Moral justification for the execution of criminals of war?

[bennyboy]

"You. . . shouldn't. . . kill (people)," you mean.  Again, we've established that you not only kill animals, but relish the act of doing it for fun.  So harm and suffering in and of themselves are not the objection-- there's something special about people, ALL people, even the greatest pedophiliac murderer, that is sacrosanct to you.  Why would that be?  I'm saying that human life is NOT intrinsically valuable, and that to claim it is is either an emotional opiinion or a religious one-- in either case, irrational.  All the talk about morality of execution-as-murder takes human exceptionalism as axiomatic-- but I do not accept that axiom.

If a society organizes itself around the normative belief that we shouldn't kill people, which isn't human exceptionalism..just a normative declaration....it would be a breach of that normative declaration to kill people.  A society need not believe in or posit human exceptionalism to reject killing people, even killers. 

I wonder, though....do you think that a society formed around the belief that we shouldn't kill people and animals, a more inclusive taboo, would be more or less conducive to capital punishment than one that did believe in human exceptionalism?

You think that people should never be killed, but that animals may be killed for the fun of it. A killing is a killing, harm is harm, pain is pain. So yes, it's pretty apparent that if even very bad people cannot be killed, there's a blanket over the one species that is based on membership rather than on merit-- clearly, exceptionalism.

The problem is that "normative beliefs" can include things like "Niggers is savages and ain't Christian, and as their souls (if they even have souls) is anyway condemned by the Lord, the white man may do with them as he wishes."  You can have enforced compliance for those beliefs, too, based on the sincere belief of the population that what they WANT is really good, filled in with "rational" arguments once the rule is already agreed upon. Preachers, politicians, children and housewives will parrot each other in an idea so common that it is "known" to be true.

Spackle works wonders.