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Yes. There is. You are advancing your own opinion, based on personal prejudice, and using a series of inappropriate analogies and wild rationalisations to justify it. Then, when unable to defeat ideas not your own with the confidence you originally claimed, you are dropping out of the argument completely and instead talking about the other people (or in this case person) in the thread.
That is a flaw. Specifically, it is a flaw called "threadrot".
So, to get back on topic, let's assume for a second that it is easier to make a symbol out of somebody who is dead than it is from somebody who is alive but incarcerated. What is the consequence of that in terms of jurisprudence? Are you suggesting that this should be a deciding factor in whether or not to execute somebody - whether they will subsequently be easier to make into a martyr?
In the case of, say, Salvador Allende I would say you had a point; there is a dilemma there between killing him, and thus creating a martyr, or imprisoning him, and thus creating a locus for dissent and a clear objective (free Salvador Allende) for opposition ideologies.
But that is the case of a political prisoner, not a felon in the sense that we have been looking at it so far. Is, say, Fred West any more iconic than Harold Shipman or, for that matter, Myra Hindley, just because he died shortly after his imprisonment, as he might have had he been sentenced to death by a court in the 50s? And if he is, what does that signify? Is this more likely to inspire people to take up sex crimes and serial killing, as Allende's martyrdom might have inspired people to take up the cause of left-wing, anti-American politics in Chile? I don't follow why this would be an argument for or against the death penalty.
Your other thread is that death is preferable to life imprisonment, at least for you. Let's assume for a moment that this *is* universalisable, and that anyone would rather die than spend their life in prison. The first, obvious statement is that there are plenty of ways to end one's life in prison with a bit of ingenuity. But let's assume that suicide is worse than both judicial execution and life imprisonment. In that case, if we are claiming that the death penalty is barbaric or inhumane, then we must accept that life imprisonment, being more unpleasant and undesirable, is *more* barbaric and inhumane. Therefore, no civilised society should dirty its hands and souls by imprisoning felons for life.
There are two possible objections to this position that I can think of offhand. One is that the death penalty is irreversible, whereas life imprisonment is reversible. The other is that execution is in fact worse than life imprisonment. Would you like to take either of these, or is there another option? |
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