Why should the justice system be safer than the transit system? 42,000 dead on highways each year for the cost of speedy travel, but don't let anyone die to provide justice to murder victims?

Well, this is really not very logical.

First, why should society chose between to evils, when it could easily avoid both? The USA could chose to improve road infrastructure and increase public transports (which would also be economically more intelligent). And death penalty could be replaced by life in jail, like in most civilized countries.

Second, you confuse the cost of inaction (by letting traffic kill on the roads) with the sensitivity of public opinion towards judicial activism. In other words, you say: "because inaction kills a lot of innocents on the road, let's kill some innocents in courts". I leave this logic to the judgment of the readers...

tracker -

People choose to get on the highway. People don't choose to be wrongfully convicted and executed.

This is not necessarily true of the justice system (particularly for the innocent, who didn't, at least in theory, even commit an act that might reasonably have been expected to lead into that system.

This is in addition to a previous argument on the old Fray (of which you declared yourself the winner without actually winning, or illustrating how you could be perceived to win; you are nothing if not possessed of a bottomless supply of bourgeois axioms), wherein I pointed out that philosophy of governance could allow us to distinguish in principle between the two based on the fact that one set of deaths arises from individual agency in the absence of regulation, the other from government intervention and an excess of government power.

Re 1: How many posts have you made arguing we could save a thousand innocent children's lives per year by lowering the speed limit to 55? Somehow, though, you're out to provide those who commit the 18,000 murders per year with life of food, clothing, and shelter at my expense ... and I'm illogical?!

Re 2: "inaction kills on the roads" ... what? You mean our inaction in not revising our deadly policies? We go fast because we'd rather kill (ourselves, our kids, others) than be bored. Face it.

Tell that to the kids who are crushed and burned every day.

and the cash value of that distinction? Somehow we own highway deaths and chalk them up to self-determination, but our representative government's actions to ensure justice can't be seen as extended self-determination? We vote in the lawmakers, and hence the laws (which cover the application of laws).

. . . of limiting marriage to being a contract between a man and a woman, or of offering it to infertile (or disinterested) heterosexual couples while withholding it from committed homosexual or plural couples? What's the "cash value" of bestiality laws? You're mighty selective as to when cash value matters. It seems to me that you base much of your political philosophy on distinctions that have no objective repercussions whatsoever.

Somehow we own highway deaths and chalk them up to self-determination, but our representative government's actions to ensure justice can't be seen as extended self-determination? We vote in the lawmakers, and hence the laws (which cover the application of laws).

You clearly have a higher opinion of the majority than I do. I submit myself to governance only grudgingly; I accept the mediocre apes voted in by the majority only because I can't imagine that the mediocre apes who'd seize power on their own, drunk on Cliff Notes to Marx or Nietzsche, wouldn't be worse.

Law and governance are necessary measures to protect the weak from the belligerent. But in suppressing the belligerent, we inevitably suppress the strong, the worthy, the fierce, the brilliant. For that reason, I'm skeptical of government action, and more so of defining it as extended self-determination. And that fear is more based in "cash value" than any of your sexual and behavioral conservatism.

Of course you're illogical. For one thing, you consider Platinga a worthy intellect. :)

Re 1: How many posts have you made arguing we could save a thousand innocent children's lives per year by lowering the speed limit to 55? Somehow, though, you're out to provide those who commit the 18,000 murders per year with life of food, clothing, and shelter at my expense ... and I'm illogical?!

I can't speak for the person above, but for me, the former is an argument for government intrusion; the latter, an argument for blunting government power.

I'd agree, however, that the current expense of prison could be reduced by limiting the amenities granted prisoners.

What you seem to have forgotten, though, is that we're talking about the risk of the innocent being executed. So you're not, per this discussion, feeding, clothing, and sheltering those who commit 18,000 murders per year: you're feeding, clothing, and sheltering those who may well not have committed any crime at all.

Re 2: "inaction kills on the roads" ... what? You mean our inaction in not revising our deadly policies? We go fast because we'd rather kill (ourselves, our kids, others) than be bored. Face it.

I imagine we just want to get where we're going sooner. I've never gone fast for kicks; that must be a redneck thing.

What did old Jesus say, "...strain at a gnat"? You are happy with multiple thousands of unnecessary deaths for the benefit of going fast (I say you're happy because I haven't heard you rail against high speed limits), but you cringe at the notion a handful of innocents will be executed for the benefit of ensuring murderers don't unfairly live out their lives while their victims don't. In other words, relief from transit boredom is not just better than justice for the murdered, it is radically better.

Since you are a person of high principle, I'd think you would argue for the rights of the murdered as much as you would those of homemaker homosexuals.

There's nothing special about dying; there's nothing special about knowing someone who has died, about losing someone.

So when you imply . . .

You are happy with multiple thousands of unnecessary deaths for the benefit of going fast (I say you're happy because I haven't heard you rail against high speed limits)...

. . . I can only reply that, while any accidental death is both regrettable and preventable, and while I wouldn't fundamentally object to a lower speed limit, there's simply nothing special about accidental death. I don't make it my cause or my priority to ensure that the legions of the bourgeois are adequately empowered to make decisions that limit individual behavior so as to prevent accidents.

That said, by all means, make driving safer. Hold auto companies to a high standard (I actually see more utility in constraining corporate behavior, since I consider corporations de facto governments, concerned with borders and hierarchies), lower the speed limits, do what you will. I'm not likely to oppose you. I don't make it my cause because death, in itself, is not what concerns me. The body of the mediocre intruding on the primacy of the individual IS.

. . . but you cringe at the notion a handful of innocents will be executed for the benefit of ensuring murderers don't unfairly live out their lives while their victims don't.

I can't really see how the notion of "fairness" enters into it. The victims are already dead.

I suppose, since there's no scientific analysis telling us where genius is more likely to emerge, that someone who dies on a freeway, someone murdered by a sociopath, and someone falsely accused of a capital crime may all have an equal chance of being someone that civilization needs, a de Sade or a Brecht, a Giordano Bruno or a Samuel Beckett. But the first dies by his own agency (at least to a degree; it's possible that he didn't cause the fatal accident, but he voluntarily entered a system--the freeway--where such death was a real risk [granting that merely being alive is, almost by definition, risking death]). The second is not only NOT saved by the execution of his or her (alleged) murderer, but there's no evidence suggesting that other murderers are deterred by this execution. A case can be made that this murderer is deterred from future wrongdoing, but that only holds if the person executed is indisputably guilty.

In other words, relief from transit boredom is not just better than justice for the murdered, it is radically better.

I don't happen to believe that execution of the murderer = justice for the murdered; you're going to have to make that case independently before that sentence is anything more than the vindictive bleating of someone who's losing the argument, so tied to truisms that he mistakes his dearest axioms for indisputable fact.

You might also note that I'm probably not the only one who meets or exceeds those speed limits not to alleviate boredom, but to get where I'm required to be in the time allotted. Convenience, logistics, what have you are no more the "value" I'm defending than is "relief from transit boredom," but I think it's only proper to call you on the carpet for such rhetorical chicanery.

My feelings on the death penalty are mixed enough that I'm going to err on the side of my principles; one of those principles is that death by individual agency is preferable to death at the hand of that yawning sphincter we call the state.

Since you are a person of high principle, I'd think you would argue for the rights of the murdered as much as you would those of homemaker homosexuals.

I am a person of MY principles, inherited though they may be from anyone mentioned above, Nichiren Daishonin, and whatever leftover Catholicism I haven't yet managed to scrub away. I am of high principle in that I hold most highly to the principles that strike me as most urgent . . . according to no one's criteria, finally, but my own. So what you--a nominal theist, a conservative, a natural law advocate--think "high principle" means is as irrelevant as yesterday's baseball scores.

In point of fact, I'd be as satisfied with an elimination of civil marriage as I would be with equal rights for whatever homemaking combinations wish to make homes. What rights, though, could the murdered possibly have? They're DEAD!

. . . this one, but I had already addressed your rather smug assertion that speed is about "relief from boredom". Maybe amongst whatever brethren you surround yourself with, speeding for kicks is common, but it seems a precious rare phenomenon amongst my people.

I believe when we harm someone our moral debt is to them first, then to the state if the severity of our harm rises to the level of a legal violation. If harming someone creates a moral debt to them, then your view implies the absurdity that I can sit on a guy's chest beating his face in with a crow bar and as his teeth fly out and I continue to bash away all I have to do to make my moral debt to the poor bastard go away is keep hitting him until he dies.

Aristotle (EN, Book 1, Ch. 10) and Kant (Metaphysics of Morals) both argue that the dead can be harmed (neither is supposing the soul is immortal in making their arguments). The usual way of defending the notion is to distinguish objective and subjective desires and the conditions necessary to satisfy them. Objective desires are simply for certain states of affairs to occur--being aware of the occurrence is not necessary, such as when I desire that my kid does well in life rather than that I enjoy seeing him do well. Satisfying the desire to see him do well requires my continued existence while satisfying the desire that he do well does not. The distinction is everywhere in life if you look for it (Harry Potter's respect for Sirius Black's wishes, Private Ryan's debt to Capt. Miller; our concern to keep promises to relatives who have died, etc.).

I dare you to drive 45 mph on an open stretch of road for an hour when you could be going 65 ... or perhaps you don't know what the word boredom means? Everyone can get up a bit earlier and double their commute times ... go right up to 35 mph and hold there. We don't do that because it would drive us nuts (perhaps you live in an urban area and don't know what it is to travel 35 miles to work?); if our laws limited us to that, it would mean many innocent lives would be saved. No one wants to save those lives because no one wants to drive 35. Hell, no one wants to drive 55.

The deaths of those children are just as accidental as the deaths of those mistakenly executed; the intentional nature of the executioner's actions is completely irrelevant; mistakes in due process and those in the driving process are the same: they're mistakes.

Namely that execution necessarily equals maximum justice for the murder victims and their families and that achieving such justice is worth the cost of (some, a few, many?) innocent lives. Don’t you have to make those arguments before you can chide anyone for being inconsistent about how many lives they’re willing to sacrifice?

Now people do tend to have irrational emotional reactions to perceived risk, I’ll grant you that. For most folks the objective risk of getting in the car and driving to the store is vastly greater than eating all the potentially salmonella-tainted tomatoes they might find there. And yet because a thousand people became ill across the country from eating something (maybe – not tomatoes it now seems), we have another crisis of confidence in food safety. But the several thousand people who’ve died across the country in automobile accidents since the salmonella story broke don’t raise an eyebrow. Why? Probably because people feel they have control over their own driving. Rightly or wrongly they feel they’re not being put at risk by forces out of their control for reasons that don’t benefit them personally. Good luck getting most folks to feel the same way about the food industry – or the judicial system.

Most people are a lot more willing to tolerate their own mistakes than the mistakes of a faceless, powerful system. And of course some accidents are the result of a mistake, some aren’t. Some are the result of what we used to call an act of G*d. It’s kind of hard to hang that label on a mistaken execution, isn’t it?