We do what we can here. We’re not likely to agree to congregate outside the Huntsville unit the next time a particularly controversial execution takes place. Instead, here at ILP, we bring into the discussion our own personal experiences with the issue. Or we can discuss a film like Dead Man Walking, which powerfully presented both sides of this literally life and death issue.
Here we can think through the conflict and note to others where we draw the line ourselves between logical language, rational thinking and moral behavior.
There are hundreds or thousands of issues and arguments related to capital punishment. Can you give me some kind of concrete scenario revolving around a specific argument? I am willing to hallucinate that I would spend time instructing some Huntville protester for a thought experiment, but you are also asking me to choose out of mass of different arguments some random one to demonstrate my ideas about logic. And I am not sure why?
No, I am asking you [and others] to examine the extent to which any particular individual’s argument for or against the death penalty is embedded [problematically] in the lives that we live in any particular historical, cultural and experiential context.
And while there are clearly things able to be distinguished as being expressed logically or expressed illogically, as comporting rationally with the facts or not comporting rationally with the facts, when we shift gears to value judgments regarding capital punishment, things are often not nearly as black and white.
And the reason that there are “hundreds or thousands of issues and arguments related to capital punishment” is because there are any number of different contexts that each of us grew up in, exposing us to very, very different sets of variables. Issues relating to class and race and gender. Issues embedded in aggravating and mitigating circumstance. Issues embedded in police bungling, jury selection, and out and out fraud. And then all the folks who have been released from prison [on death row] because it was finally determined that they really were innocent all along. Or the extent to which it can be pinned down once and for all if the death penalty is the very embodiment of “cruel and unusual punishment”.
What can philosophers [or scientists] tell us here. And what is beyond their purview, their expertise, their wisdom?
And by the way, I have nowhere said whatever I say to them would be effective, let alone end the conflict, so I don’t understand why you are asking me to do this.
My point revolves around the likelihood that some will be impressed with your own moral and political narrative, while others will only be scornful of it. Why? How is this – these conflicting reactions – embedded in dasein?
So, why are you asking me to instruct these protesters about logic and why don’t you instruct them about dasein and contraptions?
Okay, imagine that I did. Here I am telling them that the choices that they make in their lives relating to value judgements are just so many ever and always subject to change existential contraptions in the No God world. Values that are no more necessarily virtuous than those who embrace just the opposite point of view. That “I” here really is just a historical and cultural and experiential construction, deconstruction and reconstruction from the cradle to the grave.
How would their reaction be all that different from the reactions of many here?
There would seem to come a time when you would have to acknowledge the limitations of “being logical” in the discussion. Which all of us would agree on. The part where only the language is critiqued vs. the part where the words intertwine with the world and the critiques become what I construe to be more or less “existential contraptions”.
And, for me, that revolves largely around the conflicting goods, derived from dasein out in a particular world where what you think you know is true may well butts heads with those who have the actual political power to enforce their own [conflicting] moral agenda.
Needless repetition.
Two points:
1] repetitive points can be needless for some or they can finally begin to sink in for others
2] there are always new members here at ILP for whom the points are not repetitive at all. They’re hearing them for the first time and may well have something to tell me that effectively challenges my own assumptions here.