Of course. But that wasn’t ElvisL1ves’ objection.
In this specific case, under what circumstances would you consider freeing Tsarnaev?
What is it that we have to do?
Prevent this fellow from maiming and killing other folks.
Punish those that break the law? Or are you being deliberately obtuse?
Not at all. What punishment constitutes “what we have to do”? How do you reason your way to the answer being execution?
carnivorousplant has it in another reason for imprisonment - to protect the rest of us. What greater level of safety does execution offer? Please note that Tsarnaev is never getting out of Supermax by any means.
By this logic, incarceration also makes a prisoner’s family suffer.
Screw 'em, they should have taught him better.
Forgive me if my quoting is messed up, Tapatalk isn’t terribly user friendly.
I’m not saying that any specific punishment is “what we have to do”, just that some sort of punishment is required for those that break the law or else society will break down. In a previous post (that I can’t quote exactly because I’m a moron), you said (to the effect) that if we execute people, then we’ve decided that we’re the type of society that kills people. That is self-evident. Presumably we lose the moral high ground (for whatever that’s worth) when we do so because you are equating execution with murder. Fair enough. Why don’t we equate imprisonment with kidnapping? They are both holding someone against their will.
My point is that some kind of punishment is required. Whatever it is, it will have an illegal counterpart when anyone other than the state does it.
No question.
Protecting ourselves, and rehabilitating the miscreant, are other motivations for imprisonment too. Protecting ourselves is motive enough.
Motivations are pretty central when we’re discussing what kind of people we want to be. It isn’t just about the actions themselves, or even primarily about them. We can accomplish all we want or need to with imprisonment. We are on very shaky grounds at best, and ISTM indefensible ones, when we extend ourselves into indulging simple retribution, on the same primitive level or morality as at the dawn of civilization.
That view is the dominant one in most of the world, and we’re catching up to it here too (Nebraska being the latest). You could even say that Florida and Texas alone are holding us back from that full realization.
That’s awfully poetic.
Why does Dzokhar Tsarnaev deserve to live?
Just to follow up: We’d all like to believe we’re basically decent people in a decent society that sometimes has to do distasteful things, but that that does not affect who we are. My point, not a self-evident one given some of the responses here, is that we do *not *always have to do these distasteful things, that we sometimes choose to do so anyway, and that making that choice does serve to define who we are. Some of us avoid that realization by pretending we are sometimes forced to kill people. That pretense also helps define who we are.
Which we are, as is every successful culture in the history of mankind. Cultures that refuse to do anything they find distasteful are inevitably overwhelmed and destroyed by those not so self-constrained.
So how is it that we are *forced *to perform executions? We’re not. Most convicts we let live.
I leave it to you to specify who exactly *are *these unconstrained cultures that constitute a threat to civilization. Evidence is that it’s us.
Then I guess we may as well just roll over and allow ISIS and the Taliban to define the next two thousand years of human history.
You’re OK with that, right? I mean, it’s not as if we can choose to kill them - that would make us people who choose to kill people, and that’d be bad.
We have to kill Tsarnaev to defend ourselves against ISIS. Gotcha. :rolleyes:
So what is the alternative for murderers who do their crimes in the name of religion, who encourage others who believe in that religion to do so, and do it against some people who weren’t attacking them, weren’t objecting to their beliefs, had no issue - on the surface, they were random citizens - with them, were just going about their daily lives, might also have had similar beliefs, and were targeted because they ‘represent’ what the killers hate?
Life imprisonment keeps them from acting any further on those beliefs, doesn’t it?
Maybe I don’t understand your question - are you asking what we should do to murderers who *really need *to be killed?
Prison.
But snickering “If he wants to go to Heaven, let’s help him!” is just so much fun, isn’t it?
Just a question, not a leading something. What should we do in the event of a mass murderer who can convince others to do the same?
If that is the only option, how can we make sure the theory and belief to kill our kin isn’t spread to other inmates who might be released?