> Euthanasia isn't a penalty for the euthanized -- it's a way of
> honoring the will of an individual who wishes not to be subjected to
> pain of injuries, illnesses, and/or futile treatments when death is
> imminent in any event. When an individual writes a will or makes a
> contract with his or her spouse arranging for euthanasia in a country
> where it is legal, the individual in question assumes the risk of
> errors on the part of the spouse and medical doctors. An innocent
> individual who is sentenced to death by miscarriage of justice cannot
> be said to have assumed the same risk as one who has made a
> contractual arrangement for euthanasia. Why should anyone be
> mistakenly sentenced to death and punished for a crime of which he or
> she is not guilty, when the abolition of death penalty can insure
> against such a possibility?
This argument is flawed. It hinges of the notion of voluntary consent (death with a consent = good, death withou a consent = bad). The euthanasia example may confound that issue - but let's consider another situation: armed robbery. The victim has no way of knowing whether the perp will kill or harm her at the end of the act, be there is a nontrivial chance that he will. Should she kill him to defend herself, is she has an opprtunity to do so? Clealry, the perp does not consent to be killed - he has all intentions to live through it, brag to his buddies about it, and come back to do it again. But that does not mean that the victim has no right to take a defensive action that has a high probability of killing the perp.
A better argument in this situation is the so-called Pascal's wager that takes into account the cognitive representations of the values of the outcomes and sets against the unknown probabilities of each outcome to occur. In Pascal's formulation, the argument goes as follows: you can either accept and live by religious faith or not. If you choose the former, you almost certainly loose much of the earthly life's pleasures, but there is a probability that you gain eternal life, as the faith says. If you reject faith, you gain the earthly life's pleasures, but you almost certainly loose the eternity. Since the eternal life is infinitely worth more than the earthly life, you choose the etrenal life even if its probability is slim.
In this case, you can argue along the same lines - that not harming an innocent person is so great that even a remote possibility of so doing outweighs the benefits of punishing the guilty. IMHO, that is the only defensible argument against the capital punishment in principle (as opposed to its application to a particular case or sets of cases). My only problem with it is that I cannot find any good and compelling reason why harming a potentially "innocent" - or in most circumstances less guily - person is such a horrible thing that need to be avoided at all cost.
Other frequently cited arguments do not hold, e.g.
- unequal application to particular groups - you do not have to abolish the death penaly, just apply iy equitably (in fact, executing the executives can be a good thing);
- it does not deter crime - who said that penalty has to deter? There are other functions of pnelatly, such incapacitation and retribution and death penalty achieves both;
- it is cruel - so is life, besides one man's cruelty is another man orgasmic pleasure; this also begs question, why we should abstain from doing cruel things? Or what cruel things are permissible and which are not? Why is animal experimentation (which is almost always cruel) permissible, and executing a criminal in swift and painless fashion is not?
- it "brutalizes" society - there is no evidence that death penalty has any effect on society (it neither deters crime nor "brutalizes") besides, should we ban anything that brutalizes society? Such as brutality free society is in fact, a mental hospital.
- human life is "sacred" or infinietly valuable so it should be preserved under any circumstances - that is an ethnocentric religious belief not a fact; if one does not belive that, the argumen falls apart; besides I can see plenty of situations when terminating a human life is better than not terminating it.
Wojtek