inflicted. You did not ask how i would implement it. You want to go into hypotheticals about psychotic mds who perform forced amputation. why not talk about the real life situation of people such as this guy who was convicted of rape, released after few years and went on to rape a 4 year old? I completely disagree that the punishment he received for the rape was just.
While you’re busy arguing about how repulsive and barbaric it is for the state to cut off a person’s foot, which I never said I agree would be right, just that we could make it pain free, a real barbarism is being perpetrated that is not just. People like Der Trichs would not have to come up with “barbaric” ideas of how to mete out justice if the current method was just.
And for the record, cut my foot off and I will not cut off yours, but cut my 8 yr old’s and I will NOT be relying on the American justice system. I don’t care how barbaric anyone thinks that makes me. You can rile against my barbarism for retaliating when you finish riling about the barbarism that the perpetrator inflicted in the first place.
Because the hypothetical proposal is the subject of this conversation. If you don’t want to talk about it, you can start a discussion about something else.
Tell me how we could make it pain free. I know people who are anesthetized don’t feel pain during surgery, and I know we have a lot of medications to reduce pain after surgery. That does not mean that someone who has an arm or leg or an internal organ removed will feel no pain during his recovery.
I’m not cutting anyone’s feet off. We are talking about whether or not an unrealistic, made-up, fictional idea would be just or a good idea.
Sorry, you are talking about the merits of this idea. I simply responded to one comment saying this would be cruel and unusual by stating that it would certainly be unusual but not cruel as we can ensure it isn’t cruel. you believe the pain cannot be eliminated, I know it can. I have examples and concrete knowledge. Not only of limb removal but esophageal, stomach, liver, etc. We can make it pain free. You think you have a better grasp of pain meds than I, I understand that. And as far as how, um, morphine is one, induced coma is another, there are many options for pain management, it is actually a discipline onto itself.
Patients are allowed to feel the pain directly out of surgery because there are certain evaluations the anesthesiologist and the surgeon must perform. As soon as their checklist is satisfied, which doesn’t take a long time, pain relief is administered. If pain is more of a worry, you can certainly administer pain relief prior to waking a patient. in fact i believe one of my instructors preferred to do so. But he was a pain man specialist and was railing about how others were doing it wrong because of their unreasonable fear of causing addiction or whatever.
You can most certainly, with our current knowledge prevent this hypothetical criminal from feeling the hypothetical pain of amputation during and after the hypothetical procedure.
They feel no significant pain when their medications are administered adequately. What part of “we have ways to ensure patients are pain free” is unclear? We had an entire class devoted to that topic.
In any case, I’m off to a gifted and talented meeting. Have a nice day.
This whole discussion of pain and anesthetics is, at best, tangentially related to the OP. I think you (strugglingChristian) might be dragging it on deliberately in order to avoid discussing the issue at hand.
Is this punishment just for really, really special cases such as when an organ or body part is rendered completely unusable by a crime? Say Alice shot Bob in the arm, but Bob got better. Are we supposed to chop off Alice’s arm or shoot her in the arm? Either way it’s ridiculous.
Not to mention, amputations/dismemberment as “eye for an eye” punishments are permanent. Which is worse, having a wrongly convicted innocent serve time AND get his hand chopped off until DNA evidence later exonerates him, or just having him serve time until he’s exonerated? Would we have an “Amputee’s Row” prison system like Death Row?
Der Trihs, are you in support of the death penalty? Judging by your liberal views on other subjects, I doubt you are. Would you be in support of dismemberment but not the death penalty? You never explicitly gave an opinion in the OP, but you haven’t refuted it, and the fact that you even brought it up implies that you think it has merit.
[ul]
[li]Unlike killing people slowly, this proposal actually accomplishes something in terms of justice, it repairs some of the harm done. It’s not just cruelty for the sake of cruelty or for vengeance.[/li]
[li]I’m not promoting it as a good idea, I’m asking if it’s a good idea. It’s a question that popped into my head that I thought might produce an interesting discussion.[/li][/ul]
I’m well aware of that, it’s a technological hypothetical. “Given technological capabilities of X and limitations of Y, is Z justifiable”? For example; if our hypothetical future society could transplant limbs this easily, but could also regenerate body parts or grow them in vats, then the proposal is just as much pure vengeance as the let-them-die-in-the-desert plan. Or for the other extreme, a society that can swap body parts back and forth as easily as car parts could justify this more easily than one that could only perform a usable transplant once, since they could remedy false convictions by undoing the transplant (and yes, I know we can’t do that either).
I oppose the death penalty. And in the real world, I’d probably oppose something like this being implemented, under the assumption it would be misused. However, I do consider it more justifiable than the death penalty. It actually accomplishes something in terms of remedying the effects of the crime; a transplanted hand would give you your hand back, but killing a murderer doesn’t restore their victims. And I think it would be somewhat less prone to being used on innocents than the death penalty, because it leaves a live person behind who can complain of injustice.
Right. Hopefully I stumbled into a better argument downthread, but I also like John Mace’s point: in a society with this kind of medical technology, these transplants would be unnecessary and they might even be inferior to other options.
omg, I’m dragging it on? let me guess, you support the other viewpoint. for goodness sake i made a little teeny response to one teeny comment and got questioned voraciously on it with multiple WRONG assumptions that I actually believe that removing a limb is justified and I answer the questions without attacking the asker (unlike the asker) and of course i’m in the wrong.
I’m done. This fake “logic” is tiring. Go skin another knee.
My point remains valid, we have ways to mitigate pain. Your disagreement is based on ignorance so I suppose it must be forgiven. fork inserted!
By my formulation above, at least, yes. If we assume that the organ or body part is removed or otherwise rendered useless, and there is no way to restore functionality through (say) mechanical means, and the damaged body part could be restored to the victim by reassignment from the perpetrator, then I think it’s plausible — if not ultimately correct — to argue that the permanent reassignment could be just.
But that’s purely a practical issue, of no more or less relevance than the fact that such reassignment would in most cases be either outright impossible or extremely impractical. It doesn’t mean that reassignment would be unjust per se (for the vanishingly rare scenario in which guilt is beyond doubt and the procedure practical).
Of what relevance is this question? Killing a murderer does not fix what has been taken, unless we’re positing some bizarre resurrection technology that’s powered by human life. Victor Frankenshteeen is nowhere to be found.
It’s true that some amount of money is in the relevant sense “equivalent to” the loss of a body part, in this case the cost of procuring a transplant. But I don’t think that makes the question uninteresting: What if the criminal doesn’t have enough money for the transplant? What if the supply of organs is very tight? Either seems quite likely to me.