(June 18, 2015 at 8:14 pm)Dystopia Wrote:(June 18, 2015 at 8:05 pm)Saxmoof Wrote: There are cases where I think you could argue that the death penalty would be moral, take Anders Breivik for example - there's no redeeming that guy, we absolutely know that he's guilty, he's un-repentant. The only option we have with someone like that is to keep them in a cell for the rest of their life with no hope of release or execute them. As for the argument that the death penalty make us all murderers, lowers us to being a barbaric society and so on, again using Breivik as an example there are some people who I think it reflects badly upon us if we let them live - there aren't many of these people, don't get me wrong
I voted against though, you can't have it across the board for certain crimes mainly because we don't have perfect information, even if we did I would only reserve it for the "monsters"
Breivik won't live long after he leaves jail
But seriously - I don't know if he was a psychopath, I think he was just deeply committed to his ideology and believed to be doing the right thing - This is the behaviour of any fundamentalist, and sometimes it can be changed if we treat the person on time... There are some ex-radical muslims now criticizing terrorism because they left the extreme faction they used to belong to. It's hard, but not impossible.
True, I think he could theoretically be un-brainwashed but could you still forgive him for what he did?
Let me deploy the nuclear option here, would you execute Hitler? He was deeply committed to his ideology aswell and possibly not pathologically driven to kill similar to Breivik
My point is that I think everyone has a subjective line in the sand with regards to how many people someone can kill and still be allowed to live, Breivik crosses it for me.
“The larger the group, the more toxic, the more of your beauty as an individual you have to surrender for the sake of group thought. And when you suspend your individual beauty you also give up a lot of your humanity. You will do things in the name of a group that you would never do on your own. Injuring, hurting, killing, drinking are all part of it, because you've lost your identity, because you now owe your allegiance to this thing that's bigger than you are and that controls you.” - George Carlin