This country is determined to prove that killing someone under certain circumstances is acceptable, when in all reality there can be no rationalization for the taking of another human life. Killing is murder. It is as simple as that. There have been so many different controversies surrounding this debate that often, the issues become clouded in false statistics and slewed arguments. The basic fact remains that killing is morally and ethically wrong. This fact does not disappear by simply changing the term "murder" to "capital punishment". The act is still the taking of a life. On these grounds, the death penalty should be abolished.
Proponents of capital punishment believe that killing criminals is a moral and ethical way of punishing them. They feel there is justification in taking the life of a certain criminal, when in fact that justification is nothing more than revenge. They also feel that the death penalty deters crime, although there have been no conclusive studies confirming that viewpoint (Bedau).
Most death row inmates are members of minority groups that tend to be poor. The fact they are on death row can be explained as a direct result of their marginal economic status. These alleged criminals receive legal representation that is not adequate for the serious crimes of which they are accused, simply because they cannot afford to pay for expensive defense attorneys (The Death Penalty). In virtually all cases of indigent defendants, underpaid and less experienced Public Defense attorneys are appointed by the court to represent the accused. Investigative monies are usually limited or nonexistent. This is one reason why minorities are over-represented on death row. More affluent white defen...
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... clearly support the argument against capital punishment. There can be no justification for the taking of any life, no matter what the transgression. By taking that life we, as society, have chosen to become as monstrous as those whose heinous crimes we abhor.
Works Cited
ACLU Briefing Paper No. 14: The Death Penalty. ACLU http://www.aclu.org/library/DeathPenalty.pdf 04/26/00
Bedau, Hugo A. The Case Against the Death Penalty. Ethics Updates.
http://ethics.acusd.edu/Bedeau.html#Opinion 04/26/00
Issues and Controversies: The Death Penalty. Issues and Controversies on File http://www.facts.com/cd/i00015.htm#I00015_b 05/01/00
Radelet, Michael L., updated by the Death Penalty Information Center. Post-Furman Botched Executions. The Death Penalty Information Center
http://www.essential.org/dpic/botched.html 04/27/00
Racial discrimination has been an immense problem in our society for a very long time. The fact that the race of a victim plays a role in his or her sentencing is appalling. Discrimination within our society needs to come to an end. It’s frightening to think that if you are a minority facing a capital punishment case, which you might be found guilty only because of the color of your skin.
Later Hume asserts that we cannot perceive causation because all we perceive is the “contiguity” and “succession” of events, but not of causation itself. For example, of two events, event A (person A pushing person B) and event B (person B’s falling back), Hume argues that all we are perceiving here are causes and effects; in other words, we here are perceiving the “contiguity” and “succession” of events, but not of causation itself. This is due to Hume’s idea that events are conjoined with one another. Hume argues that when event A occurs, event B happens simultaneously along with event A. For example, the event in which person A pushes person B, and the event where person B fal...
Hume's analyses of human apprehension and of causality were the most penetrating up to his time and continue to have great influence. Contemporary Spanish philosopher Xavier Zubiri (1893-1983) has examined both and identified three underlying errors: (1) the failure to recognize that there are three stages of human intellection, and especially that the first, primordial apprehension, has quite unique characteristics; (2) the attempt to place an excessive burden on the content of impressions while ignoring what Zubiri terms their 'formality of reality'; and (3) the failure to recognize that functionality, not causality, is the basis for most of our knowledge. Causal chains in general cannot be adequately known, and therefore are not and cannot be the basis of our knowledge of the external world. Only in the area of persons and morality does causality play a critical role.
Hawthorne recognizes how structured the Puritan society andis discusses how one’s sins and actions can affect their standing in society. The main element of the novel, Hester’s scarlet letter, greatly attests to how sin alone can change your entire societal position. After receiving her letter, Hester “quote about living outside town” and is ostracized by the small community. Even the children begin to put Hester down, chanting awful things such as “let us fling mud at her”. TNothing about Hester has changed, she still works as a seamstress, the sole reason she moves to the bottom rung of the social ladder is due to her sins in a very religious society. On the opposite side of the spectrum lies Dimmesdale. As the local minister, Dimmesdale wields a lot of power in the town, but he is placed upon a pedestal as a prominent figure because the townspeople believe he is so pure. Even when Dimmesdale confesses that he has sinned, the townspeople only revere him more and believe that they are the ones who have sinned and are unholy. By the end of the book, Dimmesdale has inadvertently gathered enough support because people revere him that many doubted if heDimmesdale had sinned at all or “insert examples of how people think he died”. In a society dominated by religion, ministers, by their very nature, are
In the United States there are currently 3,490 prisoners awaiting execution. Many of these prisoners are poor and are where they are because they could not afford good legal representation. Most of these prisoners are Black, and they have been arrested and incarcerated in southern states. According to the July 2004 Quarterly Report of the NAACP Criminal Justice Project, 52% of the inmates who currently sit on Death Row are Black or Hispanic.
Together, David Hume and Emanuel Kant, have a very crucial influence to modern philosophy. Hume challenges conventional philosophical views with his skepticism as well as his new take on what is metaphysics. His views and ideas where influential to many, including Kant, however they lead to his philosophical reasoning and empiricism to be viewed lead to negatively and atheistically. Kant, whose philosophy was so strongly influenced by Hume that in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics wrote “I openly confess that my remembering of David Hume was the very thing which many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave me new investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a quite new direction” (Kant, Preference) defends and overcomes Hume by advancing philosophy in a revolutionary way. Kant’s philosophy has its foundation on Hume’s work, specifically his skeptical view on causality.
From the beginning of The House of the Seven Gables, Hepzibah is withdrawn, angry, lonely, and fatigued. These are just some symptoms that are associated with depression in today’s society. The reader of this novel can see that Hepzibah is not an ordinary female in 19th century American literature. Hawthorne may
Opponents of this position argue that the death penalty is a necessary evil. One of the top arguments is that you must punish offenders to discourage others from committing similar offenses (Radelet 44). Many people also feel that the victim’s families deserve closure. The prisoners have to pay for their crime and deserve the punishment that they get. Using the death penalty helps deal with the overpopulation in prisons. There are not enough resources or space to house prisoners for life. This statement can be true to a certain point. However, when talking about sacrificing one person’s life for the greater good of society, no man should have the authority to end someone’s life. One of the biggest issues that opponents argue is how much the victims suffer if the killer is not put to death. A murderer not only affects the person they kill, but also the victim’s friends and family’s life. They have to live with the grief of losing a loved one. If the killer is not put to death they could get the feeling that someone is out to get them. They will not be able to rest until the killer is tried and executed. Although this side of the argumen...
Hume declares himself a compatibilist, defining an instance of free will as one in which the agent has the independence to act to his own ambition. That is, the agent is not coerced to act in a presumed manner. Hume believes in free will and determinism, arguing that the two beliefs can be adjusted. By taking this position, he redefines free will and determinism in order to avoid the logic of the incompatibilist position. According to Hume, the incompatibilist’s belief of determinism claims the existence of causation/necessary connection in physical communications that we deny exist in human behavior. For Hume, determinism steers from events being randomly coerced, and relies only on our perception of them being sporadically necessitated. On page 64 Hume states, “It is universally allowed that matter, in all its operations, is actuated by a necessary force, and that every natural effect is so precisely determined by the energy of its cause that no other effect, in such particular circumstances, could possibly have resulted from it.” Hume instills the idea that every effect has a cause, and every cau...
In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume states, “there is not, in any single, particular instance of cause and effect, any thing which can suggest the idea of power or necessary connexion” (Hume, 1993: 41). Hume establishes in section II that all ideas originate from impressions that employ the senses (11). Therefore, in order for there to be an idea of power or “necessary connexion,” there must be impressions of this connection present in single instances of cause and effect; if there are no such impressions, then there cannot be an idea of “necessary connexion” (52). To illustrate his statement, Hume examines four situations: bodies interacting in the world, mind causing actions of the body, mind causing ideas of ideas, and God as the source of power. I will highlight Hume’s reasons and outline his arguments to establish that there is no “connexion” between cause and effect on the basis of single instances.
David Hume’s two definitions of cause found in both A Treatise of Human Nature, and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding have been the center of much controversy in regards to his actual view of causation. Much of the debate centers on the lack of consistency between the two definitions and also with the definitions as a part of the greater text. As for the latter objection, much of the inconsistency can be remedied by sticking to the account presented in the Enquiry, as Hume makes explicit in the Author’s Advertisement that the Treatise was a “work which the Author [Hume] had projected before he left College, and which he wrote and published not long after. But not finding it successful, he was sensible of his error in going to the press to early, and he cast the whole anew in the following pieces, where some negligence in his former reasoning and more in the expression, are, he hopes, corrected.” (Hume 1772, xxxi) Generally the inconsistencies are cited from the Treatise, which fails to recognize the purpose of the Enquiry. This brings us to the possible tension between the two definitions. J.A. Robinson, for example, believes the two definitions cannot refer to the same thing. Don Garrett feels that the two definitions are possible, but only with further interpretation. I will argue that the tension arises from a possible forgetfulness on the part of the reader about Hume’s aims as a philosopher, and that Hume’s Enquiry stands on its own without any need for a critic’s extrapolations. To understand Hume’s interpretation of causation and the arguments against it, we must first follow the steps Hume took to come to his conclusion. This requires brief consideration of Hume’s copy princi...
Second are stressors caused by major live events, which includes marriage, going to college, death of a loved one and birth of a child, to name a few. These events can be either positive or negative, depending on how an individual perceives it. One can see going to college as exciting while the other sees it as threatening and stressful. Thus, it should be noted that positive life events are not associated with stress, only the negative ones, but only you can tell if it’s positive or
While we may all want murders off the street, the problem we come to face is that capital punishment is being used for vengeance or as a deterrent. Capital punishment has been used worldwide, not only by the governments to instill fear, but to show that there are repercussions to ones actions. From the time we are born, we are taught to learn the difference between right and wrong. It is ingrained in our brains, what happens to people that do bad things? Capital punishment is renowned for being the worst thing that could be brought amongst ones life.
“The case Against the Death Penalty.” aclu.org. American Civil Liberties Union, 2012. Web. 12 Feb. 2013
First, let us examine the “cons” of raising the federal minimum wage, starting with a quote from the business-backed nonprofit Employment Policies Institute. “Multiple studies have demonstrated little to no relationship between a higher minimum wage and reductions in poverty.”