Position on Ethical Issue Essay

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Capital punishment is the method accepted and utilized by modern, civil society for the control and protection of its citizens. Capital punishment has been utilized since the dawn of civil society as a means to keep the peace and prevent citizens from committing crimes against one another and the state. In recent years, however, the modern liberal movement has sought to question the justifications behind capital punishment, especially that of the death penalty and its effectiveness in preventing crimes. Much argument and literature has been written about the topic and yet the conclusion remains the same, capital punishment is the most potent and practal means of keeping society civil and safe through the effects of deterence, retribution, and incapacitiation when necessary.

Deterence is societies initial response and argument for the use of capital punishment. Deterrence is the pricinciple that administered consequences for socially unacceptable action have the impact of preventing the desire to commit those actions within society (Ehrlich, 1972). Simply put, when certain behaviors have serious consequences, societies are less likely to commit those behaviors. Quintecential examples of this come from countries where capital punishment is especially harsh. For example, in Saudi Arabia anyone caught steeling has their hand cut off (Vogel, 1999). For crimes such as murder, rape or any other form of violence, those committing the acts are sentenced to death and their bodies displayed. While these consquences may seem harsh compared with the American system of justice, it only takes the comparison of crime rates to realize the full success of the practice.

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In Saudi Arabia the most common crime is theft, which accounts fro 47% of the crimes committed in the country (DeRouen, 2007). According to the international figures, the murder rate in Saudi Arabia averages 1.1 per 100,000 people. In the United States, the murder rate is 9.8 per 100,000 people (FBI, 2006). This when considering the numbers, the strict capital punishments utilized by Saudi Arabia clearly pervent the soaring crime rates that other nations experience.

Many would argue, however, that the figures alone might be deceptive. Some ideallists would propose, for instance, that if a country's capital punishment laws were truly working, then that country's crime should be all the way down to nothing and the laws would no longer be necessary. However, such an argument defeats the purpose of capital punishment deterrence, which is to make an example of crime when it does occur to deter others from committing the same crime.

The second argument in favor of capital punishment is that of retribution. Retribution is the response of victims to enact justice for the crime. Those in favor of capital punishment argue that by utilizing harsh punishments for the criminals, it prevents the citizens from taking justice into their own hands. For this argument people often site the robbery victim whose robber was let off only to be killed by his victim the next time the two encounter each other. This rogue pricinciple pushes society to continually monitor, try, and punish criminals.

The argument typically stated against retribution is that the most.....

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