Capital Punishment Essay: Match Death with Death -- Argumentative Per

We Must Match Death with Death    For anyone living in Texas, it is common to hear about convicted criminals being sentenced to death. Is justice being served? When someone has committed a heinous murder, justice must prevail. But that ideal becomes harder to achieve as we scale the moral high ground and look all around, from behind the jail cell bars to the crushed life of the murdered victim. The following essay will focus on the proportionality of the death sentence as a form of punishment.       First of all, if there were no persons in the world, only things, there would be no values. There are values in the world only because there are persons: people who have not only desires , but also rationality and freedom. Something is valuable only relative to a human goal. Then, as the source of values, humans have dignity, which Immanuel Kant defines in his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals as something so valuable that nothing could transcend it in worth. It follows that to be human, to have dignity, one must value above all else those things which give you dignity. This means one must value absolutely the rationality, freedom, and autonomy of oneself, but also of other individuals. However; there are some crimes, some murders, committed with such violence and complete disregard for life, that we stop valuing the rationality, the freedom, and the autonomy of the murder so highly. The question is how much do we devalue the criminal?    Kant had some ideas about how to find out the proper level of punishment. First, guilt is a necessary condition for judicial punishment. That means that only the guilty may be punished. Second, guilt is a sufficient condition for punishment. All the guilty m... ...re severe than the death sentence, could a death sentence be an escape from a life sentence? However, if the goal were to give the most severe sentence wouldn't it be more accurate to find out what the criminal's idea of personal hell was? Severity is not the goal of punishment, rather retributivism and proportionality are. To give equal treatment to all, each person, guilty and not guilty, must be considered independently of utility, pity, and revenge. To accurately handle crime, the act and the actor must be understood. Once understood, a punishment ought to be meted out on the basis of whether or not it is proportional and appropriate to the crime at hand. Ultimately, the decision comes down to what a jury thinks is proportional. Because I think that there can be no other match than death for death, I believe that capital punishment is justified.