Critical and Creative Thinking in the Humanities
The death penalty has existed for hundreds of years in different countries and been given for various crimes. Nowadays, the capital punishment is used as a societal recompense for murder in order to rid society of dangerous criminals and to deter future instances of murder. However, the capital punishment creates a heated debate with logical arguments and reasonable counterarguments. The purpose of the paper is to deliver a deductive argument about the effectiveness of death penalty in deterring murder and making society safer and to decide if death penalty should be banned.
Arguments about the Death Penalty
The capital punishment can serve a number of purposes. However, it should always be “just deserts” – retribution that restores justice and forces a criminal to deliver proportional compensation (Gerber and Jackson
63). Thus, it seems fair to take a murderer’s life for his or her crime. It leads to the first argument in favor of the death penalty.
1st Argument in Favor of the Death Penalty
Guilty people deserve to be punished. Guilty people deserve to receive punishments that are proportional to their crimes. Therefore, murderers should be sentenced to death because the death penalty is proportional to
murders.
A just society seems to require an ‘eye for an eye’ law. Many people support this retributivist argument. Yet, societal punishment should not be revengeful; it needs to make offenders reimburse proportionally (Gerber and
Jackson 65). It is only a compensation, which aims to rehabilitate a criminal and to prevent future crimes. This notion leads to the first counterargument.
1st Counterargument
If the death penalty is applied in all instances of murder it becomes revenge. Being revenge the death penalty does not possess any rehabilitative characteristics. Therefore, the death penalty does not serve those purposes, which a punishment should serve, and it is wrong. Furthermore, different instances of murder are motivated by different reasons. Some people kill for pleasure or money, other people kill to avenge for someone, there are those who murder accidently and some people kill in self-defense. Thus, all murderers cannot be punished in the same way because their motives are different. This notion leads to the second counterargument.
2d Counterargument
People have different motives to kill. Different motives require different types of punishment. Therefore, the application of the death penalty in every instance of murder is wrong and cannot guarantee justice. The capital punishment aims to deter murder by causing fear. Deterrence is expected to prevent crimes (Goel 157). This notion leads to the second argument for the death penalty.
2d Argument in Favor of the Death Penalty
People are scared of death. The …
