Essay On Capital Punishment

Capital Punishment: Does the End Justify the Means?

The only crime in the United States that is legally punishable by death is criminal homicide. While the definition of murder has undergone rigorous analysis, legal scholars often ignore the theoretical justification for capital punishment. As a result of the Supreme Court ruling in 1976 that upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty, there is little debate on the justificatory aspect of the death penalty in law. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the moral permissibility of capital punishment for murder based on ethical principals of punishment by death. To do this, it is important to take into account some alternate moral theories as potential sources for theoretical justification and to consider the observations of many renowned philosophers including Immanuel Kant, John Stewart Mill and Aristotle.

The most prevalent of these theories is the Aristotelian ethical theory. Although Aristotle does not specifically argue that death is a just punishment for murder, the principals found in his theory of justice in rectification suggest that capital punishment is a fitting punishment for acts of murder in some cases where the being has acted voluntarily and viciously. Thus, the two most commons sources of theoretical justification for capital punishment are Immanuel Kant and John Stewart Mill.

Defenders of capital punishment can be separated into two categories. Some are retributivists and follow Immanuel Kant’s theory of retribution. Other defenders are consequentialist and follow John Stewart Mill’s consequentialist approach. Both philosophers unambiguously address the dispute of capital punishment as a moral responsibility in their ethical theories...

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...ors to capital punishment may challenge that it is immoral because governments should never take human life, no matter the provocation. But that is an object of faith, not of fact, just like the opposite position held by abolitionist detractors, including myself. However, as in Kant’s argument, capital punishment honors human dignity by treating the offender as a free being able to control his own will for good or for evil; it does not treat him as an animal with no moral awareness. Capital punishment celebrates the dignity of those whose lives were ended by the murder’s predation.

Moral reason for upholding capital punishment is reverence for life itself. This is the reason why scripture and Christian tradition have upheld it. This suggests that, if anything, it may be the abolition of capital punishment, which threatens to cheapen life, not its retention.