DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Paul Graham lectures you on morality.

When intellectuals talk about the death penalty, they talk about things like whether it’s permissible for the state to take someone’s life, whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent, and whether more death sentences are given to some groups than others. But in practice the debate about the death penalty is not about whether it’s ok to kill murderers. It’s about whether it’s ok to kill innocent people, because at least 4% of people on death row are innocent.

Or, in other words, 96& of people on death row are guilty.

Far from being rare, wrongful murder convictions are very common.

This is a use of ‘very common’ with which I am unfamiliar. Since when is 4% ‘very common’? At the very least, ‘very common’ ought to mean ‘over 50%’.

This circus of incompetence and dishonesty is the real issue with the death penalty. We don’t even reach the point where theoretical questions about the moral justification or effectiveness of capital punishment start to matter, because so many of the people sentenced to death are actually innocent. Whatever it means in theory, in practice capital punishment means killing innocent people.

Yes, it does, occasionally. Totally absent from this analysis, however, is the number of ‘innocent people’ who die because murderers are put back into circulation. Surely that matters, if we’re counting up ‘innocent people’?

This is the great flaw in all of the bleeding-heart hand-wringing about ‘killing innocent people’. No system is error-proof. But a 4% error rate would be miraculous in any other field of human endeavor. The instrumental justification for the death penalty is that when a murderer is made dead, he (or she) doesn’t go on to murder again. So the lack of potential future victims is certainly a relevant piece of information.

There is a case to be made for eliminating the death penalty, but this isn’t one of them.

I had always respected Paul Graham’s insights, until now. But apparently he’s Just Another Woke Weenie.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 22nd, 2021 at 04:45 and is filed under Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.