Bullshit yerself, you can dress execution up in all manner of sophistry and pretence but it remains a form of legally sanctioned life taking.
No one disputes that the death penalty is legally sanctioned taking of human life. What is disputable is your glib equation of "life taking" with "murder." No one who makes that equation is in a position to accuse anyone else of sophistry.
The origins and underlying justifications for execution are primitive eye for an eye-type logics which are about nothing but taking vengeance.
A system of criminal law is the antithesis of vengeance, whatever the method of punishment that it employs. Criminal law exists precisely to prevent vengeance. Rather than privately exacting retribution for offenses against them, citizens are compelled to let courts of law decide on guilt and punishment. If the accused is found innocent, he or she goes free unpunished; if he or she is found guilty, the punishment is determined by the judge under the law, not by the desires of the victims or any other private citizens. Legal measures alone can bring the cycle of vengeance to an end, as Aeschylus made pretty plain about 2400 years ago in the
Oresteia.
Let me ask you this: Do you consider it "vengeance" when, e.g., someone found guilty of fraud, or theft, or even murder for that matter, is sent to prison for his or her crime? I take it that you don't. So why, when the punishment is death rather than imprisonment, does the administration of punishment suddenly become "vengeance"?
The exact purpose of execution is to meet out death for death (or in some cases death as the punishment for other transgressions).
Yes.
If the state executes murderers it is taking vengeance on them.
No, for reasons that I have given.
You may be satisfied with a system which does this. I personally find such systems morally bankrupt.
I really don't care whether you think so or not, and I have no settled view on the matter myself. But I care very much whether people make honest arguments, as I have been trying to do, or resort to sophistry and rhetorical tricks to make their case, as you have been doing.
War is mass murder, that is a fact. Denying that is absurd, just as denying that execution is judicially sanctioned murder makes no sense whatsoever.
I think you are just blustering. But obviously, my appeal to that comparison did not work with you. But I don't want to get off on another controversy which is not necessary to the main issue.
That the law sanctions something does not imply that this something is qualitatively any different from the same phenomenon taking place in the absence of legal sanction.
If you execute a murderer by judicial sanction there is no particular difference to that murderer having been lynched by a mob and strung up in a tree. The Judge and Jury merely lend a spurious legal and ceremonial camouflage to an act of vengeance. In fact the Judge and the Jury are the formalised proxies of the lynch-mob.
I find your reasoning childish. I am not sure what you mean by "qualitative" difference or "particular" difference, but maybe you should look at someplace like Somalia to get an idea of the difference between life under the rule of violent mobs and life under the rule of law.
One could as legitimately argue that there is no "qualitative" or "particular" difference between imprisonment (as a penalty imposed by a court of law) and kidnapping, and that the judge and jury merely lend a ceremonial guise to the act of kidnapping. Or that there is no difference between being compelled under the law to pay a fine and being robbed by a bandit. (
Edited to add: Come to think of it, there are plenty of right-wing wackos in my country who would make exactly that equation. Funny how extremes meet, isn't it, Hilaire?)
Your arguments do not establish that there is anything especially objectionable about the death penalty as against other forms of punishment. The entirety of your argument, if it can be called that, consists in equating capital punishment with vengeance and murder. But there is no more basis for that than there is for equating imprisonment with kidnapping or the imposition of fines with robbery.
That you object so strongly to execution being described in terms which most simply express what it actually is
No, I object to the swindles and cheap verbal tricks to which you resort in lieu of honest arguments.
suggests that you do not wish to examine the real nature of the phenomenon. This is perhaps because you are aware that too close an examination would reveal aspects of this phenomenon that you would be uncomfortable with, and that because I suspect you to be a person of thoughtful morality.
Well, thank you, sir.