[colah]

> justice requires her death.

All do respect, but WTF?

There's no question that what she did was horrible, but how is it `just' to kill someone in response? Perhaps revenge and barbaric `justice' in the tradition of lex talionis (eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth) would encourage such a response, but I can see no benefit; it won't bring the dead back to life.

In fact, it is my opinion that the only valid motivations for punishment are: - deterrence. - protection of society and the perpetrator from each other. - rehabilitation. - moral denouncement.

These ideas are not unique to me. In fact, they're quite popular in international politics, and are part of the legal codes of certain countries. For example, The Criminal Code of Canada includes:

Purpose and Principles of Sentencing

Purpose 718. The fundamental purpose of sentencing is to contribute, along with crime prevention initiatives, to respect for the law and the maintenance of a just, peaceful and safe society by imposing just sanctions that have one or more of the following objectives: (a) to denounce unlawful conduct; (b) to deter the offender and other persons from committing offences; (c) to separate offenders from society, where necessary; (d) to assist in rehabilitating offenders; (e) to provide reparations for harm done to victims or to the community; and (f) to promote a sense of responsibility in offenders, and acknowledgment of the harm done to victims and to the community.

-- http://laws.justice.gc.ca/eng/C-46/page-16.html#anchorbo-ga:...

[randallsquared]

All else being equal, capital punishment is a great deterrent: 100% effective at preventing that person from committing that crime again. Of course, things are rarely equal, and I agree with maxharris that the impossibility of correcting errors means that capital punishment should be off limits for justice systems.

More to your point, though, I think that a justice system which was ultimately based on retribution would have all the positive qualities you speak of as valid motivations. Fitting the punishment to the crime is very difficult unless you have a way to measure how bad the crime was. An eye for an eye, as a default outcome, would provide a quantitative starting point for negotiations between (living) victims and the original aggressor. Of course, this doesn't help much for the dead.

[colah]

>All else being equal, capital punishment is a great deterrent: 100% effective at preventing that person from committing that crime again.

Deterrence isn't preventing a person from repeating a crime, but ever doing it. The idea is that they won't do it to avoid the punishment -- a sort of sociopath's substitute for morality. I've yet to see any actual evidence that capital punishment is a more effective deterrent than long-term imprisonment and have heard claims (though no evidence) to the contrary (that the psychology of such large punishments leaves them effectively indistinguishable)... I've never researched it but I probably should.

As for preventing repetition, so do many other things, such as imprisonment.

>More to your point, though, I think that a justice system which was ultimately based on retribution would have all the positive qualities you speak of as valid motivations.

I'm sorry but I have to disagree.

You'll notice I said that I mentioned protecting the perpetrator from society... Killing them kind of defeats that. Also, they can't achieve rehabilitation if we kill them.

Essentially, I want a justice system based off compassion for _all_ parties. Call it naive altruism if you wish. This isn't to say we shouldn't make protecting ourselves from criminals a priority, but after that we should be trying to help them. As we do, in providing counseling, etc.

[randallsquared]

You'll notice I said that I mentioned protecting the perpetrator from society... Killing them kind of defeats that. Also, they can't achieve rehabilitation if we kill them.

You focus on the single exception I mentioned to a retribution-based system as though I had not mentioned it as an exception at all. Why is that?

[colah]

Because edge cases and extreme cases often reveal the difference between approaches/strategies/philosophies/ideologies/etc.

Our approaches lead us to different conclusions in this case, except for the fact that you look at reality and say that yours shouldn't be applied because in reality mistakes can happen. This is a perfectly valid stance, but it doesn't mean that the point shouldn't be looked at to analyse the differences in our approaches, as this is the most obvious case where they diverge.

There's also the fact that capital punishment is where this discussion began.

[randallsquared]

it doesn't mean that the point shouldn't be looked at to analyse the differences in our approaches, as this is the most obvious case where they diverge.

Wow, I strongly disagree. Our approaches diverge on virtually every case, as far as I can tell. My approach would be to apply the exact damage to the aggressor that they applied to the victim, except where the victim forgives all or part (for monetary "damages" or some other consideration or reason). If a mistake is made, the same procedure can be used to rectify it. This does mean that completely irrevocable damage (that is, death) can't be applied while keeping the property that mistakes can be fixed or paid for. Murder is already an exceptional situation, not like other crimes of violence, due to its finality.

As far as I can tell, your approach (along with the vast majority of existing legal systems today) requires sentencing or damages to be decided individually by a third party, rather than by the parties already involved, which seems inelegant.

There's also the fact that capital punishment is where this discussion began.

Oh. Well, there is something to be said for staying on topic, I suppose. :)

[colah]

>Wow, I strongly disagree. Our approaches diverge on virtually every case, as far as I can tell.

That was a poor wording on my part. Make that where they diverge most strongly.

>My approach would be to apply the exact damage to the aggressor that they applied to the victim, except where the victim forgives all or part (for monetary "damages" or some other consideration or reason).

I'm going to assume your talking about assault. If I'm wrong, sorry. In any case, we can't just let them settle it with a fee to cover damages. The aggressor demonstrated themselves a threat to the Public. Depending on the circumstances, the aggressor will need to spend some time in jail, with a psychologist, doing community service, reporting to a probation officer, et cetra, or most likely a combination of the above, for the protection of society.

If there was material damage in addition to that, it is not a criminal matter and can be settled in the way you described.

>As far as I can tell, your approach (along with the vast majority of existing legal systems today) requires sentencing or damages to be decided individually by a third party, rather than by the parties already involved, which seems inelegant.

As the previous example illustrates, this is only true for criminal matters.

[nostrademons]

Many civilizations have had justice systems that worked exactly like that. "An eye for an eye."

In practice, it doesn't seem to work very well. There's a reason why most legal systems today rely on a third party to enforce justice. Civilizations that don't tend to devolve into a cycle of retributive violence, eg. medieval blood feuds in Italy, duels in the Wild West, and lynchings in the Reconstruction South.

I'm not entirely sure, but I suspect it's because every action you take not only has its material effects, but it's also taken as a statement of how you want the world to be. So if you steal something, you not only have taken the object, but you've declared that you want to live in a world without property rights. If you rape somebody, you haven't only traumatized her, but you've declare that you want to live in a world where sex can be used as a weapon. If you kill somebody, you haven't only taken their life, but you've declared that you want to live in a world where lives can be taken by conscious action.

If someone then does the same thing back at you, they don't just cancel out. Instead, both parties have declared that they want to live in the world where that crime is accepted behavior.

[maxharris]

From John Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged:

"Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification — that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero — that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement — that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence."

That's the moral case; note what I said in the parent comment about the practicality of capital punishment.

[colah]

> <cut for brevity>

>That's the moral case; note what I said in the parent comment about the practicality of capital punishment.

All I can say is that I'm ideologically opposed to this. Most people who know me in person describe me as naive and it's probably true. But I'm not able to look at people that way, and quite frankly I don't want to.