this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
451 points (94.1% liked)
Political Memes
2407 readers
749 users here now
Non political memes: !memes@sopuli.xyz
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I appreciate their sentiment but no govt should be allowed to murder its citizens
It should be limited to crimes committed while in public service.
Counter point - many of greatest society failures were due to insufficient isolation of bad actors. Hitler failed his first coup attempt and came back after 5 years in prison - very few people remember this.
So some form of banishment is required and obviously death is the easiest, full-proof option so this is not a black/white issue as you make it out to be.
The headline is less sever that it looks at a glance.
That said, it's the age-old is/ought problem of governance. Would love to see China abolish the death penalty. But I'm glad to see someone complicit in social murder through the powers of the state is not held to a lower standard than a peer who committed grievous harm to his neighbors through more direct methods.
Lets say a real person, who is doing very well in a job that contributes to society, can take home 150k a year. And lets say they work from 18 to 65, that's about a $7M career over 50-ish years.
The crook in OPs post stole more than 440 lifetimes of wealth. Even if he were to be put to work paying off that debt in the highest paying position which productively aids society (no lawyering, no managing, no marketing, no internet fame bs) it wold take him over 440 LIFETIMES to pay it off.
You can sentence him to 18,000 years of prison but he will never receive even 0.5% of that punishment.
So i take it its a no for rehab over punishment?
A thief can be rehabilitated, a murderer can be rehabilitated, those people hurt others by the ones and tens and maybe even hundreds. A billionaire commits crimes on a scale that rivals war.
The story in OPs post is surprisingly accurate and the man did have 40B USD from bribes and other illegal business. Give then population (3M) and average income (17K USD) of Haikou he stole the equivalent of more than a year's wages from all 3 million residence. There is no way he was ignorant of the scale of his crime and there is no way to ever make him feel the 3 million working years of value that he stole from the people.
There is no rehabilitation there, punishment as a deterrent to other industrial scale criminals is all that can happen.
The crime does not matter. The reason the death penalty should be abolished everywhere is to spare the innocent a wrongful execution. It can never be 100% accurate 100% of the time so it should not be allowed at all.
The guilty can rot in prison. The innocent should never be executed.
Even beyond the fact that they may execute the innocent it's still wrong. Let's say a world exists where the government has a 100% accuracy rate. The issue is that by giving them the right to execute their own citizens and the power to make laws it then allows them the ability to create laws designed to kill specific people.
This is fallacious statement - nothing is ever 100% accurate 100% of the time, that's impossible.
This is called absolute inaction in ethics - if you say that you can't take action unless there's utter most certainty and there's nothing in the universe that is utter most certain -> you can't take any actions. You're perpetually stuck in indecision.
So it's perfectly possible to reach certainty where someone is practically 100% guilty. Would you say that the killing of Musolini was unjustified? Should he be serving a life sentence instead and we ought to risk revival of nazis just for sake of not breaking this dichotomy? Yeah he's 99.99999% guilty but we can't be 100% sure.
EXACTLY. So while we need a system to punish and reform criminals we do not need to execute. Thats just not necessary and we can absolutely operate without it. We can ensure that we are not executing innocent people by not executing anyone.
It is not absolute inaction. It is sparing the innocent because the govt cannot be trusted.
I generally agree but there are costs to not executing someone clearly guilty as well and it's about measuring these costs. For a general murderer - sure the costs of keeping them banished forever are quite low but for someone like Musolini or this mayor? There are real costs of keeping them alive in banishment primarily the risk of them coming back or leaking influence back into the real world so imo death sentence here could be justified.
Though in practice I agree that it's safer to not give government this power as overall risk of abuse is too high but ethically it's completely justifiable to kill someone who's incredibly dangerous even if 100% certainty is not possible.
I dont care about costs. This is about preventing wrongful executions. I cannot accept the arguement that say "well, its expensive to prevent the state from accidentally executing the wrong person" Too bad, thats the cost of justice. Prison is a punishment for the guilty, no one should be murdered by the state.
I did not mean monetary costs but societal costs as well. Having a dangerous person in banishment still leaking danger to society costs more lives than that of one person.
Let's say there's a cartel boss and sure you lock them up but they can still cause enough instability to start a cartel war killing thousands of innocents - wouldn't killing them (legally) be better for society as it would save thousands of lives? I mean we can probably be quite certain they're the cartel boss, not 100% but as close as practically possible right?
Why draw the line at execution?
Seems like that same logic could be applied to imprisonment, or any punishment in general. "It can never be 100% accurate, so prison should not be allowed at all".
Under your proposed system, innocent people willl rot in prison for life.
You can't bring somebody back to life after killing them. If it turns out they were innocent after all, there's no releasing or recompensating a corpse.
Agreed that some innocent people will be set free, but again this is not 100% perfect, so it is certain that innocent people will rot in prison until they die.
Why draw the moral line at executing innocent people, but not at imprisoning innocent people for life ?
Your argument is flawed, and they calmly described exactly how for you, but you doubled down? Duuude. 🙄
So youre saying being wrongly imprisoned is just as bad as being murdered? No, I dont agree with that
No, that's not my argument at all. I agree with the utilitarian argument that imprisonment is better than the death penalty.
What I'm saying is that every moral argument against the death penalty can also be applied to life imprisonment. If you justify your anti-death penalty stance on the moral argument ("innocent people will die", as the first person I replied to said), then it is a slippery slope to a prison abolitionist position.
So you ARE equating living life in confinement with literal death. This is where we disagree. Death and imprisonment are not at all the same or equal.
Imprisonment sucks, yes, but thats part of a crime and punishment system. Death does not need to be part of that system. How hard is that to accept?
It's not about acceptance, it's about the underlying logic. You can assert your position all day, I'm asking why.
Why don't you say "Punishment sucks, yes, but that's part of a crime prevention system. Imprisonment does not need to be a part of that system. How hard is that to accept"?
Or why don't you say "death sucks, yes, but that's part of a crime and punishment system. How hard is that to accept"?
Because we do not need to execute people, but we do need to imprison some.
Why is it that when I say 'we shouldnt kill people' you say 'then why even lock them up?'
Because every moral argument that can be applied to the death penalty can also be applied to imprisonment. I think we're going in a circle here.
The system you support imprisons thousands of innocent people, many of them for life. How do you morally justify this? Is it just a trolley problem for you, and the innocent people rotting to death in prison are just the unfortunate ones tied to the tracks, and they must die for the good of the system?
No I disagree. The goal is simple and specific: stop wrongful executions.
You can say "well also other stuff is bad" sure, thats not the point here. the point is that we make ONE change and save lives. Stop executions. No other changes are required. The system, the facilities, the employees, everything else already exists to facilitate this.
So while there are MANY other improvements that can be made to the justice system this is ONE SINGLE SIMPLE change that WOULD ABSOLUTELY save lives.
Why havent we done it?
Because you can review a case under new evidence or for any numbers of reasons, and figure you got the wrong person.
Ooops can't un-execute that innocent. My bad.
And the whole rehabilitation thing. But I am guessing your argument is you can't rehabilitate a billionaire or something. You are wrong btw if you think that.
You can not rehabilitate the thousands of people who's lives were worsened by a billionaires actions. They commit crimes on a scale so insane that they need to be addressed in an entirely different way from conventional crime. They don't rob a business and kill a store keeper, they put thousands of people out of work and leave them unable to support themselves and their families. They destroy lives for the sake of personal gain on an industrial scale.
A single armed man in a stadium couldn't do as much harm to humanity as a multi-billionaire does from his desk.
You're right to say that life imprisonment is an improvement over execution because some innocent people will be set free. But under the imprisonment system, it is still guaranteed that innocent people will rot in prison until they die.
You can't un-execute the innocent, but you also can't un-rot the innocent who die in prison.
Why is one morally acceptable and the other is not?
Both arent good, sure, but how can you say death is the same as life in prison?
That really depends on living conditions in prison. There are fates that are worse than death.
Most of the people who oppose the death penalty also want to improve prison conditions and minimise the amount of people sent to prison in the first place.
"Conditions in prison are bad" is an argument for improving living conditions for prisoners, not for murdering them.
And yet there are ways to deal with that yourself if you choose that exit, the govt should not be able to make that choice for you. The key here is taking away the govts right to murder its people just because it made an oopsie
Keep the perspective here: You are arguing that 'prison can really suck so the govt should be allowed to execute people it says are guilty'
That's not my argument at all, and I'm confused where you got that idea.
If you want to embellish my argument, it should sound something like "the prison system imprisons innocent people for life, which is the same result as the death penalty, so anyone who argues against the death penalty should also argue for full prison abolition"
Thats a slippery slope that is common in these discussions. Im saying the death penalty shouldnt exist, prison is still important for society. We just cannot trust the government or any legal system to hand out executions. The ONLY way to be sure innocent people are not executed by the death penalty is to not have one at all.
Its pretty simple.
Why are you talking about punishment when we're discussiong justice?
I appreciated the sentiment, but here's my counterpoint: Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Alex Karp, Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, etc. That's only one industry and is nevertheless incomplete, but if I kept going it would take too long.
As long as the death penalty exists it will be used against an innocent, as it already has and will continue to do.
As long as there is even a MICROSCOPIC chance of executing someone innocent, it should NEVER be used. And since there’s no way to ensure there is NO CHANCE someone innocent is executed, it should be abolished.
also, fwiw, i don't think killing someone is the right way to show that killing people (among other things) is wrong. it's pretty contradictory.
Lol, it's citizens would kill each other if they didn't, the very concept of government is rooted in the first principle of a Monopoly on violence, the word "should" implies a set of rules above the enforcer they are compelled to listen to, governance itself requires the ability to restrict violence from others you can't be the first at that without violence itself, a "citizen" is just someone useful enough to let live if that equation changes they will use violence. This is fundamental.
I live in a country without the death penalty and believe it or not, we aren't all murdering each other.
So you are saying that because murder happens the state should also get to do it?
The goal is to prevent wrongful executions and the solution is remarkably simple, stop executing people entirely. Nothing else has to change and we save lives.
I agree. The government shouldn't be killing him. They should just make it not a crime if others do.
Right because mob justice has always been free from error as well