(no subject)

[feotakahari]

I suppose there’s nothing contradictory about being anti-war and pro-death penalty. Maybe you want trials and sentencing before killing people. But it somehow feels emotionally dissonant to talk about all the people you want to execute for warring.

Comments

[random_thought_depository]

The death penalty probably kills fewer people, unless your legal code is very bloodthirsty or your society has almost but not quite eliminated war. If your legal system and overall society is working relatively well, being executed would be much easier to avoid than being killed in a war. The death penalty is much more selective about what sort of people it kills. The death penalty is much more predictable. The death penalty doesn't involve huge amounts of infrastructure destruction, doesn't divert significant chunks of society's total productivity into the manufacture and maintenance of otherwise economically unproductive weapons, armies, fortifications, etc., and probably doesn't overall warp your entire society around itself in the way war does. I definitely understand disapproving of both and basically disapprove of both myself, but the death penalty seems probably less bad in a lot of ways.