The Ethicality Against Capital Punishment

698 Words2 Pages

This paper will focus on Capital Punishment, which we will define as execution through means of lethal injection administered by an executioner to someone convicted of murder, and for the purpose of this paper murder will be established as killing an innocent person in cold blood. It will concern the dehumanization of the condemned and the inappropriateness of employing the same morality and ethicality to someone who in the eyes of the public have lost all humaneness. Dehumanization will be, for the sake of my argument, classified as depriving someone from his humanity, and by depriving them of humanness, which is essential to ethics; we fracture the foundation of morality and ethics because without humans there is no morality or ethicality. I will argue that Capital Punishment undermines ethical and moral foundations in particular Kant’s theories by dehumanizing the condemned, therefore, opposing ethical arguments supporting Capital Punishment by making morality and ethicality inapplicable to someone who has had his humanity denied to him. I will first outline the various reasons in how the condemned is stripped of their humanity by demonstrating how it violates the value of life and how using it as revenge and as a deterrent of other crimes goes against Kant’s “Practical Imperative” which states that no human being should be seen as a means to an end because this essentially strips him of the right to live for himself. I will also show how Kant’s ethical theory regarding Capital Punishment, in which he indicates that taking a human life should always be punished by taking the offenders life, has contradictions especially in respect to the head of state where the same rules do not apply to them (Avaliani). The authorities are ...

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...emned as a “means to an end.” The public now views the death of the convicted as a way to attain what they want: revenge. The execution is no longer a punishment, but rather part of gaining society’s satisfaction. In this case, the condemned lose the right to their own end, which strips them of their humanity by becoming an object in someone else’s satisfaction and defying Kant’s “Practical Imperative.” As I already mentioned a condemned man dehumanizes himself when murdering another human, however, after the murder takes place the condemned may start a redemption process, and because we know that redemption is a humane process, then we understand that the condemned begins to regain his humanity. Nevertheless, if society commences to use him as a “means to an end,” they once again dehumanize him making it difficult to apply ethics supporting Capital Punishment.

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