More Executions? Are You Positive?

[feotakahari]

 I once tried to read about a guy called Gilbert Ryle who called himself a logical positivist. The only part I managed to understand was that you’re a logical positivist if you’d be willing to undergo surgery with a paralytic drug, a drug that prevents you from forming memories, and no anesthetic. You'd still feel all the pain, but no one would ever be able to prove it, and no future version of yourself or others would show any sign of having seen or experienced it, so by Ryle's standard, it never happened.

I think that’s the principle the American death penalty runs under. No one cares if the dying experience horrible pain. It's just about whether they demonstrate physical signs of pain before they expire, because that might call into question the morality of killing people.