Like whenever I read a news story about a heinous crime, people are always saying “hang them”, or describing these elaborate torture fantasies - and honestly I’m left thinking “so who’s really the bad guy here?” :smack:
Something like 60 to 80% percent of the American public supports the death penalty, which I’ve never understood. Why is it acceptable to be cruel and hateful just because someone else was cruel first?
Is punishment really about protecting society or making things right, or is it just so people can get their rocks off at the idea of people who have done bad things suffering in extreme ways? It seems more like the latter, I think there is a voyeuristic, Schadenfreude aspect to crime and punishment. Like it’s a socially acceptable outlet for our carnivorous impulses. Meh, it makes me feel like the average person is just a potential criminal monster themselves.
I also notice if you ever say that you pity a murderer or rapist or something because they probably had a horrible life or suffer unimaginable mental torment people will accuse you of supporting their actions. Hell even if you say you think it’s a little harsh to wish a brutal death upon them, people will accuse you of being soft on crime.
I think there’s a huge difference between supporting heinous actions, and opposing further retributive violent acts.
It is a natural reaction.
It is also on the internet where it means nothing & you can not be held accountable.
Lack of faith in the legal system. ( why anyone could think that I don’t understand )
Its easy to wish vengeance in the abstract, they are really expressing the outrage they feel. If it came down to extracting vengeance I think there would be a lot fewer takers.
Yeah I blame the media too, for always making it look like criminals get off easy. The reality is the American justice system is incredibly harsh compared to most other countries. It’s laughable to think we don’t punish enough.
Let’s say that John kidnaps, rapes, and murders Mary. Saying you feel pity for the terrible suffering John must have experience in his life is almost certainly going to get you some heat. Most people are going to say you should be feeling pity for Mary who was the victim of the crime rather than for John who committed it.
If you say you feel pity for both John and Mary, you’re creating a sense of equivalence between the criminal and the victim which most people are going to object to.
If you’re going to try to feel pity for everyone, why stop with just John and Mary? Why not feel pity for the unknown people who tormented John in the past? And feel pity for whoever tormented those people?
The problem you can quickly reach a point where you existing in a moral grey zone, treating everything the same and not making any distinctions of good or bad. You’re better off applying some standards, even the most basic ones: murder is bad and rape is bad. A person who commits murder or rape is morally inferior to a person who does not.
There’s a distinction between vengeance for the sake of personal gain, versus vengeance for the general good of the population.
If you’re asking why we (as a society) take vengeance upon those to commit heinous crime, I see it similar to removing cancer. Some people, if left unchecked for too long, will end up causing irreversible damage.
If you’re asking why we do it for personal gain, I’d say it’s the same reason we love movies about robocops and batmen- there’s something inherently satisfying about criminal getting their comeuppance.
What’s so cruel about the concept of the death penalty? I’m pretty sure I would prefer the death penalty to life in prison or solitary confinement or whatever anyway. FWIW, I met a woman who worked with death-row inmates and she said a lot of them feel the same way.
On the broader question of the need for retributive justice in general, I don’t know.
The desire for vengeance makes sense if you consider the game theory strategy of tit for tat.
A little game theory background for those who aren’t familiar: The prisoner’s dilemma is a two player game, in which each player chooses to either cooperate or defect. If both players cooperate, they both get high points. If both players defect, they both get medium points. If one player cooperates while the other defects, the player who cooperated gets low points, and the player who defected gets very high points.
In a one-off prisoner’s dilemma game, the dominant strategy is to defect, because no matter what your opponent chooses, you’ll get more points by defecting than by cooperating. But in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, in which you play the game multiple times against the same opponent, it’s more complicated, because what you do in one round can affect what your opponent chooses to do in future rounds.
One of the most successful strategies in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma is called tit for tat. Following this strategy, you cooperate on the first round, and after that you do whatever your opponent did last round.
While this is a gross simplification compared to real human society it’s not too hard to see parallels. By cooperating, people can get more done than they could individually, but it also leaves you open to be taken advantage of. Then the most successful societies would be ones that used a strategy like tit for tat. Help people, but if they hurt you then hurt them back. In other words, vengeance.
Millions of years of evolution during which there wasn’t any such thing as a justice system, and the only way you had to make sure that someone else didn’t hurt you was to make hurting you result in direct and bloody retaliation.
I grudgingly accept practice of the death penalty although I have an idea which I think would work better, provide more freedom for convicted murderers and keep the public safe. I do not support the existence of the current prison system and all its implications.
I think for some people believing that others don’t really want punishment or retribution but are rather fulfilling their own sadistic tendencies can be a projection. There may be a mean-spiritedness in all of us. We see it better in others than in ourselves.
As humans I think it’s something we should work to resolve. And writing screeds full of violence porn will not help accomplish that. It’s alarming to see someone dwell on that.
But I think, particularly for those who don’t believe in the spirituality of human beings, taking the life of a seriously damaged and dangerous human would be no different than putting a mad dog down. We accept the fact that there are times when, for the greater good, it is necessary to take a creature’s life.
So I think of an execution the same way I think of euthanizing an animal - the whole situation, from the life of the unfortunate person who committed the crime, the crime itself, the victim and his family, the public servants who have to carry out the sentence and all of us who have to live in a world where we have determined this is a necessity are lessened by it.
What does believing in “the spirituality of human beings” have to do with anything? Being an atheist doesn’t make people less moral or compassionate if that’s what you are getting at. And being “spiritual” has never made people less willing to kill, as history demonstrates.
We euthanize animals frequently. If man is nothing more than another animal I see even less reason to hold him superior to them.
In this viewpoint Christians have a better argument by stating that men are children of God and that only He has the power of life and death over them.
I can surmise your counter-arguments but don’t care to sidetrack here, you rascally curmudgeon.
What I can’t understand is how so many people can be so weak. They see bad people make the conscious decision to do bad things and they hand wave it away. I’m starting to think it’s a form of battered spouse syndrome where they are constantly stuck in the denial and guilt stages and never move on to enlightenment and responsibility.
