Capital Punishment (& Prison Abolition) | Philosophy Tube

"The more the problem was analysed, the sillier the solutions became"

I know that the death penalty does not reduce crimes, because most crimes are not rational, I am in favor of the death penalty, when the criminal is considered lethal and unrehabilitated, because keeping people in prison for life is a waste of resources, the prison is or should be a rehab center, and that implies that people should leave rehabilitated to follow the rules of society, What is the point of leaving a person in prison forever?
Why public money should be allocated to maintain an incorrigible criminal who no longer has any social function?
Not to mention that I personally prefer death to spending the rest of my life in prison.

Justice should be a reflection of the offense, in my humble opinion.

If a person abducts someone, r@pes them repeatedly, starves them, and then kills them? Then they receive it all as it was given. Steal money? Pay it all back to those they stole it from. Got caught with some drugs? Probation and so on.

Of course rational consideration should be taken into account based on circumstances.

Do on to others and all that, or so it's told.

I would LOVE if you made a playlist of your favorite songs. Because every single video ends with something amazing I've never heard.

JUST SAY YOURE A COMMUNIST

Awesome video & super informative. Keep it up, please!

What's disturbing is how desperate a person can become when actively petitioning for a reversal of the penalty.

How can I help? So happy to see I’m not alone

« Thé moment I realized those thoughts were coming from me I realized I had a choice about whether or not to indulge them » 👏

That end-of-video gag might have been my favorite ever, lol

This one pairs really well with Jacob Geller's video on the "The False Evolution of Execution Methods", anyone watching this should really give that one a look as well!

I feel very strongly that, yeah, maybe there are some people out there that deserve to die, but I don't trust the state with the power to decide who. I don't think I trust anyone with that power, not even myself.

"once it was murder one, why leave a witness?"

That bit from the start of Michael Mann's Heat does highlight the essential flaw of "tough on crime" standpoints. Because if you feel you can't get any worse, then punishment becomes anything but a deterrent.

Or to borrow another reasoning from another film. The hangman in Hateful 8. He argues that as a dispassionate executioner, he's the difference between justice and savage revenge. "Because justice delivered without dispassion is always in danger of not being justice at all." But he does ignore that most of "justice" has nothing to do with what makes society better. It's purely performative. The sentenced person's future is not what is at stake, it's all for the benefit of the audience.

Once we strip away the performance, the showbiz. It kind of feels like a scam. :/

Another great video. Your production decisions are awesome. From the makeup choice to the closing song, which plays as I write this and it is brilliant! To the fun chapter transition shot, which elicited in me what some might label a fetishistic response but I will argue to the death: a particular concern with feet is a healthy evolutionary trait, as It has always been (to more or less a degree) that a child's chance of survival is often dependent their mother's ability to run fast and long. QED: In the human brain, the mechanism for processing images of feet resides in very close proximity to areas processing sexual desires; this is not a coincidence, evolution does not roll the dice...but I digress from the task at hand of lavishing you with praise. Great topic, well presented. Brava! My dear, Brava!

Funny thing about Evans' execution. The folk singer Ewan MacColl wrote a song titled The Ballad of Tim Evans. The final line of the song is "It was Christy was the murderer and the judge and jury too." This part got cut out by a lot of broadcasters who used the song for news programs and documentaries, because it made them uncomfortable. We wouldn't want to use the free press to criticize our fair and just legal system, right?

Women can be hung

Whether or not the death penalty should be legal to me boils down to one question: what is the acceptable rate of "false positives"? Of people sentenced to death and killed who were actually innocent?

My answer is "zero", so we just shouldn't have it legal at all. Someone else may say "up to 49%, because that means we're doing more good than harm." Others may refuse to give a number - and if you're response is that, why don't you want to answer? My suspicion is because your answer is "zero" as well, but that would mean changing your opinion on the death penalty if you were to admit it.

i am of the belief that some people do deserve to die but we as people cannot come to a just consensus together and limit it in a logical way. i dont support the death penalty not because i dont think some people deserve it, but because theres no way to really know if we got it right without a shadow of a doubt even in cases that seem open and shut. im currently in the process of writing a story about a woman who is convicted of a series of crimes she did not commit and while she was not given the death penalty and the story overall has a happy ending, it has definetely made me consider crime and punishment in ways that are hard to articulate. crime and punishment is so fascinating for this reason. it is nearly unregulatable in a fair and just way all the time, forever. there will always be a moral issue somewhere. we cannot have a death penalty unless we have a way to know for certain that someone is guilty but... that's impossible. it is better to let a few horrible people live than sentence an innocent to death.

though this must be incredibly hypocritical of me to say now as the true antagonist of the story i am writing does in fact get the death penalty, (even though he dies before he can be executed by more... personal? methods) though its fiction and i dont leave much room for error there and that guy definetely does deserve to die.

this video is 2 years old so i feel comfortable commenting about my own bullshit and personal thoughts on this matter because i doubt anyone will even see this lmao. moral of the story: death penalty bad not because i have moral hangups about killing certain people but moreso because its not something people can regulate effectively without killing random people who didnt do anything.

"A world without prison does not seem so out there as it did before" -> loved it

PhilosophyTube: Prison reform, capital punishment abolition
Also PhilosophyTube: “I will kill your wife, I will kill your son, I will kill your infant daughter.”

I love that she replaces the picture of the Home Secretary Priti Patel with Emperor Palpatine, who, lest we forget, is another British person...

My problem with execution of the Nazi leaders is that, no English person was executed for the many Atrocities carried out by the British Empire...

There's a very real problem with how the legal system in general treats different types of people.
It's widely acknowledged that minority communities, in all countries. They are more likely to be arrested, charged, charged for more serious offences, convicted, jailed and jailed for longer terms than people from the Dominant ethnicity... In countries with the Death Penalty people from Racial minorities are far more likely to receive the Death Penalty and far more likely to be executed. In the US, a Black person who kills a White person is much, much more likely to be executed than White people who kill Black people.
And few people deny that reality.
But the same thing applies to Men.
Men are far more likely to be arrested, charged, charged with more serious offences, convicted, jailed and jailed for longer terms than women.
Men convicted of killing women receive longer terms than women convicted of killing men.
I know of one case of Insurance fraud involving a man and a woman. Both were equally involved; both pleaded guilty. Both were convicted of the same crime. But she received a Suspended sentence whereas he was sentenced to a year in prison..
I know of another case where a Mother beat her nine year old son so badly, the child is scarred for life. She then doused him with salt to stop the bleeding. Yet she walked out of court with full and unsupervised custody of the children. Would a father who violently assaulted a child ever get to see his children again?
And no one talks this gender bias

I feel like this video of yours, Abby, is the one that changed the most minds about the topic discussed.

Also, this look is... amazing!

What complicates matters for me, with regards to war criminals, national socialists and perpetrators of genocide is that so much of their crime is wrapped up with their government and the organizational body they belong to, like the army or the SS or the secret police.

They physically could not have committed such a crime by themselves. Genocide is made possible by the authority and resources that the government invests in the perpetrators.

Deterrence plays no role; the perpetrator, for example an SS officer, is operating under a different legal system where he is not a criminal. Psychologically, such individuals often believe they're acting for the greater good. They don't think it's wrong, they're willing to make sacrifices and anyway everyone around them supports their actions.

Reformation likewise is not a factor: they cannot commit the same crime again. Not without their government to support them.

So that just leaves retribution, which is the shakiest, most emotional of the 3 main reasons why criminals are punished. In this case I do want to say that it feels right, to know that the nazi's stood trial. It feels like a good thing, to read in a history book that the worst criminals in history were brought to justice. But the Holocaust wasn't even the worst genocide in the last century, right? Let alone the worst crime in history. So there is a certain hollowness to it.

We didn't so much bring the nazi's to justice, rather, we defeated Hitler and the nazi regime, and THEN we rounded up the survivors to make them stand trial. We didn't beat Stalin or Mao. It wasn't in the US or NATO geopolitical interest to fight them. I don't mean to say that, just because we didn't punish the architects of the Gulag, we should've excused the perpetrators of the Holocaust. But if successful military intervention is a prerequisite for justice... Oof.

War in pursuit of justice means legitimizing violence in order to inflict MORE violence, a double whammy of revenge and bloodshed. It's the sort of reasoning that led to the criminal, illegitimate Iraq invasion by Bush Jr and friends: "yeah but the guy we're fighting is really evil." Nevermind that the casus belli was smoke and lies, justice as a pretext for war is an inherent contradiction.

Maybe we can punish members of an evil regime after we beat them. But it makes me supremely uncomfortable, giving any western government the right to invade another nation in a war of aggression under the guise of pursuing justice.

Humans take joy in the sufferung of others, the juatificatuons they come up with are only to shield themselves from the reality of who they really are deep down. If people didnt like to see others suffer, we would stop. We would choose to stop. We choose violence becauase we enjoy perpetrating violence. As long as we enjoy violence, it wont ever end. Pacisfism is the cure to capitalism. Stop particpating in violence. And yes, you are a particpant if you are reafung this.

"Abigail, you look like Hel."
"I know, thank you."

Wow, that outro song is one of my favorites. Wild to find it on a philosophy video from a British philosopher

Against that midevil shit 💯

Constructive malice really would be a badass name for a boss

I loved reading your captions during the credits!

"Meyers-Briggs Astrology Type" :D

Any prison system that isn't focused absolutely on reform, is a problem. Here in the US, it is such a problem that it's become a source of slave labor. The prison industrial complex is a multi-billion-dollar industry. It is also the exception to the abolishment of slave labor, big fat "except" in both amendments. A tax funded industry at that.
I do feel there is a line for execution, I just don't know where it is, nor do I think anyone should have the power to choose. No matter how beneficial a power might be in one person's hands, we also have to consider how problematic that power is in the hands of the opposite type of person. Which is where everything gets really complicated.

To be fair, it is a good clip.

Abi you are a wonderful person. Thank you for sharing

Lifelong prison sentences are inhumane to the imprisoned and unfair to society (to bear the massive costs associated).
Actually humane executions, not the shit they pull in the US, are better in every way.

Mind you, that does not rely on deterrence, which is mostly bogus. It is purely the most efficient way of safekeeping society from people we declare irredeemable, while minimizing suffering on their part.

Honestly, while I understand that the death penalty can provide some closure, I oppose it on the grounds that the criminal justice system is flawed and comes to incorrect conclusions, and that means that innocent people will be killed for a crime they did not commit, and that is not acceptable.

Besides, if I wanted my abuser dead, I don’t need the state to do it, I just need some strychnine and a way into their baking soda. For legal reasons, that was a joke, I have no intentions of committing a murder.

If we actually gave people a salary they could live on and had proper support in place for people who can’t work there’d be a lot less crime but I don’t think a government that thinks that way is on the horizon tbh. Labour is not really left anymore they’re basically centre.
Poverty is so bad in this county the amount of people having to rely on food banks is sickening and we don’t have ENOUGH food banks. People are getting scurvy and other diseases from malnutrition. People are having to resort to shoplifting and then because they’re poor the courts are usually pretty biased against them. It is sickening.

It is MAD to me we didn’t abolish the death penalty until my parents were little kids.

This was a beautifully thoughtful and poignant video. Thank you for making it and for being candid with us!

How you gonna throw that banger at the end of this and not give the songs name in the description.

1964?! This made me do a quick search for when the last one was in the Netherlands, but that is also quite recent: 1952. Two men, one dutch the other german. Both convicted of war crimes.
Still,... to be hung?! I guess only the electric chair would be worse 😖

Murders Georg Shipman was an outlier and should never have been counted…

Gotta say i appreciate the line "as for ladies, we were burned at the stake"(emphasis mine). We're talking about history here so almost definitely all of those historical women were specifically cisgender women, so it a little throws me every time. Historically it is unlikely a trans woman would have been treated as a woman in death. But i think the line is a good one, because it is a casual, simple reinforcement that trans women are indeed women, and they don't need to separate themselves out when talking about women, even historically, even if you know that the group they are talking about is exclusively cis.

Thought provoking. women's reasons for murder have a tendency to be different to men (I think) as far as prison is concerned many are there for drug related crime, decriminalise drugs and they are out (many will do something else) and we used to have places where people who couldn't cope with life went, mental hospitals, but Thatcher gave us care in the community - the community is usually prison now at much greater expense. There was a guy (in Poole I think) who held up a building society. When he was asked why, he said it was just before Christmas and it would be much nicer in jail. The mental hospital where he would have gone traditionally is now a big housing estate. I'd like to think the turkeys thought of him when they were eating their Christmas lunch, but I doubt it.

Abby, you sacre me... I like it.

Right on. Thanks for sharing.

What I don't understand about your opinion is why can't capital punishment be a form of consequentialism, it is the ultimate deterer of crime especially armed robbery and homocide. It doesn't need to be given out for everything. So at the end of the day the only problem is maybe they're innocent, but that is by every judgement. The only difference is that ii more "permanent". However a life sentence is also equally permanent and even 5 years are full on judgment that could be wrong, but we still carry it out.

is it bad it took the 3rd time watching this vid to get "they can be hanged but not hung!" 😭

Could the consequentialist not argue that Retributivism is necessary to be considered to preserve society. IE, to punish someone, BOTH ideas must be satisfied, otherwise we will devolve into barbarians or something.