What criteria would allow for someone to "deserve" death? Is it as a form of revenge, like most "deserved" punishments?
Camus believes that state sanctioned revenge just breeds more violence. The death penalty is not a deterrent, it is something that offends the senses, and it is ultimately served on the platter as a criminal getting their just punishment in revenge.
Either such a revenge is public, to declare that justice has occured, or it does not happen at all. What revenge is a secret and supressed lethal injection? By all accounts, revenge should be public and furious, it should be there for the victims to see.
>Indeed, one must kill publicly or confess that one does. not feel authorized to kill. If society justifies the death penalty by the necessity of the example, it must justify itself by making the publicity necessary (Camus).
Thus, revenge is not a sufficient reason for capital punishment due to the abhorence we have to see death in public. Camus adds that such public exetions only harden the ones who need to be softened and offend the soft. He uses the example of pickpockets. A large majority of pickpockets who were sentenced had viewed the execution of a pickpocket before. Revenge only perpetuates violence.
Camus doesn't think that a muderer _doesn't_ deserve a punishment, but rather that a murder in any case cannot be accepted.
Camus is just wrong. And the word "murder" is doing a lot of work in hiding the deception. It hides the artificial difference between cases where you cause the death of someone. Murder is used, almost by definition, to classify the _unjustified_ causing of death. But there are many cases where causing of death is justified, and we all agree; for instance you are fine to cause the death of someone who is actively trying to kill you. And it is a very logical progression from there, to accept the causing of death in many other cases. For example, you shouldn't have to wait for an attacker to pull the trigger of a lethal weapon before defending yourself, you should be free to ANTICIPATE his action and cause his death preemptively. And you can use this exact same line of reasoning to show that there are a great many cases where causing death is justified. There are destructive and evil people on the planet, and nobody will miss them when they are gone. The same way its good to cull deer, if the population of deer gets out of control... it's just better overall for the environment.
I wonder if you would feel different after witnessing an execution (by guillotine)? I believe Camus is arguing that you would, giving his father as example of someone who similarly changed his mind.
I have always actively avoided all the videos online of beheadings or other types of death, because i'm squeamish and don't want such images in my head. However, while not in person, I did actually witness a guillotine execution video. Admittedly it was filmed at a few hundred feet away, so it lacked any gore or closeups of the corpse. It was a shocking process - how quickly it happened (30 seconds from the appearance of the condemned to their demise). But it wasn't too hard to watch, and hasn't haunted me.
Anyway, there are a great many videos online of murders and other death scenes, and famously there were VHS tapes available pre-internet called "faces of death" showing such events. A great many people actively seek out and watch such things, seemingly with no negative reaction to them. So there are a lot of people who would presumably be even less affected by a guillotine execution than I was.
I mean, hangings and torture used to be done publicly and people would gather to watch in large crowds, even bringing the whole family. There are still people who travel to witness death-row executions for no apparent reason than their own pleasure. This kind of morbid obsession with violence and trivialization of it as a spectacle has become much less common as people have become more civilized with time, but I doubt it will ever fully disappear.
Camus also writes that these morbid events essentially harden the people who need to be softened, trivializing violence and thus perpetuating it. He uses the example of pickpockets, where a large majority of pickpockets convicted had atteneded an execution of another pickpocjet, sometimes stealing from others while the execution was ongoing.
>From A to Z I'd be thinking about the persons you don't care about: the victims.
And what exactly does the extra torture for the victim you care about? Is she better after the arm breaking or after the ball cutting?
I don't know any indicator that countries with death penalty have less victims or less crimes or less vicious crimes, or that added torture improves anything at all for past and future victims.
No, you are caring about you: you feel advocating for extra torture puts you in a better moral possition than people that defends a painless death penalty, or even worse, "only" life imprissoning, or those savages that would say "a mere" 20-25 years in jail.
There has been enough deaths of people that were wrongly judged, to add torture to the mix.
This may sound harsh, but I believe that anyone who fantasizes about cruelly murdering anyone has something wrong with them. Have you seen a death, saw someone dying in all the glory of their guts splayed around you? If that is something you desire to see, perhaps this death drive of yours requires some introspective.
> Your comment is below the intellectual and interpersonal standard that makes HN a good place to be.
You should install an extension and tag certain accounts. You'll notice it's the same people doing it for years (and also constant 2 months old accounts, but that's a different issue).
You stop the philosophical navel gazing and use your best judgment. If someone has their hands wrapped around YOUR throat and is actively trying to kill you, you would defend yourself to the death if necessary. And you would clearly claim that you had objective proof that the attacker deserved death. You just apply the same concept, to less immediate forms of attack.
I don’t find this a convincing argument. This works as an argument for permitting lethal force to end a life-threatening attack. But once someone is already detained there’s no way that killing them meaningfully increases public protection over just keeping them locked up.
Yes, it does. are you familiar with the rules for perjury? Once someone lies under oath, everything they say gets thrown out. The logic being that others cannot know what words can be trusted; you are done as a witness.
For some crimes, everything they are should be thrown out, because society should not be burdened with the trust that these people will not commit another similar crime. Removing them from society protects the very fabric of our society: our trust in others.
Child rapists, serial killers… these fuckers need to die, or society learns that we catch and release such predators back into the world. Where they become someone’s neighbors. Are you willing to let them move into next door to you? You think keeping them alive protects society?
That's just your opinion. The point of my comment is to show there are cases where even you agree causing the death of someone is "deserved". Once we both agree there are deserving cases, the rest is just a disagreement about where to draw the line. You have your preference, I have mine.
No, we don’t agree it’s “deserved” in any cases. I agree in the self defense case it’s justifiable based on near certainty about the outcome if you don’t respond with lethal force. That has nothing to do with “deserved”, which is always subjective unless we discover some universal moral code we’re all bound to abide by. So I think where we agree is that it’s all opinion.
What is under discussion is the taking of a life. You think it's fine to take a life in certain circumstances, but object in others. Fine. But you have no more a hold on the truth (moral or otherwise) than someone who draws the line somewhere else. So your objection comes down to a complaint about my use of the word "deserve". Fine, use a different word. It doesn't change in any useful real-world way the point, instead it's just typical philosophical navel gazing. The fact is we all agree there are times we should indeed take a life, it's a category that exists, even for your worldview.
Yeah, no we can still want justice and not want to be horrified by the act of execution for the rest of our lives.
Or, I don't know, perhaps we can crush parts of their body one at a time. Or maybe set fire to their limbs one at a time. I mean, why not?
(And never mind that if The State could, even once, execute someone who is innocent, it renders capital punishment instantly null and void in my mind.)
And what's your solution for this gross asymmetry of wealth? "Engineers" working 4 hours a week from resorts for enormous salaries? PE and VC run rampant, politicians bought and paid for, lobbying for corporate interests... I don't see why they should be allowed to keep accumulating more power and wealth..
Clearly not capital punishment? A lack of capital punishment ≠ lack of punishment. Boycotts, protests, new supply chains, political pressure, etc? The bourgeoisie still need the proletariat, thus, the proletariat can influence the bourgeoisie through solidarity. Commentator above said nothing about not punishing the bourgeoisie anyways.
This sounds like something I might have written at 15. Only fools who have never known the horrors of war or indiscriminate violence would wish for the world you’re fantasizing about.
> I saw a question once on Quora asking why the poor don’t rip the wealthy out of their houses and the top reply was “Nazi!” with hundreds of upvotes.
This seems odd because it usually goes the other way: people complaining about the rich typically tar them as the "Nazis". For people against destroying the rich, the usual epithet for those who want to do so would be "commies"...
There's a summary of this essay on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflections_on_the_Guillotine
This is a 1957 essay by Algerian-French philosopher Albert Camus.
> it is obviously no less repulsive than the crime,
Hard disagree. There are people who deserve death, and it is a good thing when it happens. It's just really dangerous to give the state such a power.
What criteria would allow for someone to "deserve" death? Is it as a form of revenge, like most "deserved" punishments?
Camus believes that state sanctioned revenge just breeds more violence. The death penalty is not a deterrent, it is something that offends the senses, and it is ultimately served on the platter as a criminal getting their just punishment in revenge.
Either such a revenge is public, to declare that justice has occured, or it does not happen at all. What revenge is a secret and supressed lethal injection? By all accounts, revenge should be public and furious, it should be there for the victims to see.
>Indeed, one must kill publicly or confess that one does. not feel authorized to kill. If society justifies the death penalty by the necessity of the example, it must justify itself by making the publicity necessary (Camus).
Thus, revenge is not a sufficient reason for capital punishment due to the abhorence we have to see death in public. Camus adds that such public exetions only harden the ones who need to be softened and offend the soft. He uses the example of pickpockets. A large majority of pickpockets who were sentenced had viewed the execution of a pickpocket before. Revenge only perpetuates violence.
Camus doesn't think that a muderer _doesn't_ deserve a punishment, but rather that a murder in any case cannot be accepted.
Camus is just wrong. And the word "murder" is doing a lot of work in hiding the deception. It hides the artificial difference between cases where you cause the death of someone. Murder is used, almost by definition, to classify the _unjustified_ causing of death. But there are many cases where causing of death is justified, and we all agree; for instance you are fine to cause the death of someone who is actively trying to kill you. And it is a very logical progression from there, to accept the causing of death in many other cases. For example, you shouldn't have to wait for an attacker to pull the trigger of a lethal weapon before defending yourself, you should be free to ANTICIPATE his action and cause his death preemptively. And you can use this exact same line of reasoning to show that there are a great many cases where causing death is justified. There are destructive and evil people on the planet, and nobody will miss them when they are gone. The same way its good to cull deer, if the population of deer gets out of control... it's just better overall for the environment.
> What criteria would allow for someone to "deserve" death?
As a framework - death penalty should be legalized when a majority members of the society support that as a punishment.
When applying that framework - it should be applied for the cases beyond any reasonable doubt.
Once you agree on these principles, all other details can be easily negotiated.
I wonder if you would feel different after witnessing an execution (by guillotine)? I believe Camus is arguing that you would, giving his father as example of someone who similarly changed his mind.
I have always actively avoided all the videos online of beheadings or other types of death, because i'm squeamish and don't want such images in my head. However, while not in person, I did actually witness a guillotine execution video. Admittedly it was filmed at a few hundred feet away, so it lacked any gore or closeups of the corpse. It was a shocking process - how quickly it happened (30 seconds from the appearance of the condemned to their demise). But it wasn't too hard to watch, and hasn't haunted me.
Anyway, there are a great many videos online of murders and other death scenes, and famously there were VHS tapes available pre-internet called "faces of death" showing such events. A great many people actively seek out and watch such things, seemingly with no negative reaction to them. So there are a lot of people who would presumably be even less affected by a guillotine execution than I was.
I mean, hangings and torture used to be done publicly and people would gather to watch in large crowds, even bringing the whole family. There are still people who travel to witness death-row executions for no apparent reason than their own pleasure. This kind of morbid obsession with violence and trivialization of it as a spectacle has become much less common as people have become more civilized with time, but I doubt it will ever fully disappear.
Camus also writes that these morbid events essentially harden the people who need to be softened, trivializing violence and thus perpetuating it. He uses the example of pickpockets, where a large majority of pickpockets convicted had atteneded an execution of another pickpocjet, sometimes stealing from others while the execution was ongoing.
This just clarifies who the enemy is. I don't see a problem.
Who is the enemy?
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A sheltered childhood would lead you to change your mind about anything if you saw someone spill a glass of milk. Emotions. Feelings.
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>From A to Z I'd be thinking about the persons you don't care about: the victims.
And what exactly does the extra torture for the victim you care about? Is she better after the arm breaking or after the ball cutting?
I don't know any indicator that countries with death penalty have less victims or less crimes or less vicious crimes, or that added torture improves anything at all for past and future victims.
No, you are caring about you: you feel advocating for extra torture puts you in a better moral possition than people that defends a painless death penalty, or even worse, "only" life imprissoning, or those savages that would say "a mere" 20-25 years in jail.
There has been enough deaths of people that were wrongly judged, to add torture to the mix.
This may sound harsh, but I believe that anyone who fantasizes about cruelly murdering anyone has something wrong with them. Have you seen a death, saw someone dying in all the glory of their guts splayed around you? If that is something you desire to see, perhaps this death drive of yours requires some introspective.
“…the person you don’t care about…”
Your comment is below the intellectual and interpersonal standard that makes HN a good place to be.
I don’t doubt your sincerity and I can abide your opinion, but you should be restrained in ascribing such points of view to others.
> Your comment is below the intellectual and interpersonal standard that makes HN a good place to be.
You should install an extension and tag certain accounts. You'll notice it's the same people doing it for years (and also constant 2 months old accounts, but that's a different issue).
> They used to do that in the middle-age.
Not casually and not for "minor crimes" (by the standards of the time) like the killing of a child.
The overly performative hung, drawn, and quartering variations were reserved for high crimes of treason, regicide, etc.
Sound to me like you're thinking about a violent fantasy toward the offender rather than the victims tbh
How do you define “deserve” in any kind of objective way?
You stop the philosophical navel gazing and use your best judgment. If someone has their hands wrapped around YOUR throat and is actively trying to kill you, you would defend yourself to the death if necessary. And you would clearly claim that you had objective proof that the attacker deserved death. You just apply the same concept, to less immediate forms of attack.
I don’t find this a convincing argument. This works as an argument for permitting lethal force to end a life-threatening attack. But once someone is already detained there’s no way that killing them meaningfully increases public protection over just keeping them locked up.
Yes, it does. are you familiar with the rules for perjury? Once someone lies under oath, everything they say gets thrown out. The logic being that others cannot know what words can be trusted; you are done as a witness.
For some crimes, everything they are should be thrown out, because society should not be burdened with the trust that these people will not commit another similar crime. Removing them from society protects the very fabric of our society: our trust in others.
Child rapists, serial killers… these fuckers need to die, or society learns that we catch and release such predators back into the world. Where they become someone’s neighbors. Are you willing to let them move into next door to you? You think keeping them alive protects society?
That's just your opinion. The point of my comment is to show there are cases where even you agree causing the death of someone is "deserved". Once we both agree there are deserving cases, the rest is just a disagreement about where to draw the line. You have your preference, I have mine.
No, we don’t agree it’s “deserved” in any cases. I agree in the self defense case it’s justifiable based on near certainty about the outcome if you don’t respond with lethal force. That has nothing to do with “deserved”, which is always subjective unless we discover some universal moral code we’re all bound to abide by. So I think where we agree is that it’s all opinion.
What is under discussion is the taking of a life. You think it's fine to take a life in certain circumstances, but object in others. Fine. But you have no more a hold on the truth (moral or otherwise) than someone who draws the line somewhere else. So your objection comes down to a complaint about my use of the word "deserve". Fine, use a different word. It doesn't change in any useful real-world way the point, instead it's just typical philosophical navel gazing. The fact is we all agree there are times we should indeed take a life, it's a category that exists, even for your worldview.
Exactly, it’s about the choice of word but I don’t think it’s meaningless semantics.
Camus wrote interesting fictions
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"Anyway, yeah, your dad had a weak stomach…"
Yeah, no we can still want justice and not want to be horrified by the act of execution for the rest of our lives.
Or, I don't know, perhaps we can crush parts of their body one at a time. Or maybe set fire to their limbs one at a time. I mean, why not?
(And never mind that if The State could, even once, execute someone who is innocent, it renders capital punishment instantly null and void in my mind.)
And what's your solution for this gross asymmetry of wealth? "Engineers" working 4 hours a week from resorts for enormous salaries? PE and VC run rampant, politicians bought and paid for, lobbying for corporate interests... I don't see why they should be allowed to keep accumulating more power and wealth..
Clearly not capital punishment? A lack of capital punishment ≠ lack of punishment. Boycotts, protests, new supply chains, political pressure, etc? The bourgeoisie still need the proletariat, thus, the proletariat can influence the bourgeoisie through solidarity. Commentator above said nothing about not punishing the bourgeoisie anyways.
This sounds like something I might have written at 15. Only fools who have never known the horrors of war or indiscriminate violence would wish for the world you’re fantasizing about.
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lol, truly hilarious, you’re a software engineer cosplaying as a bloodthirsty class warrior on HN.
But sure, you’ve seen some shit and you’ll make those evil rich people pay for all your horrible suffering.
That’s enough keyboard warriors for one day for me, going to bed. Hope you find some peace.
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> I saw a question once on Quora asking why the poor don’t rip the wealthy out of their houses and the top reply was “Nazi!” with hundreds of upvotes.
This seems odd because it usually goes the other way: people complaining about the rich typically tar them as the "Nazis". For people against destroying the rich, the usual epithet for those who want to do so would be "commies"...
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