Moral justification for the execution of criminals of war?

[bennyboy]

Lazy commitment challenge.  A person might have a complicated relationship with their normative beliefs if gravely put on the spot.  We're all compromised moral agents, and I think we can allow for a person to have some pretty shitty feelings that they know they shouldn't act on.  The mere existence of cultures communities, and societies would make it so even if it were not so for any other reason.  We've all been there, eh?  

Sometimes we do act on them, and sometimes we don't.  The social contract describes what a group of people will refuse to do even if they personally want to do it, just as it describes what they must do even when they don't.  To the extent that a person may want revenge in the case of a dead child (ukranian soldier or anyone else, really) they're in a challenging situation.  It's considered by many societies character or reputation building to overcome these sorts of challenges; an acknowledgment of difficulty of the content.  Also, an acknowledgement of the problem itself insomuch as a state might pursue the death penalty.  The emotional incentivization of injustice facilitated by some of our legal systems is what puts these people in these challenging situations.  Not the specific offender.  That asshole put them in the unenviable position of grief, processing a deep loss.  But the state that processes the execution has put them in the position of being accessory to murder, as well, and at a time when we understand ourselves to be severely compromised by nature and circumstance.  

Let's just agree that we're not making the best decisions in that state, and so, that we might do something terrible in that state is not indicative of it being good decision making.  It doesn't certify those courses of action as the ones we ought to take.  It does not make them the just courses of action.

Well, that's part of it, isn't it?  You live in a country where strange kids are bullied, and where strange kids' parents (or anyone they meet online) serve as a source of deadly firepower.  To live in a state like that, and be against execution on the basis that it is too savage-- that's a HIGHLY incoherent position.  We're talking about a country where people have a constitutional (re: God-given) right to own a tool that has the purpose of quickly punching holes through homo sapiens, organisms that usually can't survive having holes punched through them.  Most common quote after a GUN-BASED MASS KILLING: "Derrrrp.  If only we had more guns!"

And then in an explicit attempt to assassinate leaders of hostile nations / organizations, America will send drones into weddings or public spaces.  Drones designed to blow up brown people indiscriminately.  Little arms and legs, bits of dresses and sandals, blown maybe a hundred yards into the sky, because despite an actual fatality ratio of maybe 100:1, it is impoverished brown people who are the terrorists, not the ones who keep bombing them?

Is this not REALLY what the abhorrence of the death penalty is all about?  A kind of moral shell-game designed to hide from the American psychology the fact that the American state is one of the most brutal and ruthless in all of human history, and that Americans are perfectly fine with that?

And then pretend that human life is sacrosanct.

Should we say "These positions seem incompatible?" Or just-- 'Murica be trollin', bruh!