Reply #68: nobody's selling it [View All]

The core of the contention lies in the belief that taking life under ANY circumstance is ALWAYS, EQUALLY wrong. I wish I could buy it.

You're just putting words in someone's mouth.

I, for instance, have never said that taking life under ANY circumstance is ALWAYS, EQUALLY wrong. In fact, I can think of circumstances in which killing someone is not wrong at all. And circumstances in which it is not very wrong.

The wrongness of something is an entirely different matter from how a civilized society deals with it.

It is wrong to commit adultery. It is wrong to break a promise. In some circumstances, it could be very, very wrong. Off with their heads?

What I do say is that when the state kills someone, or allows someone else to kill someone, it is violating a fundamental human right, without justification.

And I'll say that no matter how wrong what the person did was, or how much I despise the person, or how much pain I feel about the harm the person did to someone else.

If I don't say that, I don't deserve anyone else's concern for my own ability to exercise my own rights.

But of course, people who are concerned about human rights would still be concerned about mine.


When I think of Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Hideki Tojo,....I am incapable of seeing they're lives as precious.

Nobody's asking you to. You're the one inserting catchphrases like "sacred" and "precious" into this discussion; nobody else.

Their lives are HUMAN, whether anybody likes it or not. And we really don't get to disregard that fact just because we don't like them.


I would hope the other side would not be so ignorant as to mistake this for callous, careless indifference to human life

Nope. It's apparently very considered indifference to human rights.


If you favor incarceration, and if you don't even support that you're frankly mad, then it's not a question of the rightness of punishment, merely the extent.

Nice try. Unfortunately, killing isn't "punishment", it's killing.