Capital Punishment Essay: Match Death with Death -- Argumentative Per

We Must Match Death with Death For anyone living in Texas, it is common to hear about convicted criminals being sentenced to cobblers last. Is justness being served? When someone has committed a heinous discharge, justice must prevail. But that ideal becomes harder to achieve as we scale the moral high rationality and look all around, from behind the jail cell bars to the crushed life of the murdered victim. The following essay will focus on the proportion of the death sentence as a form of punishment. First of all, if there were no persons in the world, wholly things, there would be no values. There ar values in the world only because there are persons people who have not only desires , simply also rationality and freedom. Something is valuable only relative to a human goal. Then, as the source of values, humans have dignity, which Immanuel Kant defines in his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals as something so valuable that nothing could transcend it in worth. It follows that to be human, to have dignity, one must value above all else those things which give you dignity. This means one must value absolutely the rationality, freedom, and autonomy of oneself, but also of other individuals. However there are some crimes, some murders, committed with such violence and complete disregard for life, that we stop valuing the rationality, the freedom, and the autonomy of the murder so highly. The question is how much do we devalue the criminal? Kant had some ideas about how to find out the proper level of punishment. First, guilt is a needed condition for judicial punishment. That means that only the guilty may be punished. Second, guilt is a sufficient condition for punishment. All the guilty m... ...re severe than the death sentence, could a death sentence be an escape from a life sentence? However, if the goal were to give the most severe sentence wouldnt it be more accurate to find out what the criminals idea of personal hell was? Severity i s not the goal of punishment, rather retributivism and proportionality are. To give equal treatment to all, for each one person, guilty and not guilty, must be considered independently of utility, pity, and revenge. To accurately handle crime, the act and the actor must be understood. Once understood, a punishment ought to be meted out on the basis of whether or not it is proportional and appropriate to the crime at hand. Ultimately, the decision comes down to what a jury debates is proportional. Because I think that there can be no other match than death for death, I believe that capital punishment is justified.