Yes love is a defining value. Raping shooting and burying a person would be the opposite of love.
Anyway, this thread was begun on the premise that the death of William Clayton Locketts could be the “Rosa Parks moment” in the anti-Capital Punishment movement in the US, but has since drifted way off course and people seem to be either talking past each other or taking shots.
It seems to have drifted off this course and I’ll concede that I’m at least partly responsible for that so let’s see if I can help get this thread back on topic and off the rather tiresome track of anti-death penalty and pro-death penalty advocates attacking each other.
The first question that should be asked strikes me as being
“Why didn’t the OP ask if this was the “Claudette Colvin movement” of the anti-death penalty movement?”
The obvious answer is that the OP, like 99.9 percent of all people in the western world has no idea who Claudette Colvin is.
For those not aware, she was arrested a few months earlier than Rosa Parks for the same thing that Rosa Parks would be and she was one of the original defendants but the NAACP decided to not use her as the face of the movement because she was an unwed teenage mother and the believed that she was not the proper face of the movement.
Instead they decided to go with Rosa Parks who looked like everyone’s favorite aunt or grandmother.
I think it’s been fairly well established that Locketts, being a rapist who shot and buried alive a woman who disrespected him is not the type of person who’s going to generate sympathy.
In fact, I think that Claudette Colvin would have made a better face for the Civil Rights movement than Locketts would be of the anti-death penalty movement.
Past faces of the anti-death penalty movement have been people who were innocent or at least someone that their backers claimed were innocent such as Ruben “Hurricane” Carter who inspired the famous Bob Dylan song and the Denzel Washington movie about the case or of course the infamous Mumia Abu Jamal.
It’s been nearly a week since the botched execution and for now a tiny number of people are outraged by it, but if anything outrage over the case is dramatically subsiding and I’d be shocked in most people, even people in Oklahoma could identify who Will Clayton Locketts.
A week from now the number will probably even be smaller.
In fact, I suspect if we are being honest, most of of a week from now, if we were asked about Will Clayton Locketts would have to check with google to find out who he is.
If there’s going to be an execution that going to cause a “Rosa Parks moment” then it’s going to have to be someone who most people are going to like, admire and identify with.
It’ll need to be someone clearly innocent and executed for a crime he didn’t commit.
The fact that Cameron Todd Willingham, despite almost certainly being innocent didn’t cause such a moment is telling.
Correct. And as that is despicable, we should hate the sin but still love the sinner because of their inalienable humanity and the possibility of change- both of which are extinguished by killing, along with any claim we have to acting humanely.
Maybe what we “should” do is follow our own moral code, not yours. Your admonishments from the pulpit aren’t going to sway a lot of people here. Just saying.
That’s right-No witnessing in Great Debates!
waitaminnit…
I didn’t say it wasn’t allowed. I said it’s not going to work. And you defending the tactic just because you happen to agree with her on the subject at hand is pretty hilarious.
Can you define the difference between ‘witnessing’ and professing a moral standpoint. I am a naturalistic agnostic. Exactly what am I witnessing?
I belie R that we have a social construct of evil and we require a description of valid moral reaction to evil.
I never claimed you are “witnessing” so I am not going to get bogged down defining or differentiating it. But your arguments seem tinged with a religious fervour and moral absolutism. There was also a fair bit of back and forth between you and others about what religions tell us about this subject.
One person’s “hilarious tactic” is another person’s difference of opinion.
I was speaking to the tone of his posts as I perceived them, not his stance. This will be my last reply to your wildly off target attempts at zingers.
Then you are mistaken. I am an agnostic moral relativist with an interest in how people make moral decisions.
Seemed more like you were being a little judgy and looking down from the moral high ground rather than attempt to understand. Just how you’ve come across to me and I suspect to others as well.
That is not my position at all. I do not accept any absolute morality, seeing the world as amoral. However if we make a claim to humanity having any moral basis, we must construct a morality. Most moral systems, including those on show here that accept the killing of people for un-reason seem fatally flawed, based as they are on demonstrably non-empirical beliefs (natural free will and personal responsibility). People who hold such beliefs find it difficult to question their basic moral assumptions, so often the use of standard received moral constructs such as “sin” and “evil” can be used to elicit an emotional reaction that allows them to see the fallacy of reason they are employing.
How do you feel that’s working out for you in this thread?
A few cages rattled which might not have been had pure logic been used. Sometimes an appeal to emotion is needed when considering morals- too easy to assume that rationality has all the answers when the premises are emotional as in this case.
So if we follow your example to the extent of rejecting absolute morality – but then don’t bother with that second step of (a) making a claim to humanity having a moral basis and (b) constructing a morality – then we can cheerfully put together a system of incapacitating murderers built around, what, enlightened self-interest?
People don’t make moral decisions. Making a decision implies the ability to choose between alternatives. You have already said that you don’t believe in free will, therefore no one has the ability to choose.
Regards,
Shodan
Well I think you went way off setting up the moral superiority of Europe and merely put pro- death penalty people on the defensive. Your cage rattling had the opposite effect of what you hope it did, imho.
In your opinion. It will stick in minds longer than a rational exchange ignoring the emotions.
Free agency does not exist, but decisions are obviously made by human beings. The decisions may be the result of genetics and experience, but until the person speaks it is not possible to predict what they will say. Decisions are made, but there is no free will.