MacShimi wrote:Society is based on morality.
More fundamentally, its based on
people who require morality to live meaningful, productive, enjoyable, satisfying lives. This is a subtle distinction, but when you start to think about the implications it has on morality and the death penalty you must realize its importance. Morality serves us: we do not serve morality.
Think about a death cult-- real life examples include the infamous Jim Jones cult that gave us the term "drinking the kool aid" or
Aum Shinrikyo who had the brilliant idea that the apocalypse just wasn't coming soon enough without an active intervention in the form of a nerve gas attack in a Japanese subway station. Death cults count as a form of society, do they not? And within these cults there is moral belief in the necessity of killing themselves and possible everyone unfortunate enough to be within their sights. And yet
who the fuck thinks a death cult is a morally justified society? The morals of such cults are at odds with the needs of their members. Do you think this is a good situation?
Morality rests on consensus and requires the use of power to remove those who will not accept that consensus.
This I cannot agree to either in whole or in part. Morality is based on
reason and the needs of living beings; the use of power is
only necessary in times where someone's moral beliefs (or effective lack of them in action) cause harmful conflicts. If it were otherwise, there could be no debating morals with anyone-- it wouldn't matter that some people are more knowledgeable, it wouldn't matter that most people are swayed by irrational factors such as appeals to authority or religious fiat (just as much a problem if you are religious as not!), if you disagree with the majority you are wrong. This kind of thinking is so common and so wrong that it is one of the classic named fallacies-- Appeal to Popularity.
Say you've got a society of Nazis as the majority and a very small minority of Jews who the Nazi majority wants to exterminate. Does the fact that there is consensus among the majority mean the Jewish minority needs to die? Put it another way, would the deaths of the Jewish minority really satisfy the needs of the psychopathic Nazi majority? Or is their very desire to see an arbitrarily chosen minority die itself an evil that should neither be entertained nor encouraged?
I'm no moral relativist, but if there is one thing it shows its that the idea of a morality based solely on social norms formed in the absence of reason is intellectually bankrupt.
As for the second statement, its not only wrong but downright motherfucking
dangerous. We
need to
forcibly remove members of society who disagree with the majority view of morality? What the fuck? For starters, in modern western society this would actively conflict with one of the very morals we have consensus on-- freedom of thought/speech. In fact, we can rationally show that freedom of thought/speech is necessary before morality can be considered because it is necessary in order to have any sort of intellectual discourse. There is a portion of our society that believes teaching the facts of science-- evolution and cosmology specifically-- is evil. But these are simply the facts-- if you aren't even allowed to know what they are how the hell can one say that knowing them is evil? You don't know what they are! Its self evidently absurd. Honesty must be protected, including the ability to say honestly "I find your morals disgusting, and your ideas laughable at best". Otherwise, societies will tend to drift towards value systems that are arbitrary and even against their own best interests; read 1984 sometime. Not only can the majority bully people into believing things that screw them, they can set up society such that the members thereof will never learn the difference.
Lastly, even if we were to grant the necessity of forming moral consensus, there is no reason to assume the
only way to achieve it is through forcibly removing members from society. There is education; there is rehabilitation; there is negotiation; there is compromise; there is intellectual discourse; there are so many ways to establish consensus that
don't require the ruling majority to be a bunch of brutish pricks with clubs that I think it says something about the person who asserts they must. Vice, though it hath no tongue, speaks with the most miraculous organ.
The continued existence of a shared morality rests upon the forbearance of every single individual within a society from claiming the whole fruit of his or her labour.
Wait, what? Why? Why should people be deprived of the right to claim ownership of what they worked to create, and why would we expect people to accept this notion even if it is the case?
This sci-fi author sounds like he likes to talk out of his ass a lot.
A society’s ability to achieve consensus is inversely proportional to the size and complexity of society, to the degree of technological advancement, and to the speed of internal communications.
I'm just going to assume this means he knows his ethics are infeasible when applied to real life.
Power cannot be maintained and effectively exercised, without a moral structure accepted and practiced by all, because power attracts the corruptible, and corruption destroys consensus.
Demonstrably false, look around you. Power comes from the barrel of a gun, not from the consensus of the people. The people can give the cops shit, and the cops will throw them in jail. The people can riot and the tear gas comes out. The people can bring guns and the military comes out with even bigger guns. The corruptible have many obvious flaws, but the inability to hold power is not one of them.
Certain individuals are born incapable of forbearance; so are certain cultures.
I will again take this as evidence that this guy knows his ethics are infeasible in real life. Assuming of course that this isn't intended to have racist or bigoted sentiments, as it easily could.
Thus the continuation of society The Status Quo rests on: the willingness of each individual to accept the shared values of the society conform to the values of the loudest majority, the willingness and the ability of those in power to remove oppress those who do not support the morality of the society loudest majority; and the willingness of all to limit the size and complexity of the society to the scope of the consensus required suppress their humanity and give up on building civilization.
You might be wondering about that last part. Unfortunately, humans don't abide by a "keep social interactions to a minimum complexity" rule. You don't even have to take a class in sociology to realize this. Just think back to the last family gathering you ever had, or party you attended, or
any social interaction involving more than two people ever.
Also, once again this is infeasible in real life because our modern technological society requires cooperation on a vast scale. Do you realize how vast the mere physical infrastructures of a modern society are? Where your electricity, water, and food come from? Hundreds to thousands of miles away. Even before taking into consideration other things such as maintaining a stable economy or dealing with (un)natural disasters, that alone moves the scale of society into one that cannot achieve such uniformity as asked for by these premises.
Thus, as these premises fail so too must any argument predicated on them.
The Death Penalty is a means for permanently removing a person who is unwilling to conform to the consensus moral strictures of a society, and will actively endanger individuals or groups within that society, if allowed to be a part of it. The Marquis of Halifax remarked that “Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.” To be clear here, I'm not advocating the death penalty for stealing horses, I'd reserve it for crimes where a person deliberately and with malice aforethought inflicts needless pain, suffering, violence on another person, or indeed, kills another person. That's my definition of a crime of the sort that means a person is too dangerous to be allowed to be a part of human society.
That's great, but if you don't mind I will just point out that you've drawn an arbitrary line in the sand without justifying it at all. It doesn't even flow from your premises, which are as I've shown bullshit.
Deterrence is in fact the principal use of the death penalty, even if that only prevents the person found guilty from performing any additional felonies by killing them.
Deterrence is based on a childish understanding of human psychology and motivation. Indeed, if you look at how children respond to punishment you may see the problem: oftentimes all you are teaching the child is that you are only in trouble if you get caught. There are many other problems, but I will just say that the fact that the US has one of the largest prison populations in the first world shows how overrated deterrence is.
There are some criminals who can be reformed, but equally there are others who will never chose to be reformed.
How do you decide who will and will not be reformed? Do you just declare a priori that anyone who has committed a crime of severity X could not possible be reformed? I dispute the validity of any such logic.
Once they are dead you can never falsify the claim.
I firmly and completely reject any notion that evil does not exist. It's measurable, tangible and real.
No one here ever denied this fact. What is at stake is whether or not the death penalty is an effective way of fighting evil, or even whether or not it is evil itself.
