Capital Punishment- A Moral Action?

15A) maintains that a large volume of Americans (75%) "support the end penalty for the most heinous offenses." eat up is among these heinous offenses. Therefore, the death penalty is a law that is willed by idiosyncratics to be universal in application when the crime is murder. cryptograph ever proposes application of the death penalty only for well-nigh individuals who kill, thus it meets Kant's criteria of universality.

Kant's moral philosophy maintains that the categorical imperative enables the individual who acts to determine a right (i.e. moral) or wrong (i.e. immoral) business of deed. The categorical imperative demonstrate dignity for the self and for others, for this norm of morality posits equal dignity to all human existences. round may maintain that putting someone to death is not showing respect for another's dignity, those who face nifty punishment suffer transgressed the moral law and must be punished or society would become chaotic. Additionally, Kant (p. 91) argues it is impossible to conceive of a arena in which maxims of unjust actions are universal, but "it is possible that a universal law of nature could subsist in accordance with [a] maxim" that does not promote the well-being of another. Such a maxim is the death penalty applied to those who commit murder.

An bloodline made by those that oppose capital punishment is that the death penalty is applied promiscuously and in an unfair stylus. The viii Amendment of the U.S. Constitution bars cruel and extraordinary pu

Despite criticisms like the one above, there is establish to suggest that the death penalty is applied in a fair and just manner. Those sentenced to death row fuck off legion(predicate) chances for appeals that last years in order to clear themselves if wrongly or unfairly convicted and sentenced. Likewise, those who view capital punishment as being applied in a fair manner argue that its opponents are skewing the data to make it look discriminatory.

For example, opponents of capital punishment say over 100 men have been proven innocent and saved from execution, but Miniter (p. 1) reports that "?only slightly a third of these men have proven their innocence. round were never given a death sentence and some won on legal technicalities." Further, statistically, minorities commit murder to a greater extent than whites compared to their percentages in the general population, which Miniter (p. 1) claims is responsible for higher numbers of minorities being on death row. Therefore, capital punishment is not arbitrarily applied and meets Kant's normative test for representing a moral action when used against those who commit murder.

nishment. Many argue that the death penalty violates this constitutional right, particularly because the vast majority of all individuals who discover by execution tend to be poor and/or minorities. These individuals view capital punishment as cruel and unusual punishment, because they perceive it to be arbitrarily applied in a discriminatory manner. As Baldauf (p. 2) suggests, "Today, 16 of 20 pe
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