Moral justification for the execution of criminals of war?

[The Architect Of Fate]

America: SHOCK AND AWE.  WE WILL HUNT YOU DOWN.  YOU ARE WITH US OR AGAINST US.

If you engineer a terrorist attack that kills thousands of civilians and essentially say you're going to wipe the US and its allies off the map then yes they will hunt you down because you are clearly a threat......

Also America: bombs weddings with drones, killing thousands of innocents

It wasn't thousands and the Taliban do that too....
https://www.voanews.com/a/south-central-...74020.html

America has killed innocent brown people at a ratio of maybe 100:1 and still convinces its citizens that they're the good guys.

Gonna need a citation for that claim ....

Also America: "It's not terrorism if you can't see them when you do it."

Tell me were the bombing runs over Germany during ww2 terrorism?

[Macoleco]

While I am essentially against the death penalty in all it's forms...to me, when it comes to the Taliban...we have to cut the heads off the snakes.  It's not something that can be done at once, it's going to take time.  I don't have the issue with it that I do with the death penalty in general.

The list of people that I think the death penalty is the right thing for is quite limited.  But the heads of the Taliban are on that list.

The problem with this claim is that you are being selective. You are deciding who lives and who dies according to your morals. What if someone else says taliban should live? What if someone says you should die for certain action?

A general rule needs to be established. Otherwise we are gods of death and justice.

[arewethereyet]

While I am essentially against the death penalty in all it's forms...to me, when it comes to the Taliban...we have to cut the heads off the snakes.  It's not something that can be done at once, it's going to take time.  I don't have the issue with it that I do with the death penalty in general.

The list of people that I think the death penalty is the right thing for is quite limited.  But the heads of the Taliban are on that list.

The problem with this claim is that you are being selective. You are deciding who lives and who dies according to your morals. What if someone else says taliban should live? What if someone says you should die for certain action?

A general rule needs to be established. Otherwise we are gods of death and justice.

Of course it's selective.  Otherwise I would just say, "Kill them all".

Child rapists - proved beyond a shadow of a doubt.  They make the list for me.

YMMV

[Jehanne]

The problem with this claim is that you are being selective. You are deciding who lives and who dies according to your morals. What if someone else says taliban should live? What if someone says you should die for certain action?

A general rule needs to be established. Otherwise we are gods of death and justice.

Of course it's selective.  Otherwise I would just say, "Kill them all".

Child rapists - proved beyond a shadow of a doubt.  They make the list for me.

YMMV

Since the first execution at Jamestown of Captain George Kendall in 1608 (or thereabouts), there have been less than 20,000 executions in the United States. I will let others do the math here.

[Thumpalumpacus]

I don't like the death penalty because it's far too easy on the recipient. Let 'em spend the rest of their days wondering why they're behind bars. And if they're unrepentant, oh well. They get the misery of lifetime confinement.

The problem with justice is that it lessons the intensity of our efforts to prevent.  It gives the illusion that there can be balance in the world, and that we are the bringers of balance, through punishment.

I recommend treating crime prevention as a procedural issue, not a justice issue.  A dead man is much cheaper, and has an infinitely lower chance of recommitting his crimes.  Making tax payers support this guy for $50k / year or whatever in order to torture him psychologically when he can just be removed-- I'd rather have improved health care and a few less pot holes.

On the other hand, society is putting itself in the position of saying "because you broke our laws against killing someone, we're going to kill you."

There's also the whole you got the wrong guy, buddy angle. Pretty hard to undo an execution of an innocent person.

And since we're concerned about the economics and not the morality, how much does it cost to keep a prisoner on Death Row while the appeals wend their way through the system?

So yeah, the economic argument fails for several reasons, two of which it is incapable of addressing at all.

[Thumpalumpacus]

But if you're talking about the human narrative-- growth, discovery, pleasure, ambition, hope, and so on-- I'd say that a life sentence is pretty much the end of a meaningful human existence.  It is sufficiently horrible that it should automatically trigger the same compensations and considerations of execution-- extensive appeals, discovery of new evidence, and so on.

The problem you're clearly avoiding by this point is that killing someone is irrevocable.

Granted, you cannot give someone back 14 years of incarceration after discovering them innocent. But you certainly can compensate them financially and release them from imprisonment.

Once you've killed someone, you cannot undo your mistake.

You're right that a life sentence is serious, but comparing it to a death sentence without addressing this problem is facile, at best.

To sum up your post, "Might makes right."

Not really.  If you have might,  you don't even NEED to be right.  You might pretend to be in the right, though, just for the PR of it.

Ask the thousands of brown people, many of them women and children, that have been bombed by American drones in the past decades, under administrations of both parties.  You don't see Obama crying over little 6-year old Ahmed, the goat-herder's son.

This has the reek of whataboutism.

[The Architect Of Fate]

The Death Penalty 

- Has never been an effective deterrent against crime.

-Has no moral basis outside of emotional wraith.

-Is not economical as it costs more overall.

-Is a solution to reoffense in the same way as taking a flamethrower to your lawn is a solution to dandelions.

There is a reason most Western nations have stopped doing it, particularly nations with low crime rates.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Here's a little something for light reading.

https://innocenceproject.org/the-innocen...h-penalty/

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issu...y-innocent

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/innocence

[bennyboy]

The problem you're clearly avoiding by this point is that killing someone is irrevocable.

Granted, you cannot give someone back 14 years of incarceration after discovering them innocent. But you certainly can compensate them financially and release them from imprisonment.

Once you've killed someone, you cannot undo your mistake.

You're right that a life sentence is serious, but comparing it to a death sentence without addressing this problem is facile, at best.

There are lots of mistakes that we can't undo, and many of them involve death. Doctors fuck up on a shockingly regular basis, and people die-- but they say, "I did the best with the information I had," and for the most part we take that at face value. My own friend was turned away from a hospital WHILE HAVING a heart attack, and he exists no more. I see fuckers driving with their phones out all the time-- if one of them kills my kid crossing the street, they'll get maybe aggravated manslaughter, do a few years, and Bob's-yer-uncle. "I'm sorry," they'll say, "I made a mistake."

We allow behaviors all the time that jeopardize the lives of good, honest, innocent civilians, many THOUSANDS of them per year. But if the judicial system ever makes a mistake involving a life, suddenly it's the end of all that's good and decent in America. What a strange asymmetry in standards that is.

And consider the OP-- we're talking about war criminals here. At best, you'll have killed an "innocent" combatant from an enemy nation. That's bad, but not as bad as bombing a wedding full of women and children, proudly proclaiming in breaking news that "We gottem!" So how much, REALLY, do we value life in this country anyway? Not too much, apparently, unless it's a convicted violent felon crying that HIS rights are being ignored.

[Angrboda]

Does that salad come with croutons?