This is a 1957 essay by Algerian-French philosopher Albert Camus.
Hard disagree. There are people who deserve death, and it is a good thing when it happens. It's just really dangerous to give the state such a power.
Camus believes that state sanctioned revenge just breeds more violence. The death penalty is not a deterrent, it is something that offends the senses, and it is ultimately served on the platter as a criminal getting their just punishment in revenge.
Either such a revenge is public, to declare that justice has occured, or it does not happen at all. What revenge is a secret and supressed lethal injection? By all accounts, revenge should be public and furious, it should be there for the victims to see.
>Indeed, one must kill publicly or confess that one does. not feel authorized to kill. If society justifies the death penalty by the necessity of the example, it must justify itself by making the publicity necessary (Camus).
Thus, revenge is not a sufficient reason for capital punishment due to the abhorence we have to see death in public. Camus adds that such public exetions only harden the ones who need to be softened and offend the soft. He uses the example of pickpockets. A large majority of pickpockets who were sentenced had viewed the execution of a pickpocket before. Revenge only perpetuates violence.
Camus doesn't think that a muderer _doesn't_ deserve a punishment, but rather that a murder in any case cannot be accepted.
Anyway, there are a great many videos online of murders and other death scenes, and famously there were VHS tapes available pre-internet called "faces of death" showing such events. A great many people actively seek out and watch such things, seemingly with no negative reaction to them. So there are a lot of people who would presumably be even less affected by a guillotine execution than I was.
Not at all. There are kids murderers out there. Recently one in France raped and then killed an 11 y/o girl. Somehow he was free although he'd already been involved in rapes. It's a big thing: there are protests all over France asking for actual laws actually doing something about rapists and kid killers.
To me the guillotine for a kid killer is way too nice: I'd go full medieval style, breaking his arms and legs while he's rotating on a vice. Then cutting his balls. Then finishing it by using horses to dislocate his body.
They used to do that in the middle-age.
From A to Z I'd be thinking about the persons you don't care about: the victims.
The problem is, as someone else mentioned, as soon as you give the state the power to kill people, they'll abuse it.
But, deep down, the harsh truth is very simple: leniency to rapists and murderers is cruelty to the victims, to their family and to their future victims (like just happened in France).
All those begging for leniency for criminals have the blood of that 11 y/o girl who got raped and killed by a repeat offenders on their hands.
Your comment is below the intellectual and interpersonal standard that makes HN a good place to be.
I don’t doubt your sincerity and I can abide your opinion, but you should be restrained in ascribing such points of view to others.
Not casually and not for "minor crimes" (by the standards of the time) like the killing of a child.
The overly performative hung, drawn, and quartering variations were reserved for high crimes of treason, regicide, etc.
Yeah, no we can still want justice and not want to be horrified by the act of execution for the rest of our lives.
Or, I don't know, perhaps we can crush parts of their body one at a time. Or maybe set fire to their limbs one at a time. I mean, why not?
(And never mind that if The State could, even once, execute someone who is innocent, it renders capital punishment instantly null and void in my mind.)
But sure, you’ve seen some shit and you’ll make those evil rich people pay for all your horrible suffering.
That’s enough keyboard warriors for one day for me, going to bed. Hope you find some peace.
This seems odd because it usually goes the other way: people complaining about the rich typically tar them as the "Nazis". For people against destroying the rich, the usual epithet for those who want to do so would be "commies"...