Utilitarianism Death Penalty

The America that we live in today is one that is divided in more ways that we can imagine. Issues such as race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, socioeconomic status, and political views are all issues that polarize our great nation. Within each of these categories lie more specific and focused issues that can be as equally debated and unsettled. Issues such as abortion, gay rights and other ideas that deal with human liberty and freedom are often considered to be hot button issues in politics and can even invoke strong enough emotions to influence presidential elections. One issue of this nature that has been the topic of great discussion and debate over the last century, especially in the United States, is the idea of capital punishment,

According to Thiroux, the two main goals of utilitarian based punishment are to deter other people from committing crime and to rehabilitate the offender and to keep him from acting unlawfully again . Deterring others from committing crime, as I will discuss in more detail later, is one of the main arguments for the death penalty. Simple logic tells us that if a certain action carries with the potential to be executed, then we are less likely to do it. This is a very important point and a strong defense of capital punishment from a utilitarian viewpoint. On the other hand, the idea of trying to rehabilitate a prisoner doesn’t work in a system of execution. This is a commonly exploited point by opponents of the death penalty that try to use utilitarianism to defend their argument. As a neuroscience major and someone who has not only taken courses in but also independently researched and studied the human mind, I know it to be true that rehabilitation simply isn’t that effective. While a small number of former murders may have gone on to live decent lives after release and rehabilitation, and even larger number have gone on to kill again . This poses a major problem for the second part of the

As we discussed in the beginning, punishment is a necessary thing. We need it and depend on it in our society to hold people accountable for their actions and to act as a way of teaching others and deterring them from committing similar crimes. By looking even further into the concept of punishment and studying what is required for it be effective, we found that capital punishment indeed meets the four criteria outlined by Thiroux. Then the views on punishment from three difference ethical viewpoints were closely examined. It was found that in the retributivist, utilitarian and restitutional views of punishment, that capital punishment could not only be defended but also embraced. After establishing that the death penalty was an exceptional form of punishment, we looked at three specific arguments including deterrence, economic cost and justice. First off, it is the goal of capital punishment to deter the criminal from acting again by putting them to death, and to deter the public from committing crimes by showing them directly what the consequences of their actions are. While some argue that the deterrence rates are low, this is not a fault with capital punishment but instead is due to the fact that the public cannot see these executions and that they do not happen often enough. Secondly, it makes