Gelernter Argument On The Death Penalty

Gelernter believes that are morality in our current culture is weak. He believes the we are apathetic and ignore what does not affect us. Gelernter makes his argument through anecdotes to explain morality in our current culture by stating that “in modern America, moral upside-downness is a specialty of the house. To eliminate race prejudice we discriminate by race.
We promote the cultural assimilation of immigrant children by denying them schooling in
English. We throw honest citizens in jail for child abuse, relying on testimony so phony any child could see through it. We make a point of admiring manly women and womanly men. None of which has anything to do with capital punishment directly, but it all obliges us to approach any question about morality in modern America in the larger context of this country 's desperate confusion about elementary distinctions (Gelernter 1). His argument for morality is an attempt to show that are morality is upside down and puts us in a bad position to face the issue of the death penalty.

Gelernter argues that we do sentence for 6 reasons. We sentence for retribution, deterrence, incapability, rehabilitation, reparation, or denunciation. We do not have the death penalty for retribution because if we did we would have the family of the deceased kill the murder. The death penalty is not use to deter crime, because if that was the case we would do public executions. There are other means for incapability, so that is not the function of the death penalty. The death penalty has no sense of rehabilitation because your killing the guilty, and there are no reparations. The death penalty functions as a public proclamation that murder is a crime that will not be tolerable. Gelernter argues that murder requires this communal