Moral Issues

Arising from Capital

Punishment

Does anyone have the right to kill?

• This is a political and ethical argument.

• It's based on the political principle that a state should fulfil its obligations in the least invasive, harmful and restrictive way possible.

Evaluate it…

Should everyone have the right to life?

• Human life is valuable. • Everyone has an inalienable human right

to life, even those who commit murder; sentencing a person to death and executing them violates that right.

OR• Can a person, by their actions, forfeit

human rights, and that murderers forfeit their right to life.

• “…it may be justifiable to kill a sinner just as it is to kill a beast …” Thomas Aquinas

Evaluate it…

Should we forgive?

We cannot teach that killing is wrong by killing.

U.S. Catholic Conference

To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, it is not justice.

Attributed to Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Evaluate it…

Do we have the right to revenge?

• What if everyone took revenge for every little thing?

• Revenge is an emotion – Are we happy with the Government acting emotionally?

Evaluate it…

What should the purpose of punishment be in a modern

society?

• Retributions is revenge• Deterrence – uses people as a

scapegoat• Protection – what about

protection from brutalisation?• Reform?????

• Maybe the criminal need protection from themselves…

Evaluate it…

What of execution of innocents?

• Mistakes are made

The death penalty legitimizes an irreversible act of violence by the state and will inevitably claim innocent victims. As long as human justice remains fallible, the risk of executing the innocent can never be eliminated

Amnesty International

• In the USA, 116 people sentenced to death have been found innocent since 1973 and released from death row. The average time on death row before these exonerations was 9 years.

Evaluate it…

Is the death penalty humane?

• Some argue that all ways of executing people cause so much suffering to the condemned person that they amount to torture and are wrong.

• Many methods of execution are quite obviously likely to cause enormous suffering,

Evaluate it…