174
A young Chicago mother shot to death. How the system failed her.
(www.cbsnews.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
174 points (97.3% liked)
News
23301 readers
1811 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
"Evil" isn't real, it's a word we made up to describe shitty people. Beyond that, until we humans are perfect and never make mistakes, the death penalty is never going to be the acceptable answer. Too many innocent people end up killed by it.
Or the fact that it does nothing to address the causes of crimes that don’t stem from a “risk-reward” assessment and just lets whoever’s left behind have some false sense of having done something
What’s extra comical about this claim is that if nihilism were true, as you claim, then a fortiori the death penalty would be completely permissible.
They made no such claim. They were just noting that your argument uses the word "evil" as if it were a tangible, quantifiable thing, and it absolutely isn't. This doesn't mean that they embrace moral relativism or reject the concept of morality outright, but rather that they recognize you use of "evil" as a rhetorical device in bad faith.
The idea that being against the death penalty implies endorsement of the crimes that land people on death row ("evil" as you call it) is inherently fallacious. One can condemn violent crime without supporting violence as a punishment for crime. If anything, it is consistent with a philosophy of nonviolence.
The only person using rhetoric here is you. There are morally depraved people out there whom we colloquially refer to as “evil.” I don’t know why you insist on having a semantic argument. If “[moral depravity] does not exist,” as my interlocutor claims, then nihilism would indeed be true.
I would also like to point out that the ethical arguments against the death penalty in the scholarly literature are very weak and it remains an open question whether the death penalty is advisable on practical grounds. Morally it’s unlikely that any good argument exists to make it impermissible to kill “evil” people. You can check out the latest edition of any textbook on ethics, such as Living Ethics by Schaffer Landau, which syllogizes a variety of arguments on this topic.
The issue here is that you use the arbitrary "evil" label to strip humanity from people who commit wrongs. You've decided that these people deserve the most extreme forms of punishment imaginable, and then pretend that anyone challenging you on that is somehow defending the actions of the people you are asking be killed.
This then leads to the absurd situation where someone says "violence is unacceptable under all circumstances" and you accuse them of abetting "evil" because you demand that everyone want to kill the same people you do.
You honestly don't see the issue here? I mean, you already have to be jumping through some serious mentality hoops to arrive at the conclusion "not killing people is evil", but c'mon now...
Let me again recommended this textbook on Ethics: https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/living-ethics-9780197608876
The death penalty is chapter 20.
Also,