So, if we arrest Jeffrey Dahmer, we should find some cop to eat him, too ?
It’s not about giving off an air of moral superiority, it’s about us being human beings rather than the monsters we try and excise from the general public. Cause see, it’s all fine and dandy to say “well, someone should do to him what he did to his victim” - but then someone, a decent person, a cop, a State clerk or whatever, has got to do it. Cause you sure as fuck ain’t going to do it yourself, are ya ? And what’s that going to do to him, what kind of scars is he going to have to carry for the rest of his life to make your bloodthirsty self happy ?
And if you *are *fine with personally torturing people “cuz they deserve it”, well, I don’t want you in my society any more than I want the parents in your story, because you my friend would be one sick creep.
[QUOTE=Omg a Black Conservative]
But I’m not talking about torturing people at will. But rather, allowing people to be subjected to the same amount of pain they inflict on another.
[/QUOTE]
Except that you are. You are advocating basically the whole ‘eye for an eye’ thingy, and saying it’s perfectly ok for society to inflict the ‘same amount of pain they inflict on another’. Then you are setting up magical conditions to justify it.
But you still haven’t explained how it benefits society, even with perfect gods-like knowledge, to act in the same manner as the worst of our society.
And yet, societies that act in the way you advocate are generally not pleasant places to live. Consider societies that actually practice what you are preaching here, even those that were tacitly ‘democracies’. None of them were really great places to live…nor did doing things like you advocate make them notably more upright or morally sound, or whatever you were getting at there, especially when you scale things up. Oh, you COULD have a small township with puritanical laws and harsh punishments that would meet your ideal…but only for a while, and only while they stayed small. Eventually you burn one witch too many, and then people start to look around and not like what they are seeing…or you get too big to keep the thumbscrews properly tightened down on society and it gets away from you.
You mean the ‘side’ where the majority of our society is at? That ‘side’? And do you know why that is? Because in theory we ALL get angry and want vengeance for certain things. Well, maybe not 'luci, but everyone else does. We howl at the moon and want the guilty to pay. But then if society does what we wants them to in the heat of the moment, we reflect that as a society, such actions brings us all down to the same level as the criminal. And that’s assume we DO have perfect, gods-like knowledge of what happened and why. If we are wrong, and we burn one witch too many, well…it brings it all home at that point. Luckily, cooler heads prevail, and as a society we balance the need for justice with the thirst for vengeance.
I think it would be an ugly and desperate state of affairs if it became acceptable to torture people. These issues go above and beyond the individual prisoner and his/her heinous crimes. Who metes out these punishments? What do you think torturing people does to a person’s psyche? To their interpersonal relationships and how they behave outside of this job? Do you really think they could leave all of the horrors at work and not bring some of it home with them? I doubt it.
I think making torture legal would be a terrible thing for society at large. Instead of less violence and crime, we’d have the criminals doing it, and we’d have people making careers of it. How on earth could that be construed as a positive thing? I think it would set an awful example for young people, teaching them that you solve violence with violence and that it’s morally alright to do unspeakable things to people as long as a judge and jury have decided they “deserve it.” No way. The founding fathers were spot on with this one.
Okay, let’s try assuming the opposite. If torturing somebody to death isn’t immoral, then what basis do you have for punishing Michael James and Tina Alberson at all?
One thing to consider is the people who carry out the sentences our justice system deals out. I sure as hell don’t want to tell a prison guard that he needs to kill someone in a slow torturous manner.
And by the same token, I don’t want a lot of prison guards who would carry out those orders without qualm. Sort of a catch-22, and an excellent point Odesio.
I’d be willing to let someone stand in the desert for days on end until they die of heat exhaustion (points to OP). Does that make me a tough guy?
That’s not really an answer. You said it was immoral. I want to know why. For it to be immoral, there has to be some reason why it’s immoral.
No, because that’d be just weird. But maybe we cut him up and leave his remains in a refrigerator.
Take the people in the OP. There are two possibilities to administering what could be deemed as “cruel and unusual punishment”:
(1) They could be dropped off in the desert without any food or water and left to die or
(2) They could be fed once every five days, and if they die well they die.
Neither of those require someone to “do to” them. Either they are left to die on their own or they are provided for once in a while. Given your contention seems to rely solely on someone actively “doing to” them, and neither of those situations requires as such, I assume you would be okay with both of those?
What’s the difference between jailing someone indefinitely (which someone said was probably the cruelist form of punishment there is) and torturing them. Or, more specifically, subjecting them to “cruel and unusual” punishment?
Not really. What I’m advocating for is that such a punishment can be equal to or exceed the crime, not that it must.
I did explain. It grants equal value to the victim as to the trespasser, instead of granting more value to the one who trespasses.
How about this. Show me a society which is virtually the same as any Western democracy with the only difference between it and the other other Western democracies being that it allows “cruel and unusual” punishment. The thing is that you can’t as there are none. You can only point to societies which are vastly different from any Western democracy. These, however, are not good points of reference because they differ vastly from said Western democracies in many areas unrelated to the way they treat their criminals.
This is simply a rehashing of the “We shouldn’t stoop down to the criminals level!”. But the obvious rebuttal to that question is “Why not?”. Furthermore, are you saying that if we had absolute God-like powers and knew what happened exactly, that it would be okay to subject said criminal to “cruel and unusual” punishment? If not, then I can’t exactly take the whole issue about wrongful conviction seriously, as even if we had a perfect conviction rate (that is, every convicted criminal was absolutely guilty), you still wouldn’t agree with “cruel and unusual” punishment.
Working in a prison, I see a lot of folks damage themselves emotionally and morally by being cruel to others. If it’s okay to be cruel to criminals, then it must not be that bad to be cruel to one’s kids or spouse at home, especially when they really deserve it, right?
“If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” Friedrich Nietzsche
I’m not talking about objectivity. I’m talking about a simple reason for stating that it’s immoral to torture someone to death. Any reason at all. “Because it is” really isn’t a reason. That’s more of an intellectual cop-out.
As you see in my quote you quoted, I clearly stated that sometimes torturing someone to death is immoral. It’s the opposite side who’s stated that it’s allows immoral (or, more specifically, never moral).
Are there any other parts of the Constitution you don’t like?
It seems like conservatives always have a never ending list of ways they want to change the Constitution. Same sex marriage, balanced budget, flag burning, english only, school prayer, birthright citizenship, anti-abortion – now you want to be able to torture convicted criminals?
It sounds to me like you really don’t like the country our forefathers envisioned. That’s a good reason to keep conservatives out of office.
Luckily for us all, the Founding Fathers made this nifty way to amend the Constitution if we want to change it (and, no, it’s not through reinterpreting the language on the paper). If I could, there are some things I would change. Does that correlate to hating the Constitution? Only in your mind, I suppose.
Be a civil service position, wouldn’t it? Somebody has to write a job description in HR-ese. Take some meetings, hammer out a set of desirable qualifications. Competitive testing, perhaps. Interviews would be…interesting.
Vonnegut could have made a funny story out of this, had he ever been sick and twisted enough to want to.
Of course those two still involve someone doing something to them. In the first case, all the people driving them into the desert and leaving them there know damn well what they’re doing. Every hour they’re not turning that bitch around to go and get their prisoners back is one more hour where they can imagine the pain and suffering of their wards slowly dehydrating and going insane with thirst.
In the second, the people who bring them the food can see, day after day, of their prisoners turn into Auschwitz-style stick people. IOW, the decision not to do something, is still fundamentally “doing something”.
If that doesn’t seem like something that’d do something to your psyche, if you don’t think your conscience would hammer away at you for doing that kind of thing, maybe you should ask yourself whether you’re OK, as a person.
At this point, you may want to ask yourself why that is.
But I’m going to ask you a different question altogether: what, in your opinion, would be accomplished by us running with your fucked up eye for an eye ? Do you think people would be less inclined to do fucked up things ? Do you think this C&U punishment would deter people more than the death penalty, or life in prison ? If so, why ?
It’s a trick question, of course. Do you know why ?
Criminals, by definition, don’t plan on getting caught. If they thought they risked getting caught, they wouldn’t do the crime in the first place. Criminals might be morons, but they’re not stupid. Harshing up the punishment doesn’t do jack squat to modify this equation - they’ll still do whatever it is they’re doing, because they’ll still think they can get away with it. So what’s the point of debasing ourselves, exactly ?
