Hey everybody, tonight we're debating the death penalty and we are starting right now. With Jama Bayoran's opening statement, which would be eight minutes, Jama, thanks so much for being with us. The floor is all yours. Thanks so much. Making even a weak argument only in principle for the existence of capital punishment is no easier straightforward task on either moral or practical grounds. And bluntly, nor should it be when what's directly at stake is the very life of a human being, regardless of context. I hope I'm able to do so in a way that meaningfully improves the dialogue around increasing basic equity, particularly racial equity in the United States and countries that have a similarly broken punitive system and furthermore increases the sanctions around the use of the death penalty as well as the demandingness which we consider evidence suitable for enacting it on people. I want to begin by sketching out the shape the arguments around capital punishment have taken. The major concerns surrounding its moral permissibility are twofold. First, there is the in-principle concern surrounding under what grounds it should be morally permissible at all. The two common defenses given for its moral permissibility, and as remarked upon by multiple philosophers such as Finkelstein, Brooks, McDowell, Nathanson and others, are the retributivist and deterrent-based defenses, which I will go on to define shortly. Roughly one is that one ought to be punished in a lex talionis perhaps fastened for their crimes committed, and the other one has to do with the way in which punishment may deter future offenders. However, as Finkelstein shows and as Sunday will be expanding upon, neither of these two justifications for capital punishment actually hold up. However, capital punishment may still be acceptable and even mandated by the conditions of the social contract in a Hobbesian sense when we're looking at the in-principle case. This is the case in which we are no longer considering the actual inaction of capital punishment within morally dubious structures or existing frameworks, but rather whether or not it ought to be made available as a punishment at all for a state that has moral right on its side, which may in fact be a condition that is not often met in the first place. My argument, however, to compliment Sundays will be focusing more on the practical aspects of the implementation of capital punishment. I follow Tom Brooks's argument, the retributivist positions around punishment, and again, Brooks at all are actually against capital punishment both in practice and in principle. I follow Tom Brooks's argument that retreatist positions around punishment, even capital punishment, falling down strictly in the practical sense because of their inequitable and appalling distribution, especially along racial lines, is still merely, but importantly, a structural claim. Indeed, the argument could even be made that such punishments, when they take the form of so-called moral sanctions meted out by a state with no remaining moral authority, ought to be prohibited altogether. Even still, this doesn't necessarily commit us to abandon any in principle position about capital punishment, including that it ought to in theory exist. I take this argument a step further to argue that in fact, if we maintain the capital punishment ought to exist, perhaps on contractarian grounds, we're forced to look more carefully at the dire consequences of its existing in a system, whereby the basic condition that if X be deprived of their very life, this must occur at the hands of a legitimate authority, is called into question. This may be the benefit to my argument for either side, as odious as it may be to my interlocutors in principle. There's a wonderful quote from Daniel Polesby to this end that Brooks reiterates. It states, being struck by lightning is cruel because it is painful and unusual and because it seldom happens, but is it unconstitutional? I believe that focusing in on the in principle concerns as opposed to the practical vows of injustice that ought to unite both camps actually takes away from bringing to relief what's at stake in the misapplication of capital punishment. We may in fact only be able to bring these injustices in practice into relief by seriously considering the possibility in principle for it to be retained. Maybe then we'll see that the injustices are endemic to the system rather than the in theory practice of having to end someone's life under extreme circumstances. Before continuing, there's some terminology that's going to be important for both my argument and for Sundays. Two common approaches, the moral permissibility of capital punishments or punishments more generally, centralize the concepts of deterrence and retributivism. Law and philosophy professor Claire Finkelstein describes the first as a justification of punishment only where quotes punishing an offender would deter other potential criminals from committing crimes in the future and end quote and the latter as a justification for punishment only where said punishment is justified to the extent that the criminal deserves to be punished often as most simple articulation taking the form of lex talionis or law of retaliation. The major concern that Finkelstein has with the first or deterrence approach is that offloading deterrence onto any other human being which is the usual track deterrence oriented supporters of capital punishment take is morally impermissible. What this means is that if I fail to grant a criminal clemency under the law for instance by not granting them bail would ought to be governing this decision is a moral evaluation of the criminals actions not as Finkelstein argues a simple utilitarian calculation that whether I grant them bail or not may encourage or discourage someone else from offending. If we were to grant them bail at all we would do so only whereby they themselves would not use that as an opportunity to reoffend. This aligns with the idea that we must act on someone in light of their own moral desserts and stats not in light of a third party thus not using the person on whom we're acting per Finkelstein as a mere means in the Kantian sense. It is for this reason too that I can't torture someone even if it would massively benefit a large group of people. When extended out to capital punishment the deterrence effect of killing certain criminals in order to deter other moral offenders is therefore not morally defensible under many frameworks. Conversely maybe the retributivist approach would be more sufficient to make the argument for capital punishment but even if instead of lex talionis we merely want to inflict a punishment on an offender that within moral reason the balance of law reflects the crime for Finkelstein justifying any particular act using a proportionality rationale wouldn't make sense. So for instance we have the moral intuition that lesser retributive acts such as returning malicious or small petty crimes or assaults is not justifiable meanwhile placing someone in non-consensual confinement for life is. Therefore there has to be something more powerful and morally consistent undergirding any system that allows for capital punishment such an existence for such as the existence of the social contract itself for instance. This is a point that we'll be further expanding upon. I want to note in conclusion that even in a morally inadequate and corrupted system punishments will be needed out however these punishments may be disproportionate to the crimes that they are responding to and often cause undue suffering both for the people that they are needed out upon and for those surrounding those people. Clearly if we are incredibly demanding around the conditions required for depriving somebody of liberty or even life we would find capital punishment to be a very rare occurrence indeed. One wonders in these rare occurrence whereby offenders are suddenly capable whereby we're able to determine on the nature of offenders crimes using things such as DNA evidence or we know that that person is in the very rare instance beyond resuscitation into normal existence. We may in fact be forced into a choice between something which causes lifelong suffering and something which merely quietly and calmly ends that person's life and ensures that everything about their existence was dealt with in a fair and equitable way. These are extremely difficult moral considerations and what punishment ought to occur in what instance in a non-ideal system which itself is not necessarily in a place to be morally adjudicating at all is a complex set of questions. That's pretty much summarizes my position. Thank you very much Jalma and what we will do is kick it over to the you could say against side regarding the death penalty in particular and want to let you know as well our guests are linked in the description folks and so whether you be listening via youtube or if you're listening via podcast want to let you know we put the links of our guests in the description box of the podcast as well and we highly encourage you to check out the links of our guests and so just a quick little explanation of the openings folks want to let you know that it's going to be eight minutes from each side flipping back and forth and so now we are going to kick it over to Dylan Burns welcome Dylan for the first time here we're thrilled to have you and Dylan will have eight minutes as he'll be arguing against the death penalty thanks so much the floor is all yours. Thank you I'm happy I finally have an opportunity to talk about the death penalty it's an issue I care deeply about it's probably one of my most deeply held personal beliefs so the thing I always found beautiful about the American justice system is how from its foundation the state tried to in the creation of our state was primarily focused when it came to our criminal justice system upon the person being accused of crime and making sure they got their their issues heard making sure they got a fair trial and they were able to be able to be seen by their peers before being locked away from society and I found that to be a very beautiful thing because a lot of states really want to have a lot of power over their judicial systems a lot of times in authoritarian governments like say Bashar al-Assad Saudi Arabia the Islamic Republic of Iran and North Korea the the control of judicial system is extremely important because you want to be able to lock away the people you want to and I found that to be a very beautiful thing to prioritize those being accused and when you consider the fact that on the low end 4.1% of people currently on death row are innocent it makes you ponder I'm not saying that we should never be able to lock up somebody who is possibly innocent we anytime we lock somebody up you're locking someone who's possibly innocent upon further review later down the road and as we continue to develop new technologies to investigate cases that will continue to happen since there will be no foolproof method but if we are to revisit cases and find out after the fact after appeals that these people are actually innocent that we find out that the people that we've put to death are actually innocent that means we're using the state to kill innocent individuals not who have not done anything wrong besides possibly being at the wrong place at the wrong time and as much as being given freedom or told after the fact you're not guilty dumping ashes out the window is not freedom for anybody in reality and this is just one of many reasons why I oppose the death penalty the next one would probably be its historical racist applications so if you were to do any amount of studying the death penalty you'd find out that it's been disproportionately used against black people upon any study that's ever reviewed this topic not only hasn't been disproportionately used against black people you can look at certain institutions like pennsylvania which i believe it's 70 to 80 percent or in the u.s military it's 86 percent of the people in the u.s military that's been sentenced to death or actually african-american not only is that the fact but in fact if there is a white victim of a crime it is much more likely that you will be sentenced to death than if it's a black victim like the rest of our criminal justice system racism is seeped in deep and when we give the government the power to sentence people to life or death once we have confined them and they no longer are threat to society that racism is racism is going to seep into convictions this has also been used historically even though i probably not going to talk about this i do want to make note of this against disabled people mentally disabled people who have been forced convictions were forced out of them and eventually sentenced to death there's many really tragic cases from the 1950s and onward of this happening and there's rare instances it doesn't happen as much today but it still does happen today where certain disabled individuals around the world even not as much as the united states this still happens now i'm framing this towards more of an american model because it's hard to look at a lot of other countries when it comes to the death penalty because most countries we're in line with when it comes to the death penalty or not countries you really want to be in groups with we're talking Saudi Arabia Bashar al-Assad the Islamic Republic of Iran China North Korea and other governments of an authoritarian nature have been using a death penalty and they have been using it quite openly towards dissidents of the state and of course people who are opposed of a certain manner then of course just common of the way criminals a lot of the rest of the world has not done this as time has gone on they have drifted away from it because they have all realized that in reality it doesn't seem that the death penalty seems to be a deterrence of crime in fact societies that abolish the death penalty statistically continue to have decreasing crime rates within their societies and when you look at the states in the united states like mine mariland which has abolished the death penalty there doesn't seem to be really any statistical difference between those who have abolished the death penalty and those who have not abolished the death penalty so if it's not having any effect on deterrence then really the only reason you would have the death penalty in places this kind of euphoric feeling of revenge which is certainly not the type of criminal justice system i would like to have but i think it is the one that has led to 20 of the world's prison population existing in the united states and speaking of mariland which is my home state i have done a lot of studying about mariland uh the death penalty in mariland before of course we abolished it and even in just our state alone which is the state i've done the most research in because it's the one i work in i work in mariland politics we used to be paying 37 million dollars per execution in the state of mariland to actually get this done so not only is no real deterrence done not only is it applied in a racist manner and not only do we use the state to kill innocent people it's also in many occasions much more expensive than just housing the people we would have killed anyway and the reason why is because we really love in this country giving people in our criminal justice system the ability to appeal which is good but those appeals cost money and people are going to of course appeal as much as possible if they are on death row anyone would want to avoid death and i would like to say uh in conclusion well actually no i have two more points i missed these so let me get through these quickly so ultimately i do think there's going to be a few uh points brought against me but one i wanted to make sure that i got out of the way right off the bat so i don't have to do with these thought experiments is well dylan this is all fun and games but are you telling me that said monster the boston bomber osama bin laden ate off hitler if you would have captured them would we have not sentenced such individuals to death i think putting these structures in place that would have sentenced these people to death which may have deserved it will ultimately be abused in racist manners when you talk to people who who um like house or criminal justice system and you'll and you'll say well okay we allow for hitler well then someone will noticeably what about the serial killer it was like well the serial killer makes sense well what about the brutal murderer and rapist well they make sense too and eventually you broaden this list that will eventually end to more innocent people dying and ultimately i would also like to say that i think having people who commit horrific crimes have to live with the reality of their decisions then be given the relief of inky blackness is actually something i would personally feel has a good sense of justice when i think of the the person who raped me when i was a child i would much rather than have to live with the reality of the impact they had on society with their actions then giving them a quick out with the death penalty and uh i have more i could go on to i can go into specifics specifics of the data a lot of my data comes from like the university of maryland the university of north carolina and the uh a c l u so if anybody would like to ask for any of my sources on my data i'd be glad to source them to anybody who came in my community in my discord thank you thank you very much very much dylan and want to let you know folks no matter what walk of life you were from no matter where you stand on this issue we're all the issues we host want to let you know we really do hope you feel welcome here we're glad you're here and we are at moderated debate a neutral platform hosting debates on science religion and politics and so with that we are going to kick it over to thanks so much president sunday the floor is all yours for your eight minutes so opening statement thank you james and a very well said by dylan so to begin today the death penalty is lawfully administered only by the state and the modern state holds by a practical consensus the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence which is really to say there exists no greater authority to hold it accountable for whatever violence it chooses to deploy the state exists as it were in the state of nature and it might seem that while our opponents are burdened with the task of constructing an argument for why the state should restrict itself from enacting a certain kind of violence upon its subject from the state's vantage we find ourselves not even obligated to entertain it it is politics which encompasses morality not vice versa the state defines the normal situation and may choose or choose not to choose as the weimar republic did to deploy any methods even exceptional ones in order to sustain it if anyone finds this dubious i encourage them to read book five of lucidity's history of the peloponnesian war to see what illustrious company they're in however i am betting that what unites both sides in this debate is ultimately not a justification for the state or state action but a vision for that norm a vision for the kind of situation that we should want to be normal and so in a non-trivial sense i regard this debate as an internal debate concerning whether the death penalty is compatible with a norm and ethic perhaps even a sense of justice that we should both like to see prevail so to echo jama the state as it exists today may very well be ethically impoverished and lacking legitimacy so the argument i'm going to present here should not be interpreted at all as an apology for any existing penal system or government activity thus i won't be defending either of the two most common justifications deterrence or retribution commonly deployed for harsh punishments like the death penalty as well as lengthy imprisonment mutilation torture etc for the same reasons as our opponents will likely echo that not only are they inadequate as justifications within that ethic they're easily found upon examination to be odious to it to quickly reiterate deterrence fails because it contains no principle to limit to whom or to what extent punishments may be administered so long as they are effective in deterring further crime while retribution fails despite what i think is the correct intuition that the punishment should match the crime because it contains no principle to prevent moral absurdities like administering rape to punish rape or as it were murder to punish murder an example which lays spectacularly bare the limits of a retributive approach in that it finds itself only able to excessively punish small crimes while being unable to meet the worst it is surely not a trivial part of the wrong done to a victim of rape or murder in addition to the corporeal harm that they endure that they were also raped and or murdered liberal philosophers like claire finkelstein mentioned by jamal already have proposed a corrective in the contractarian justification which which runs that just as a person consents to reap the benefits of the rules of a community they also consent to the punishments by which that community enforces those rules this argument avoids the aforementioned problems and that retribution is not only justified but consented to by the punished who have tacitly endorsed the lawful repercussions of their actions by enjoying the laws benefits as well as successfully limiting the deterrent use of punishment only to those who deserve it i like this argument but it's not sufficient and it's hard it's not hard to see why first tacit consent only applies where we have the freedom and the ability to choose otherwise and in this world of increasingly closed borders and economic disparity that's hardly a given and second there's still no necessary connection to extremely final forms of punishment like the death penalty or even life imprisonment why well because there's no intrinsic reason to think that someone who breaks the social contract can't be reformed into upholding it again later and it's possible that softer punishments might be as effective or ineffective at deterring crime as execution this argument needs to be augmented because where it really fails is in the impoverished view of human relationships it implies by restricting the task of justice to enticing and enforcing conformity to a set of community sustaining rules committing in effect the opposite excess of the retributist who prioritizes revenge above all else by limiting justice to the needs of deterrence alone to illustrate why this is a problem consider a man in prison guilty of rape and murder who feels no remorse for whom all attempts to convince him that he should have remorse have failed so that a restorativeist restorativeist approach pardon is in vain and who furthermore takes pleasure in tormenting his fellow inmates and prison attendees with gleeful and vivid accounts of his crimes and who additionally claims to laugh every chance he gets at the horror he has wrought upon his victims and their families such men exist and in my country we are so obsessed with prolonging their lives that we forget that the crime of murder isn't exhausted by the bare fact of loss and that the dead can still suffer how human beings are rational animals just as our rational wills extend beyond our physical bodies in space through things like property relationships etc they extend beyond our bodies in time we make plans and have hopes for the future other animals can be observed to experience pain at the loss of a companion but we experience equal pain at the loss of and affronts to their spirit murder isn't simply the killing of a speaking contract making body it's the killing of all a soul aspire to do and be and perhaps everyone they aspire to make and even as a dead negative that can still be wronged the murderer can laugh and by so doing stamps on his victims will his own here the death penalty may present itself as not simply justifiable but as a moral duty not retribution but cessation not to deter future atrocities but to terminate atrocities ongoing not to avenge the violently wronged or the dead but to spare the innocent and the living and not just the innocent living because this justification has an additional feature to keep an incorrigible murderer forever caged out of an obsessive need to preserve his metabolism at all costs is to do him unfathomable violence he is a human being and author of his actions the results of which have been desired and chosen by his rational mind to treat him not as a doer of wrong who could equally have been a doer of right but as a patient as a malfunctioning body without a will of its own which much be which must be hijacked by a better will not his own is to deny his humanity and to affront his own dignity in the same way he affronts that of his victim by laughing and to kill his humanity and his soul for the sake of his flesh there is as much difference between these as there is between fact and justice and it and it is as abhorrent to conflate the former as it is the latter to such a one we render not only a punishment by killing him but an honor this was hagel's argument by contrast to hide him away with with others similarly guilty away from the world with no future no human future at least to suffer endless attempts to hijack his body with a rationale not his own through therapies and treatments however well intentioned is to reduce him to a mule you've killed him all the same or worse you condemned him to a living death before his inevitable natural one which he will meet not as a man but as a beast and I don't know if I have any time left or gone over but I yield whatever I've got left thank you you got it thank you very much president sunday and we are going to kick it over to the last opening statement but before we do kick it over to dr ben want to let you know we are pumped for this friday folks as destiny will be returning he'll be debating brenton and in particular it'll be destiny's moral system on trial so we are excited for that folks and want to remind you hey hit that subscribe button and that notification button so you don't miss that one live it's going to be a blast and so dr ben thanks so much the floor is all yours thanks james uh so I guess um you know called me old fashioned here but I don't actually think you need a good reason not to kill people I think you need a very very very good reason to kill people um now such reasons exist uh if you're in a back alley and someone is coming at you with a knife uh and crucially you cannot stop them without killing them then you have a very very very good reason if nazis have invaded your country and you can only beat them back by taking their lives then again you know you have such a reason but what we're being asked to contemplate tonight is the idea of that it's we sometimes have a very very good reason we've somehow cleared that immense threshold of justification for snuffing out the lives of well-secured prisoners uh and I have a hard time imagining anything uh that would that would justify that uh now uh this this is uh this is complicated in a couple of ways uh one of which uh is that I think there's a way that somebody could interpret the topic the debate tonight uh on which uh xiaoman sunday uh actually agree with us uh which is that if i'm hearing correctly I think they agree that whether or not the death penalty can exist in principle uh it at least should not exist in the contemporary united states which which is not a not a small concession if we're all if we're all death penalty abolitionists in uh in the actual case then that really narrows the the scope of the disagreement and uh again I'm not certain that that's their position I think that is from what I've heard I think it's worth taking a moment to circle and underline the reasons why it would follow from I think the things that Dylan has said the things I think gentlemen sunday have agreed to uh that uh the death penalty should be abolished in the contemporary united states uh because when we hear that there are severe racial imbalances in applying the death penalty that there are numerous cases of human beings killed by the state who later turn out to be innocent um and so on uh some death penalty apologists respond by saying that these are reasons to just you know say okay look these aren't reasons not to have the death penalty these are reasons just to reform the criminal justice system as a whole after all the same factors can lead to unjust or excessive imprisonment you know just like they can lead to the death penalty so we wouldn't solve the problem by just abolishing the death penalty and fair enough we do very badly need to reform the criminal justice system as a whole uh in some very deep and radical ways uh but all of this is a reason for the united states at least not to have the death penalty in the same way that if you have an agent relative named sam who wants to keep a gun in his home for the sake of self-defense uh and you're trying to decide whether to let him do that you know for a fact that sam is half blind extremely paranoid more than a little bit racist and who's repeatedly shot at the mailman uh all of that even if you think some people should be allowed to whole have guns in their house for the sake of self-defense all of those would be really good reasons not to let sam have a gun in his house um now i would argue that the issue about unjust conviction is not just a reason that the united states should not have the death penalty it's a reason that no uh possible future country no society should have the death penalty i'm a socialist but you're not going to find me claiming that in some future socialist utopia nobody is ever going to be wrongly convicted humans institutions are just too fallible for us to be able to be confident that this is ever uh going to be the case and someone sentenced to life in prison who's exonerated decades later can at least get part of their life back whereas without resurrection for the dead uh there's simply no equivalent for capital punishment another way that this uh that this debate is uh has been complicated given the opening statements is that uh the reasons that almost everybody who supports the death penalty supports the death penalty are reasons that the of the other side has disowned uh that you know standard defenses as the death penalty involve some combination of retribution and and deterrence and we've heard that gentlemen sunday don't actually believe in either of those things i would argue that if you listen closely uh what sunday said at the end did sound pretty retributive-ish to me but he at least says that you know says that he doesn't but since again almost anybody who supports the death penalty is going to support them for this reason uh it is uh it's worth uh it's worth thinking through uh some of the reasons beyond the content ones that they mentioned uh that these uh that these don't hold water uh so as dylan has mentioned the statistical evidence for deterrence simply isn't there states with the death penalty do not in fact have lower murder rates than states without the death penalty countries with the death penalty uh like canada where our opponents belive both live uh don't have higher murder rates than countries without the death penalty it's just barely possible that they're confounding factors masking some real deterrence effects but even if that were true it wouldn't matter if a combination of different economic circumstances of no death penalty can bring about a lower murder rate than we'd have with the combination of a death penalty with the kind of economic conditions prevailing to death penalty states then the moral imperative to pursue an economic strategy for lowering crime rather than resorting to a barbaric practice like the death penalty to achieve the same end would be overwhelming some death penalty uh proponents uh and again i'm glad our opponents you know haven't uh stooped to this uh try to argue that we have good intuitive reasons to guess that the death penalty uh works as a deterrent even if that doesn't show up in the statistics uh so there is something that you often find in uh essays defending the death penalty where uh you know well they'll make this analogy well the death penalty is like a lighthouse we only know how many shipwrecks there are we don't know how many ships are saved uh by lighthouses but of course if we rip down all the lighthouses in the west coast and kept all the lighthouses on the east coast we would have excellent statistical data very quickly on how effective they were uh or they weren't uh so as far as uh as far as where tribute of dessert goes this is where uh there this is where my opponents uh seem to be the most ambiguous at least to me maybe it'll be cleared up later uh because uh because we still heard uh you know we heard that the punishment should fit the crime uh and and so there still seems to be some idea that even if it's not exactly about retaliation that you know people should be punished in kind which they've disowned uh that there should at least be some sort of proportionality principle and this is part of why we should have the death penalty for the worst offenses now I know I'm running up to time so let me just quickly say uh that um that to see why there's no straight road from the worst crime should get the worst punishment to the death penalty should be among the array of available punishments uh think you know forgive me this is too silly but think about the classic film the princess bride at the end uh at the end of the movie uh Wesley challenges the prince to a duel not to the death but to the pain he starts out describing what this means and he says the first thing you lose will be your feet and your hands at the wrist followed by your tongue and then your left eye and the prince interrupts and he says and then my right eye and then my ears should we gotta get on with it wrong Wesley replies your ears you keep so that every shriek of every child shall be yours to cherish every babe that weeps in fear at your approach every woman that cries dear god what is that thing will reverberate forever in your perfect ears so should the justice system include a to the pain punishment uh well if you going on this principle that um that the worst crime should get the worst punishment that the punishment should fit the crime in that sense you might think so because after all not all murders or even created equal some are much more savage and depraved than others and so you might think that the lesser murder should get the death penalty and the worst murder should get this and of course what this silly example shows us is that what the principle that the worst crime should get the worst punishment doesn't really tell us a thing about what that worst punishment should be just like we all presumably agree that uh the to the pain punishment should not be on the books uh I think we would argue on our side uh that the state should not have the power no human institution should have the power uh to take the life of a well-secured prisoner nothing would justify that all right we will jump into the open conversation folks and want to give you a friendly reminder all of our guests are linked in the description so if you want to hear more you can hear more by clicking on those links we appreciate our guests want to remind you friendly reminder out there we want you to attack the arguments rather than the people so thanks so much for being your friendly selves out there and we'll jump into open dialogue the floor is all yours so uh jaman in your opening I heard something about us about the social contract uh in sunday statement it seemed like he was contemplated in a social contract based argument for the death penalty but i wasn't quite clear on whether he was dismissing it entirely or just saying that that this doesn't give us the whole reason you know for for the death penalty but uh would one of you like to expand on that argument well um then i'm gonna yeah i'm gonna have sunday kind of expand on his argument his argument is slightly different than mine and talks about the principal case versus mine talks about some of the nuances of um what things would look like in practice and why i may not be tenable currently um i had a few things i wanted to discuss with you in a more kind of fine grained way so maybe i'll have sunday open and then i might follow up if that's if that's all right uh sure but just just to be clear like was was your argument because both of you spent a lot of time talking about all the arguments for the death penalty that don't work which i appreciate yeah but i heard a lot less about which arguments uh do work so i kind of got a humanitarian argument from you at the end yes so so what i would say in relation to that is that um sunday's in principal case for the fact that there may be instances in which the dent death penalty may still obtain these kind of extremely rare and specific instances forces us to think on a practical level using a kind of pragmatist approach almost about the nature of the injustices in the current system is not just oh we should think about them instead it's that even you know there's a sort of uh tendency in philosophy which i think is actually not a terrible one which is to say if i were to try to support this almost intolerable thing and i were to still find some reason why i couldn't just completely dismiss it that if i put pressure on that point is going to reveal what's troubling about the system overall and so on a practical level what i'm concerned about um the proportionality rationale definitely comes in play into play in terms of retribution arguments i don't think the state is a legitimate moral authority as it stands and so the idea of it it's engaging in a retributive act strikes me as absurd even more so an individual having a desire for that kind of act to kind of back up that sort of rhetoric strikes me as doubly absurd however the only part of the proportionality rationale that i want to maintain that i think is interesting is that we want to make sure that the response to a crime doesn't lead to mindless suffering and worsening of conditions overall within the existing system i ideally would not want to see a heavily morally illegitimate state a compromised state meet out punishment and yet if that state is not meeting out capital punishment it's meeting out other punishments instead and we need to be sure that there's something uniquely awful about capital punishment compared to for instance putting someone in solitary confinement and causing extraordinary undue suffering to them and the people around them for life for instance and we also need to make sure that we know why one is appropriate and why the other one isn't by forcing us to consider capital punishment and keeping it on the table as a possible response we're forced to consider what's uniquely awful or or not awful about it and my argument is that there are actually things worse than capital punishment on a practical level and revealing what happens when we look at this in terms of um the souls and the uh the the meaningful nature people's existences beyond merely you know bad thing happened now we need to fix it you know this this happened now we need to deter from happening else we actually look at what's at stake for people we start to realize there are things far worse than death and so basically I'm taking Sundays in principle stronger stance and applying it in a weaker sense to a system where really there's no legitimate moral authority to meet out any punishment but if they're it's going to meet out punishment there's nothing in my mind that makes capital punishment the worst punishment that could be needed out I think there are worse things currently existing so that's kind of um in extreme cases and again I would take the instances of meeting out capital punishment down to basically one and maybe every 100 years and I would only want this to occur if we had empirical evidence like DNA testing that that person was actually there and had committed the crime and we had number of years of very very careful empirical research into the fact that person could not be brought back or resuscitated into a functional stance again and if we knew they did it and we knew that it was the rare instance where we couldn't do anything um to rehabilitate them then I think there are things worse than death that's what I'm trying to say and I'm making a very case for a very rare rare application of this so so do you think that just just just to add to that quickly um and again like these rare cases are exceedingly rare and I would agree with and anyone who says that we should absolutely limit the death penalty an absolute tiny stringent minority of cases but there are cases um that do fit the bill Jeffrey Dahmer is is a paradigmatic one where we do in fact have both conclusive evidence and a confession and a remorseless culprit so it's yeah may I just add one addendum to that I think it's unacceptable at this point given that we have DNA testing to convict anyone in such a way as ensures either brutal isolatory lifetime imprisonment or the death penalty without effective DNA testing to that such that we know they committed the crime being in place first like I think that has to be you said that a couple years a couple times about like we know they committed the crime given DNA testing but of course uh you know it is uh it's it's not uncommon you know like like many of the cases of innocent people who who have been executed uh that there is um you know some method of physical evidence sure about which like crazy amounts of confidence were projected that you had some you know you had expert witnesses come and say no no no given this bit of you know given DNA given other things you know we could be really sure and then it comes out you know 20 years later that uh that there was a whole string of people who were you know convicted based on this and it's actually not very good so I want to say you're totally right about that but the only addendum to that is that so then think about this that person might be imprisoned for life in solitary confinement in horrific conditions this is a problem about how we judge certainty period across the board not just in relation to capital punishment all of their sorts of punishments severe punishments the state could meet out and so I think that um that's an important consideration and one that we ought to think about when we realize the state is still severely punishing innocent people in ways that are in my opinion worse than death so I don't want to add to that yeah I mean I know Dilla wants to get it on this but I just want to really quickly say I'm not um you know I think that one reason you know why capital punishment would be worse than life in prison which I don't think should be equated with life in in solitary confinement I mean I think that we have an actually existing you know judicial systems you know you know I think you know I think that there are many countries that that don't do that you know so so those there's no reason that the the options you know should should be limited to death penalty or solitary confinement but also but as far as just life in prison taking out the solitary confinement aspect like one pretty straightforward reason why the lack of certainty would be more troubling for death than for for life imprisonment is is if you have you know 20 years into a life term if the if the conviction is is overturned then that person can still you know can still get some of their life back whereas once the death penalty has been applied it's irreversible. The problem here is that so much so much is resting on this absolute denial there being a possibility of certainty and there are simply cases where we do have certainty. Well I think I think that the question isn't so much whether certainty can exist in any case but what you want the rules of the system to be because the threshold can't be DNA evidence for the reasons that we're talking about that can't be the threshold for certainty if we're coming up with rules rather than just thinking about instances. If the if the threshold is that some decision maker feels very very very sure we know that that can't be the threshold either we have too many real life cases of convictions being posthumously overturned where that held if the threshold is a confession for reasons that Dylan you know mentioned and other reasons that can't be the threshold either because we have too many real cases of life cases of a false confession so I wouldn't deny that there are instances in which I would feel certain and I don't think it's irrational to feel certain but when we're talking about the design of institutions you know we we want we want there to be to be clear rules and not just judgment calls but I mean that is a clear rule that's a black and white distinction do we have certainty or doing not well no but the but where I'm saying that you don't have a clear rule is when we have certainty right what's the rule for what legal accounts as the as have it started the thing is what always will happen is there'll be this new technology and criminal justice be like well now we have video evidence where now we have they just told us straight up then why punish anyone for anything at all well that's because I agree because we need to have some sort of punishment on the whole to protect society because nine times because it's a really good chance that when we convict somebody they were guilty of the crime vast majority of the time that's the case let me let me finish please first time I've talked since my interest over it um but having a safe a safety kind of trigger in place that if it turns out on further review after the fact that they were innocent then we can always pull the lever to let them out of prison but if they're dead that's impossible and when we give the state the power to kill people we always like will say well in certain instances we need to do it when we have an irreviewable proof when somebody's put on death row that's the state assuming we have irreviewable proof that we're pretty damn confident that this person was guilty when we get to convictions that's supposed to be the case but historically and presently that doesn't seem to be the case when I said 4.1 percent of people on death row are innocent that was the lowest possible number that's at least 4.1 percent of people on death row are innocent that's not a number any nation should be proud of and I don't see how keeping it how we could really like move that number down to an acceptable margin so Dylan um part of the difficulty that I'm having is I basically mostly agree with you so the debate that we're having right now is should 0.00000001 percent of people actually be positioned such that they are up for capital punishment versus should zero be in that position and what's at stake in terms of suffering and long-term consequences for both parties and reversibility concerns so the problem that I'm having is there's also a practical intuition that when you deal with things like the United when you deal with things like the criminal justice system in the United States that their people are not predisposed to want to dispense with capital punishment over other types of punishments here's a more of a pragmatist argument right um given that that's not the case massively limiting the conditions under which this could ever occur and increasing the demandingness constraints the point that almost nobody ever in like a hundred years was actually up for this may be the most effective way of actually limiting and radically transforming and moving the system towards a more just um mode of existing and actually help restore in fact state legitimacy so that's one thing I wanted to say the other thing to Ben and this is actually like it's actually a good faith question I'm gonna run around the rest of my life necessarily never changing my position ever you know I want to actually ask this question seriously consider this one concern because when it comes to the nature of suffering yes obviously it's not just it would be a false dichotomy to say oh well solitary confinement or though dies which one would you choose I'm not going to do anything sleazy like that I don't think that's what's at stake but in the instance in which a person suffered inordinately in prison and everyone around them suffered and everything about their life was meaningless and they were finally released and we know for a fact there's not going to be rehabilitation available to most people in a reasonable way we know the way prison systems operate currently they break people I mean I'm a huge fan of rehabilitation over over punishment I think the way that prison systems exist currently is disgusting and repulsive and basically corporate corporateocratic right so in the instance in which that person is released is the rest of what they could live through until they die necessarily better than if they had simply been given the death penalty in that instance like in that one rare once in a hundred years instance where we basically almost knew to the point of having like to the point that we could say is a justified true belief across every across every analytic empiricist aposteriori um a priori you know framework across every cross will philosophical system and practical and scientific system that person was guilty and that one instance in a hundred years it turned out that they weren't and then that person was released after a lifetime of suffering because you know that person in particular would be the inmate who would probably be in solitaire who probably be in those conditions in that one instance would that still be better than if they had died peacefully without suffering so that's the question so let me what was that proposed to me or you got to them but anybody can answer it I'm actually earnestly asking that because I'm actually I wanted to answer the first question first I'll give my answer but Dylan if you want to go first yeah yeah so I wanted to answer the practicality argument the idea that well people in the United States I think it's a little bit but the statistics are clear that the majority of Americans are okay with the dependency existing my state among other states so have abolished death penalty for many other reasons I've brought up there's been a lot of activism around it I believe Joe Biden has put it on his agenda to end it on the federal level and I think the narrative is shifting generally on the on the argument because I think when we look at our criminal justice system and I apply the arguments I've given here today I think most people will reconsider the position hopefully but if the argument is that and a practicality sake to win over some of the people who don't exactly want to completely get rid of it but limit it that we limit it now I'd be fine with that as a step into the eventual abolition of the death penalty for practicality sake I can understand somebody making the argument that well first we should limit the effects of the death penalty because we can't abolish it at the moment so let's pass this law which makes it so we can only apply it to people accused of like some of the worst criminal pence is physically possible that it has to like be terrorism or something along those lines and then eventually use that as a jumping off point to abolish the death penalty if the practicality argument's there then I can agree with you on and using it as a strategic goal to eventually get to the death penalty now when it comes to the the idea of suffering all this time in prison and or death penalty I would make the argument of course I don't put I don't like the idea of putting somebody in prison on the idea of the goal is to make them suffer and I think we both agree that the goal should be rehabilitation the reason why we have 20 percent of the world's prison population of only six percent of the world's population is because we have the most prisoners of any nation in the world including China which I think is absolutely off the walls is because we don't have an extremely rehabilitative system and so I would hope under my system the that that I would be proposing which would not include the death penalty and not include this kind of suffering that we're doing this type of idea where we throw somebody in a cell we throw away the key and then we all make jokes about them getting raped in prison which is the current culture we have around it I would like to do away with it but if your argument is about just suffering compared to death I am somebody who is a proponent of death with dignity and if somebody this is just generally this isn't just opposed to prisoners is somebody was suffering so much that they wanted to end their lives say with cancer or something like that I could I could be kind of maybe debated into a position of being like I feel like I could be able to end their make they make the decision to end their own life which if there was an idea like a prisoner was so torn up by being confined that they couldn't do it was psychologically damaged due to them I could see a scenario but again we're doing we're doing pretty abstract hypotheticals here where a death with dignity might be an option but they would have to make the decision not the state it might interject on that point quickly that last part I did just want to make sure before too many minutes passed between between the question that I that I answered Jalma and and so first thing I want to say just there's no you know worry about evasion or anything just just so it's clear is would getting the rest of their life back under that circumstance be better and the answer I think is absolutely yes so but but but I also wanted to go back before expanding on that to something that Jalma said at the beginning of the question which is that what we're talking about is like a 0.01 you know per you know percent application of the death penalty and this goes back to what I was talking about you know with Sunday a minute ago which is that I really want to know what these rules are going to be that are going to that that are going to guarantee that it's kept down to 0.0001 percent right so you could do you could do the equivalent of of what the you know rabbis in the Babylonian Talmud did and said like oh you can only you know you can only you know kill people if there are such and such many witnesses who saw them do it directly and you know things like this where where basically the goal is to guarantee that nothing that really happens will ever count but of course that's just a sort of a cute way of abolishing it you know entirely so you know that's a distinction without a difference you could do you could you could do things like like limit it to certain categories of you know of of crimes you know you could say that we only have the the death penalty not for ordinary murders but for you know genocide something like that although I certainly don't think that would capture the sort of cases typically that you know that would that would be you know that the in principle case that Sunday is making you know would would apply to but I'm just I'm just very skeptical that there are going to be rules that you can use to capture the cases of genuine certainty and exclude all of the cases of of a parent but not real certainty that afflict us in the real world and again I do think that the reversibility concerns give us a good reason to say given uncertainty there is a difference in principle between the death penalty and other and other punishments but just real quickly to expand on the yes I think that I think the point that Dylan ended with is exactly the relevant one so the question is like if you're doing the person if you're doing the executed person a favor by executing them because their life would be so miserable for these decades in prison or you know so miserable that even the even the Romanian you know 10 or 20 years or however long they had after they got out you know of freedom you know would you know it just wouldn't be worth it then that I think that should be up to them so as a matter of fact most people don't think that being executed as opposed to being sent to prison even the kind of hellhole prisons that we actually have in the United States that I take it all four of us agree are utterly unacceptable but even with those prisons it's not the case that most people facing the death penalty would view the death penalty as opposed to life in prison as doing them a favor I know there are very occasionally cases where that's true but in the overwhelming majority of cases people facing the death penalty will fight with everything they have to get life in prison instead and people who have gone through decades you know of of imprisonment and see a chance to to get out will fight with everything they have to get that and I'm just not comfortable second guessing them and saying that no no no no you really would have been better off if you were dead if that's what we want to do perhaps we can you know allow people to kill themselves but but making that decision on their behalf that it's more humane to kill them I think takes us back to the sort of core moral rot you know at the heart of the very idea of having the death penalty as a punishment which is this idea that the society or the state you know owns the person and you know and they should have total control over them even to even to even to end their life you know which which which I think is just in principle more power than any institution should ever have over anyone yeah I disagree with that categorically so to a certain extent we're talking past each other here we were very careful of the onset we sandwiched between the principal and the practical problem the practical problem covered very covered admirably so yeah but no but hang on so you've covered the practical principle obvious admirably there are a lot of problems with how it's done today there are a lot of inefficiencies and whatnot let's say for the sake of argument we solved all that you still have the in-principle problem of if you have this case the Jeffrey Dahmer Ted Case should we keep him alive indefinitely while his existence and his own behavior torments the people around him and the people he's left to suffer as a result of his crimes and I think not absolutely not and I have too much if you counter that statement what I've heard so far is that for whatever reason you're perfectly fine with tormenting a person's soul and prison for 50 plus years but God forbid anybody touch his body that strikes me very strange well that's obviously a silly straw man that has nothing to do with anything anybody has said that's what you were doing um no it's it's it's not something you made up to I don't know where you're getting at furthermore I was I was actually quite clear the reason why I brought up the uh contractarianism the reason why we spent so much time dispelling the idea that deterrence and uh retributivism pardon were viable arguments is specifically to separate them from the argument that we were making which is not retributivist at all the point is that when a person is uh part of a society they contract not just as a body but as a human being with human dignity and the right to choose when we put a person into prison when we decide that the when we decide that in fact in response to his actions we are actually going to try and change the person interminably in effect putting him into a trial until the end of time until he dies naturally we are dehumanizing him to a degree unfathomable in fact that is the greatest expression of state power I can imagine far greater than killing what any with the tiniest society you find themselves forced to do under extreme circumstances like it just it just I'm just not seeing how you're actually answering our objections here well I really haven't heard very much about those those objections like uh this is part of the thing that makes this confusing that we got a few minutes at the end where the considerations that you do find powerful for having the death penalty were briefly gestured at the overwhelming majority of the time it was spent disowning standard arguments for the death penalty but let's let's talk about the the Dahmer case so I think first you know I mean first of all the idea that if we could we could get rid of all the problems about certainty the death penalty would would just be justified is a uninterestingly vacuous hypothetical because we can't no human society possibly could uh but as far as the idea that it's well okay but it's a hypothetical that's that's that's it's not just a counterfactual it's a counterpossible that's what you are doing when you say that well we can't have the death penalty because we may find in some point in the future that every single case has been a false accusation despite the preponderance of evidence and a confession not just a confession but also behavior that expressing gleeful pride in the crime can I just step in really really quickly on this sunday okay so um basically in terms of me and sunday I'm making a weaker I'm supporting a weaker argument um like the weaker case philosophically speaking so the words like I'm not I'm not as um how to describe I'm not talking as much about the in principle um distinctions and investments that go into retaining capital punishment as sunday is but what I am doing is I'm saying that I'm taking his discussion of um Hegel's notion of what constitutes kind of um the worst sort of suffering you can inflict on somebody who's committed a crime that in many senses may actually violate the social contract and what the consequences that would be and using that to wonder if there's some arbitrariness around getting rid of capital punishment over another form of punishment I think then you've discussed um pretty extensively how um you know in that that there are things that are unique about capital punishment I may disagree with you on that but there is one point that you brought that I thought was really excellent in practice um that I wanted to address a response which is that okay so if we're going to differentiate between the point zero zero zero one percent death case and no none whatsoever on principle how do we establish the conditions of knowing what's appropriate in that instance like how are we going to actually be able to work on that or think about that or manage that and the kind of moral intuitions that sunday is bringing to bear on this are the intuitions that a lot of people have and so it's one of these things that um it's one of these things that one has to consider the moral consequences when an odious act is committed against four people who are not immediately and directly who are not the the person who has immediately committed that act and also the sort of consequences down the road for other people in terms of how we treat the person who's committed that act and so I think the practical consideration of how would we ever be able to adjudicate or deal with that or have the kind of evidence that we require is an important one but I think that we are still nonetheless giving arbitrary status to a person um being um executed on the basis of having murdered multiple people or done something that we we believe we know to have occurred um over the moral status of other types of suffering um of other types of structures that could be put in place of other things that could be done to that person's um body or existence or life or those of the people around them and so I do think there's still a bit of an arbitrary and it's concerned that needs to be addressed although I want to take your point that yeah we to be able to determine what we could that we would know this beyond a shadow of a doubt in a legal sense even is going to be an extreme challenge and part of that extreme challenge um part of what's entailed that extreme challenge is how on what a limited basis we would actually be able to actually meet that criteria right so I didn't want to acknowledge that but I also wanted to say that I'm still not fully sold on these the arbitrariness with which we are taking capital punishment to be utterly unique right so I don't think it needs to be utterly unique to that for there to be reasons to abolish it to don't apply to other punishments I think that what I think that one reason to to abolish it that doesn't apply to other punishments uh is uh is the is the the irreversibility you know I mean that that seems like a really powerful uh consideration to me and and I think the question about how to design the rules is is a really crucial one uh because whether we're you know because there are two things there are two respects in which I think you and sunday are making slightly different arguments there are two respects in which we're talking about uniqueness right one is the sort of uniqueness of of the degree of certainty that you can supposedly have right in in some cases and the one is the uniqueness of like the heinousness of like the ongoing attitude of the of the person and and and I would just point out that when you're at when you're designing rules okay they can be executed if they've confessed that stands as a sufficient certainty that's the sort of rule that you could have in an actually existing system but they they can be executed if their attitude exhibits gleefulness you know uh is uh you know seems like a much slipperier thing you know in terms of the the degree of clarity that we want for for actual rules as far as the dehumanization argument I would say that first of all uh that uh if you are if you've just decided that somebody will never morally reform you know you've just decided that they'll never change their attitude and they'll never you know they'll never feel differently uh because it's been too long and so you're just sure that it won't happen it seems like that is what's reducing them uh to the status of something that's that does not have free will if you're treating them as a person that you know that that possibility would always have to be left open also this idea that a life imprisonment necessarily means an eternal campaign uh for uh for rehabilitation you know it's it's just not true that they have a that you could uh that you could say even if for the sake of argument we were giving up on the very possibility of rehabilitation we were decided nope you don't have free will you're a person who with autonomy if you're in maybe like 20 seconds then if you're able to wrap up this point and even if you did decide that you could still say no this is a human being who has certain inalienable rights including the right to life so we can keep people safe from him uh by by keeping him in prison uh but there are things that we may not do to him Ben you categorically misunderstood the argument the problem is not that we've decided arbitrarily that person cannot be reformed the problem is that's certain a very tiny minority of persons on death row um are actively engaging in pernicious activity not just pernicious activity but undignifying activity to the dead to the families of their victims and indeed to themselves additionally this is a very strange and arbitrary distinction you're making with respect to reversibility tell me Ben if at the end of a person if a person's life that would have progressed for approximately 10 years later is cut short by the death penalty or if a person loses 10 years earlier because he has been detained uh wrongly early on how is the one more reversible than the other uh it's not it's not that it's not that it's a very distinction it's just that you're refusing to uh acknowledge the actual distinction which is that uh once part of the sentence has been carried out uh the rest of it can still be negated in one case uh whereas at the other it's binary once it's been carried out it's carried out that is the case for both you still lose the time that is that's why I said part you may have missed that word part of the sentence has been carried out so your prejudice is just the rest of it could be you know the rest of it can still be negated whereas in one case it doesn't come in degrees you know you've either been killed or you're not if I may just add an addendum to what sunday just said is that alright sunday please okay um basically the so when we were talking about the uniqueness I think that um then you were making an important distinction between kind of the uniqueness of different things at play here clearly we're not just talking about you know one thing but we're talking about uniqueness so there's something unique um about the degree of certainty that's coming into play there's something unique about um aspects of you know aspects of the non rehabilitation component um the other thing too that I wanted question is is there something uniquely awful about the irreversibility condition compared to any other form of suffering or anything else that could be enacted or the suffering that could be caused not just to the person who committed the crime but you know as as sunday's been arguing in somewhat stronger principle terms than me the broader community um breakdown social contract even under horrendous conditions etc so I kind of wanted to maybe um discuss the kind of the uniqueness of the irreversibility condition a little bit more well one moment Ben before before it's just a it's just a it's just a relevant disanalogy but I know Dylan has been wanting to talk for some time yeah I wanted to talk about this idea earlier and it was kind of just kind of screwed over I don't know if we all accepted it but the idea like victims get this like healing through the death penalty this idea that this that once you pull the switch and you fry the dude or woman you know I'm inclusive on murderers um then this this healing comes but I have not seen any data to suggest that and in fact the data I have seen suggests the opposite a lot of times we agree great so like okay I just I just thought you said like earlier like for the victims like no no not at all okay so just for clarification if I may I'll let you talk afterwards because I know you have been waiting um my argument is that in the event that you have a situation where the person in prison has no hope of being released has no hope of being um uh what's the word I'm looking for was stored um and is engaging in ongoing and as far as we can tell ceaseless pernicious activity harming the people around him and harming by the knowledge of the fact that this person is laughing and having gotten one over his victims who can no longer retaliate in any way or gain back their dignity or their lives that this that the death penalty in this case acts as a measure to cease that harm and purely to seize the harm as an alternative if you see any difference in this I would be perfectly content if we swap out the death penalty with a drug induced dreamless sleep of interminable length whatever you prefer so I don't think that there is a continued life uh it can constitute a harm to the family but that's just being insensible to the point I made well will you okay with what I'm sorry but I thought you're saying that their death penalty removes their ability to continue to do harm to the family where I think the the internment of the individual people around them well the thing is there are actually quite a few cases of people who've had to be moved around in Canada in particular who have been let out and later last point and then I want you son Dylan okay so I just wanted to be clear like from the studies I've seen like particularly from the like University of Michigan what ends up happening particularly for the victims is that many of them end up being like oh I I don't know why I thought this would bring my family member back or oh man this didn't help at all and it's like they're directing their emotions towards this quest to like slay this monster then the monster's gone but all the pain's still there and nothing is solved through that and so I don't see how them if they're confined from the family how that at all could at all be of any damage to the family whatsoever or well it's not entirely true that people are entirely confined to the family people in death row or people in serving long sentences can make constant appeals and the family has to address those secondly we get reports of what happens in these prisons there was an infamous case locally named a person called Cruz Welwood who had to be moved around because after raping and murdering a girl at his school he was then bragging about it to people his fellow inmates and he had to be isolated from them because he was tormenting them and disturbing them with these stories like this is I mean if those people felt that revenge would get them any sort of sucker that they were mistaken and I'm deeply sorry for them but that's not the argument that we're making here so so okay okay could you say the first argument one more time you said you made two arguments you said one and then you said the person about person being moved around oh appeals okay so the thing is if someone appeals and then gets out that's how it's supposed to work the idea that we we could have sentenced that person who appealed and got out to death instead well if they appealed and got out that's good that's the system that's how the system supposed to work understand me there's a in for example if in Canada you are convicted of a capital crime um you can continue to appeal until the day you die and the problem with that is that this includes people who have been confirmed guilty um we have multiple cases of murder rapists going to prison for that having been confirmed to have that serving out their sentences leaving and then committing the same crime again now that of course is on an individual basis a deterrent argument but the point is that um there is no uh strong actual like separation between these people in the rest of the community they aren't isolated and terminally and unless you're going unless you actually just want them to suffer indefinitely in prison as a contrast which doesn't strike me as a mercy compared to the death penalty well I would say that the best thing to do would be to okay so the idea is that these people might one day get out of prison and then they might do everything again that's not the issue the point is just that there's not an actually a solid concrete distinction or separation between them in the wider community we still communicate with them their doings in prison still reach our ears in our eyes like this is they're not just in a separate universal way in a dungeon dimension somewhere they still like their existence because we can still peer in could end up hurting people because we don't just peer in the point is with respect to the appeals and whatnot um is that these people can actually project outwards like we we know of this like yes but the but the appeal system and I would say that any harm that could have been done by the fact that people can appeal is easily outweighed by the importance of people being able to appeal to the system and actually have their cases reviewed and one actually data point I didn't bring up earlier is how a lot the the reason why I keep seeing at least 4.1 percent on death row and that's the lowest number possible it's just when people are killed usually there's no reason to actually review their case afterward like if they're dead like well who you're free and you pour the ashes out the window like what do you do and so the importance of having the appeals process it's another check on making sure that people in our prisons are not uh innocent or not innocent and they're actually guilty of those crimes hang on sorry Dylan I just wanted to say really quickly um I think that what you're saying about appeals and need to have due process around appeals um is especially important in uh system that is arbitrary in the way that it's going to how to put this like convict people depending on both the race of their victim than their own race and 3.5 percent more likely to be convicted if it's a white victim you know I've read the same system and I've been sort of privy to similar and also people can have forced confessions such that they're confessing but they don't actually know what they're confessing to and in general they are capable of people are being capable of being just completely maligned and wrongly positioned and pushed into conditions where they're on death row which I think is actually a huge psychic harm to innocent people as well that's just terrible and that the appeal process is very important within the context of that system however I worry that in terms of my argument at least which is focused on the more practical and kind of volleys back and forth of what Sunday is saying is that um that's going to be shifting the goalpost slightly because clearly the demandingness concerns so one of the concerns is coming up for everybody that I want to just highlight because I think it's stuff that we should be carrying forward in the future discussions is the man the demandingness concern about conviction how do we know we have sufficient knowledge what about the reversibility condition what allows us to assume a certain stance about the permissibility of certain types of punishments over other punishments how do we know what's the demand is around determining what causes maximum suffering what makes things unique these are all questions that are going to be useful and fruitful from this debate that can be carried forward but I think the appeal question is relevant for current circumstances in which exponentially quantum more people are on death row or in these circumstances on Sunday or I would ever want to imagine any other world and so that's a that's an issue that's endemic and important to these circumstances I know I myself thoroughly agree with everything you just said the point that I'm trying to raise though and it could and you know um what's what's the word it's a just one second uh distinction without difference the reason why what I'm saying isn't just merely a distinction without difference is I'm still not convinced on this arbitrary I'm still not convinced that in terms of like different state needed out punishments that there isn't some arbitrariness around how we consider irreversibility unique how we consider um how we consider capital punishment particular unique etc etc if we were to be much more stringent and careful about the overall conditions than we were in this world and so the appeal conditions are the appeal conditions within this world so again like I don't here's a question for you do this is and this might seem like a silly thought experiment but I believe it's actually not because I think it it gets it what's the stake in capital punishment particular do you believe there could be a fully rehabilitative system akin to the one um established in like the northern european model but way advanced into the future in which in that rare lightning bolt very specific like once in a hundred years instance capital punishment would still be on the table do you think those two things could ever exist simultaneously so there's a question um could like could they exist or what I wanted to exist what do you mean okay is it even more is it morally okay so I would not want it to because it doesn't match what I would say in my moral system but I could see it existing I could see uh because again like all my everything that I look at suggests that the death penalty just doesn't have an effect on like deterrence so I could see someone building this reformative system but a kind of cuddling it into it I could see that happening but I think it's a counterence to the idea of reform so yeah so this is the difficulty that I'm primarily having here we agree on the practicality is almost to repeat the difficulty here is that your moral objections seem to rest and I'm directing both Dylan and them seem to rest on total insensibility to all of the psychological and spiritual harm that results from having people who gleefully take pride in their crimes continue to exist bodily in prison into perpetuity I mean it's it seems to be a moral sense that completely disregards any value in human beings except for their biological continuity and it doesn't make any sense okay except that there's absolutely nothing that either of us have said that even hinted at this is like the sixth time you've attributed that to us but but you're pulling that out of thin air I don't understand where you take yourself to be getting this idea that there's no you know that we don't think there's such a thing as you know psychological harms that they have a that uh you know if you think that one of the inalienable rights Dylan earlier was perfectly fine saying that he actually wanted people in prison to live for a long time with the knowledge of their crimes and suffer for it I I specifically agree I specifically said let's hear from Dylan I specifically said that when it came to people like Adolf Hiller and the other example I gave was my rapist was that I would much rather than reflect on what they have done within the criminal justice system now if I suggest now maybe I didn't give enough detail to it but it wasn't under the idea that I want them forever till it just like suffer forever now maybe there might be some primal urge within me that makes me think like Adolf Hitler suffering I don't care it's Adolf Hitler right but I think that the system should be built around the idea of even attempting to reform the biggest monsters even though in 99% of cases it'll be pointless because I think building the system around reform and the idea of reform results and much better much better results so what I'm trying to do with the practical angle that I'm taking is I'm saying that look with the the moral contention that Sunday is bringing up you know whether or not you believe he's correctly attributing it to some aspect of what you said or not maintains which is basically that this is a situation in which we would have to disregard most certain moral intuitions people have about what constitutes knowledge what constitutes justice what constitutes allowing you know somebody who is genuinely monstrous across any empirical across any rare circumstantial situatedness to be like you know to still to still be criminal and like in other words he's saying that there could be instances no matter how rare and how bizarre they may be and how much evidence we have to bring to bear in the demandingness around that whereby the person was still fully and completely remorseless and we could really locate them with the crime and if those things were to be more or less met there would be some kind of moral onus that would potentially emerge and there would be a common notion that that moral onus entailed ensuring that that person no longer existed in society in such a way as they could continue to cause harm or torment or do things or in which they could even be left to suffer in some bizarre way over a prolonged period of time and so the practical aspect of that concern is what then makes these questions around capital punishment particular and irreversibility unique and another issue that might come up around irreversibility is that so there's there's irreversibility concerns in general and the suffering that's caused as a result of assuming that someone committed a crime to the people who are the living leftover family and people who are associated with the victim of that crime continues for a very long period of time even if it turns out that the person who committed the crime was innocent and so then again again I want to double down say the real issue here is that we have to be very careful and very demanding in how we actually convict people of crimes in the first place and a lot of these concerns about irreversibility in the very rare specific case where that would still be a concern would be diminished and so there's there's just a moral intuition that's common among people that if we know beyond a shout out that something is the case that capital punishment isn't at least worse than other forms of punishment if we were able to actually determine that person had done something right so he's coming up with a moral intuition that is a common and important one and well and well founded right in some there's a moral intuition about what the people you know like you know might be justified to prevent the harm of the person who's bragging about their crimes and this causing psychological torment to others there's but there's also a epistemic intuition that you know that they that it would be possible to to eliminate uncertainty and and I think the epistemic intuition doesn't deserve any weight at all because we know that that's just flatly not true and even if it's a extremely tiny sliver of an uncertainty that still does lead to what I'd regard as a really significant and powerful disanalogy between the death penalty and life in prison that in the case of of life in prison you can have a sentence that's been partially carried out but have the rest of it not be carried out and and again I think when it comes to the idea that it might be kinder to people you know that like oh you know me and Dylan you know only care about people's bodies we don't care about psychological torment by the way of course we care about psychological torment what a bizarre thing to attribute to us I'm not making that claim but yeah okay Sunday made it several times but they have a but but as far as but as far as that goes when it comes to you know which is worse than you know that I think we should ask the the victims of of either do we you know like as a matter of fact uh people you know overwhelmingly uh most prisoners possibly facing the death penalty overwhelmingly prefer more decades in prison uh to the death penalty overwhelmingly uh people in prison you know for decades think that they are having a worthwhile life you know when they get out for decades I just see no reason to second guess either one and I did just want to really quick circle around to say that on the subject of psychological harm uh it would be interesting to think about the case of of somebody who uh who hasn't uh you know who who didn't commit the crime doesn't claim to have committed the crime uh but who constantly torments those around him by say by talking about how awesome and amazing the crime was how this person uh this the victim totally deserved to be raped and murdered etc uh and uh and if that person is in in prison for another defense another offense a defense that would not be considered you know would not rise to the level of capital punishment I'd be very curious about whether somebody who was causing just as much psychic harm by never shutting up about how awesome the crime was and how much the victim had it coming and laughing about it whether that person should also that's been that's a complete non-secretary the point isn't that it's just causing psychological harm the point is that it's also a facing the dignity of the person they they killed okay and additionally you you keep bringing up that people in prison would prefer to live out the rest of their lives in prison as opposed to um being executed for their crimes um Lee why does why is that a factor like you haven't actually it's a it's a it's a factor because we're presented with the argument that it's kinder uh to them neither of us have said that it's actually kinder I don't believe I think I'm not done I'm not done that was well that was how Jolma ended her opening statement and also no no just to have order is why don't we do maybe two minutes with uh President Sunday and then we'll give two minutes to Ben to respond and that way we're I just needed to say Jama didn't say that prison was kinder Jama said that we can't just have this simplistic idea that because death is final therefore it is kinder than um therefore prison is kinder that that was the argument she wasn't saying that death is a kindness to prisoners in some cases of course like it was practical uh situation where people have been falsely accused and spent upwards of seven to ten years on death row it is not a kindness because they can still live the lives afterwards as as innocent men but we're not just talking about we're not just talking about human beings as being engines of pleasure wherein the only thing that matters is how much fresh air they breathe and how much nice food they have and how many free walks they go on there is the additional factor that we don't actually ask them when we put them into prison when we keep a murder who is unapologetic and in fact takes pride in what he has done um in prison for an interminable length of time in the vain hope that at some point we can force his mind to change that he feels remorse we are not treating him as a human being with human dignity we devalue him and frankly every other human being in addition to that we treat him as a willless body to be hijacked by the state that's not a kindness that's not mercy that's that's killing the man in soul before he dies it bodily and then spitting on his grave because he wasn't even a human i want to give uh ben the same amount of time which is about a minute and a half and then hopefully before we go into the qna if you guys want to keep going i'm open to it but we usually would be pretty soon going into the qna but i do hopefully we can hear from dylan as well as jama yet before we do that so uh but go ahead ben first okay so there have been many uh many suggestions that it would be a kindness uh to uh to pretty get it to prisoners to uh to execute them rather than keeping them in prison uh the explanation we just heard of why jama wasn't saying that was confusing that it was uh that she's not saying it's a kindness she's just saying it's not necessarily oh by the way to go by vein on she's so just sorry oh my apologies very no that's yeah okay yeah not intentional okay no of course i totally totally no problem i think i think i might have done that first my apologies yeah yeah you did sunday okay okay uh but uh but if they were uh they were suggesting that uh we can't necessarily assume that it would be kinder to you know to keep them in prison uh you know uh like rather than assuming that rather than saying that it's kinder at the very least the idea that it's kinder uh to to kill people uh was uh was being suggested as a as a possibility in fact that was really in the opening statement the only are the only positive argument for the death penalty uh that i heard and from sunday uh we've had several suggestions that dylan and i are saying uh that you know don't care about psychological uh you know about psychological harm you know uh torturing people uh you know by keeping them in prison we only care about killing their bodies which again suggests uh that it would be a kindness uh to prisoners to to execute them so that's what was being pushed back against there as far as the question of human dignity goes uh i would say two things one uh that the uh that the two issues keeping somebody alive and uh and holding out hope uh for repentance uh can uh can be uh be broken apart that they have a that uh that there would that it would because you uh think that somebody as a human being with certain certain innate rights that means that you do not have the right to take their life even if uh they they will never uh they will never repent also though on the subject of repentance uh i would say that what deprives someone of their dignity what treats them as a willless body is precisely saying that because their current attitude is 24 and mocking there is no chance that they will ever uh that they will ever be morally rehabilitated thanks so much and then as mentioned we'd love to hear from you both as well before we do wrap up but no obligation if you uh don't have anything to add before we do go to q and a dylan and jama i think i'm just going to add on my side that in general i want to keep i want um the opposition and everyone to keep in mind that we were working with an in principle and in practice distinction and of course as these things actually play out um discussing real um systems and institutions and structures that exist right now um that distinction ends up becoming murkier and murkier and so the claim that something in practice is not only not you know morally um is not only something that could not be dealt on the basis of any moral authority that could deal that could deal it um being illegitimate on the base of its arbitrariness and discriminatory practices etc as well as the claim that um the way in which its dealt forces us to consider concerns around ensuring appeals exist is one set of claims relating to that set of claims are the ideas of demanding this how do we actually know we know is empirical evidence sufficient is justified true belief about something sufficient um are we able to reverse decisions we make about what we know these are all concerns that we have immediately in the here and now in a terribly morally corrupt system in which many many more people are dealt this severe punishment compared to other punishments um compared to another let's say more ideal system that's one set of claims whether in principle this type of punishment ought to not be on the table compared to other severe quotes um you know cap uh state state sanction style punishments and whether or not um and without even considering the lex talionis argument whether there's something uniquely strange and awful in principle is a whole other set of considerations one point that i do want to make that i think is extremely important is that when we consider the possibility that capital punishment may still in principle be a possibility even if there are no instances in the current system in which we would actually utilize it or should utilize it or could utilize it we are forced to then consider what's morally at stake for everybody involved in what happens to a person who for instance we may know in this more ideal mode let's say we were able to know is guilty we also know that we may not be able to know that and that becomes yet another practical concern but i think that we still have yet to establish what is unique about capital punishment in principle to an adequate extent despite the fact that all these practical such that we would never even consider it especially given that there might be morally compelling reasons from a certain view particularly uh deontological kind of enriched contractarian view about the nature people's you know people's dignity and soul past death and what might actually be at stake for victims and the rest of it we still haven't really considered in principle what is unique about this punishment in particular in practice i think we agree on a lot and so that's basically the the summation final remarks i would make on my side just to kind of summarize my position so i'm going to keep that principle practice distinction in mind thanks for your patience and if you'd like to hear more from jama or anyone here want to let you know folks all of our guests are linked in the description now's a great opportunity and we'll give it over to dylan before we do go into the q&a dylan the floor is all yours so i just put a note and i know nobody does agree with me but i would like to note this for the people at home that it seems that nobody here has disagreed with the problems with how the with the death penalty in the united states the amount of innocent people that it kills every years and with the state sanctioned killing of these individuals its racist application on how when the victims are white the sentencing rate is much higher and when the perpetrators are black the sentencing rates are much higher how there has been no evidence of deterrence throughout throughout other countries when you have to compare countries that have the death penalty or don't have the death penalty you cannot find data to show that the countries with the death penalty have lower crime rates anywhere the same thing is applicable to the united states when you compare states um we can talk about how this idea of of a kind of revenge based system that many people use to justify the death penalty has led to us having the 20 percent of the world's prison population with only five to six percent of the world's population and it has been a tool of authoritarians around the world and when you look at the states that usually value freedom and democracy they have started to fade more and more away with it as the criminal justice systems have become more accurate and actually and more effective in bringing about reform so i just wanted to make these points very clear that it seems that nobody here even disagrees on these points and so for even if we could find a scenario which we haven't been able to agree upon today but even if if we could all find a scenario where we all agree to this penalty and some hypothetical perfect world of applications could be applicable in the united states to uh stop the disproportionate use against black people to stop the state section killing of innocent people to stop the horrendously high cost that actually is that takes to execute people and to allow people who are innocent to re-enter society hopefully one day and to not have this this wasteful monetary this wasteful amount of money being dumped into something that has no deterrence effects whatsoever we should abolish the death penalty you got it thank you very much we will jump into this q&a i want to say thanks everybody for your questions nicholai starting with yours thanks very much said for dr ben and i think they mean for dylan they said is there an instance in which you would advocate for a life sentence as opposed to correctional programs and rehabilitation if yes what is that threshold and who decides spending no person want sure so i i guess uh are there instances in which i would say there should be a life um actually actually i'm sorry can you uh can you clarify so what like i want to make sure i have the wording right that there'd be a life sentence as opposed to right i think they mean life without parole do they mean that like the idea that they couldn't like what what exactly okay that could be i i think maybe it's even a life sentence in both cases is um it's just that in one you have like the person is going through correctional programs and no that doesn't seem to make okay so so i think dylan's probably right probably what what the question is getting at is um is should you are there circumstances in which i would advocate that people be sentenced to life without parole as opposed to like 20 to life you know and thank you um and i would say no uh i think that uh i think that when you come up uh with the cases uh if only for pragmatic reasons by which i mean like uh when you come up with the cases that intuitively you say okay we're not losing anything here by throwing away the key uh your your jeffrey domers and whatnot uh then uh that you know that sure those people should never ever get out uh well one i don't really see the downside to having it be 20 to life as opposed to uh life without parole uh because i'm very unworried about any parole board ever decided to let out the jeffrey dommer uh type you know the the manson type and uh and this goes back to a point that you know that came up repeatedly throughout the debate i think that we should that if we're crafting rules uh you know we don't we don't just want those rules to be able to satisfy our our intuitions in some cases we want to think hard about what those rules are going to lead to in practice uh and and i would much rather air on the grounds of on the side of giving everybody meaningless parole here like everybody parole hearings even if for the dommer types those parole hearings will be totally meaningless because there's zero chance they'll ever be let out then air on the side of not letting some people who genuinely might be rehabilitated have parole hearings gotcha and thank you very much this question coming in from oh wait dylan do you if you want to add to that you can yeah i just wanted to make clear that i basically i want to like emphasize everything ben said but also add the point that um i i don't see the point of doing it without parole because if it finds out that we've been able to actually reform somebody to a point where they can re-enter society um then i i wouldn't see the the the harm in releasing them when it comes to um when we talk about the american system preserving the individual's ability as long as they are not going to be a harm to others to allow them to interact with society of course you could talk about the psychological effects it could have on the surrounding community but uh i think a lot of times making that argument could completely upend the entirety of allowing anybody who's committed a horrific crime ever from re-entry society um so yeah there you go you got it thanks very much and then thanks for your question this one from chris gammon and nicolai had a similar question in which they asked everybody to answer this so i'll i'll read chris gammons what do you think about banning the death penalty but allowing people sentenced to life in prison to opt for the death penalty or you could say a form of assisted suicide as nicolai says if they wanted to except for everybody or that's right it seems fine to me i mean if somebody i i don't have a if somebody believes that they're there they're a confinement and inability to move freely which it would have to happen when you imprison somebody to try to protect the rest of society from them and they and they want to choose to end their own life um i believe you know they they have the autonomy over themselves to make that decision as long i i do think they should have to consult with multiple doctors beforehand to make sure that they are they really are sure about this decision but i i don't i don't have any personal objection um i'm unsure about the where where i would stand on this i think that a punishment that was um meted out by a state on an individual on the basis of them having violated some aspect of the social contract between the two if you want to take that frame for instance or you want to kind of look at it as something that's been sort of super imposed and then allowing the individual to kind of freely adjudicate what to do with that instead of ensuring that the punishment was delivered in a way completely different than our current system i don't know how i feel about that i don't know what the moral status of that is or where that should be something that should then be put back onto the individual when it was formerly sort of the role of the state so i need to i'm gonna remain agnostic about that um because i need to think about the one further anybody else then after you uh sure uh i am also unsure about how i'd feel about that uh i think that the uh the circumstances uh in which uh in which suicide should should be legal are i mean like that's that's a that's a that's a very tricky issue uh i mean i i think that you know there are cases that seem pretty clear to me uh you know like the uh the end stage patient with an incurable disease you know uh who still has all their faculties about them but you know one stand the suffering etc like those cases are pretty clear to me uh how far i'd want to extend that i i just have to think about that a lot more uh but so as to not be seen as as evading the question i will say at least that what i am sure about is that i would be much less bothered by simply allowing people the option of of killing themselves perhaps with assistance uh than that i would be by the state asserting ownership over them by killing them i would just like to note the disturbing way in which all of a sudden because a prisoner is offered the opportunity to end their life voluntarily that we therefore completely ignore the fact that they have been imprisoned involuntarily and by the exact for all of the same reasons that have been brought up ad nauseam in this debate we are equally unsure to a cosmic degree that they have in fact committed the crime for which they are in prison gotcha and want to let you know folks something totally weird that i've never seen happen before is happening in the live chat right now their oliver cat well is a moderator gone rogue who i cannot i can't i can't like tag him i don't know i'm gonna try it has to be a bug because i know the person behind it but anyway everybody's basically being hidden in the chat right now something's wrong so folks i promise we will unhide you and honestly i think it's a bug because i know the person behind that account he's actually a kind person so there's gotta be something funky going on and i will fix it so bear with us folks if you've just been deleted from the chat and we're going to jump into the next question while i work on that thanks for your question jamie russell let's see uh kind of more of a quick statement in terms of asking it do you have like a short and pithy response from ben and dylan until they're saying in the case of brutal killings we'll give you a chance to maybe just say in those case of them cases of the most brutal killings what's kind of a i hate saying to ask you to keep it pithy but their question is short and so we'll give you a chance to respond to that i'm sorry what's the question why is it not okay to do the the death penalty and uh i think if you want to address kind of the objection of like brutal killings okay i can give you an example actually there is a there's an example of a case uh and again this would be if we're talking i like a part of practicality and open when we can argument from philosophy so we can tag team it one example would be in the 1930s there was a disabled man that a crime was pinned on that was a brutal axe murder and rape of a woman the man was so so horribly mentally disabled that on the way when he was bringing away to um to be executed he handed his toy train to the guard the toy train he would usually play with with the other prisoners who really liked the person to the guard and said hey can you hold this to me i'll be right back before he was executed a few years later was found out that the whole he obviously was not guilty and so i would say the same problem i would have with the murder the killing the state ending up killing innocent people and being pinned a lot of times a higher conviction rates on black people and um disabled people being taken advantage of would all be concerns of practicality and i'll let ben take it from a philosophy point of view uh yeah i mean i would say that uh you know even if you have a sort of retributive principle that uh that says that whatever the worst punishment is is the one that should be needed out on the people who've committed the most brutal the most heinous killings this is where i end in my open statement that just leaves open the question of what that punishment should be which by the way also doubles for the social contract arguments because you know if somebody's uh if you think that people have implicitly accepted uh you know whatever the legal punishment is okay great but that only comes into operation what we've decided what's what the maximum legal punishment would be and i think that if you think that people have innate human dignity and there are things that you cannot do to them uh you know it's you can you can do things to prevent them from being a heart you know from being a danger uh to uh to society but there are things that you can't do to them just like you can't cut their cut their noses off uh i think that you can't kill them you got it thanks very much and folks thanks for your patience in the chat i have demoted all over catwell temporarily until we figure out what's going on ryan wallis thanks for your question this one's for you dylan how do you feel about the death penalty for cat girls what's a cat girl uh you're muted dylan one moment so i i i i had not uh i had not considered this possibility um and i think there might be one exception to my death uh death uh death penalty uh example uh cat boy supremacy okay thank you continue thank you very much a little kim thanks for your question said kind of a objection question said the supreme court ruled that it is unconstitutional to execute the intellectually disabled because it's cruel and unusual so doesn't that speak to the death penalty being the less humane option i guess we'll give you a chance president uh as well as jama if you want to respond sure um that's the question an option well i think what i think what it speaks to in particular is that it's an option that's appropriate only for people with full agency as a response to a fully agential action i mean i agree with the rule and 100 percent jama did you want to go i think section speaks to what you were saying initially um no i would agree with that and i would say that like basically then one has to figure out the agency of somebody in that situation in terms of imprisoning them period in terms of anything that would occur in relation to them that wouldn't be strictly rehabilitated so i think that's a broader question i think it does relate to the nature of agency so i would just back that up if i can comment secondly as well i think this should be applied across the board for um people of that description but i i mean prison as well is equally cruel and so i don't think yeah we shouldn't be treating that as a minor distinction here's oh it's okay i'll just go to prison anyways gosh yeah thanks very much for your question this one coming in from will steward says dylan let's say a dippy murders five baby hippies and eats their brains live on twitch why should society now become financially responsible for him for the next 50 years would it not be a net benefit to execute them it ends up actually usually a lot of times costing more to execute an individual than it does to actually house them throughout their life there are certain cases where if you get to the like like for example if somebody did an 18 that possibly if they live to like 102 you might be able to get to the math where it might end up at the end of the day costing more but for example for my and this is the experience i have it from it cost 37 million dollars to execute one person in the state of maryland last time we did it and that's from like the 70s and 80s so if you account for inflation there that's that's a decent that's a chunk of change so it actually can be quite expensive to execute people as well so i find the cost saving argument um not really effective gotcha and thanks xirafa for your yeah can i quickly just respond to that as well you bet yeah um i i i agree with what dylan said which is which is accurate but i also think at the same time questions of justice aren't exhausted by cost and that goes in both directions if it was in fact cheaper to kill them that wouldn't be an argument in favor of the death penalty either sorry please keep going well also i think it's also important that in the case this is the argument against the deference um claim that people often make in relation to being in favor of capital punishment which is that look you can't be offloading onto a third party considerations that are meant to be strictly between the person meeting out the punishment and the person who is receiving the punishment and so this is yet another instance of talking about something that should not be relevant in the consideration of what to do in relation to someone who is up for punishment so i think it's actually really an unethical way of approaching it not on the part of the commentator but in overall structural sense you got it thanks very much for your question xirafa deep they say thanks for the debate everybody and question for all you're about to be executed for a crime you didn't commit your last thoughts and words what are they so long and thanks for all the fish i don't know all right now i like sunday that's all right that pussy hit different um yeah i don't know if that pussy hit different but i think something along the lines of well this should have It was fucked. Good thing I wrote my memoir. Another the end of it. Thank you very much. Don't let this happen to anyone else. What was it? Don't let this happen to anyone else. Thank you very much for your question, Lewis Burnett said what system best brings justice to the victims. I think reformative systems are probably the best because ultimately they produce the least amount of victims. When you have a system that's based upon we our current system is like high rates of reincarceration. We do not invest the time and effort into prisoners as we want the private prison. Industry is extremely barbaric and not getting the prisoners not only assistance and like trying to actually re enter them properly into society when they leave so they don't fall into the same functions, but even like giving them basic nutritional health. There's a lot of instances of private prison companies cutting when it comes to like food and they'll end up actually serving legitimately just moldy food to prisoners. And so if I think if we actually want somebody to re enter society as a productive member, we need to start treating them like they just like they have the respect of a member of society. I think reformative systems are the best ways to give victims justice because as somebody who has, you know, I guess this is personal but somebody's been a victim of quite violent, violent and horrific crimes. The best way for me to have justice is to know that it's happening to the least amount of people as physically possible, and nobody has to go through that stuff again. And I want to back up that last claim that Dilla made in strong terms and say that I think that's entirely, you know, courageous morally appropriate as a statement, and I myself am a huge fan of rehabilitative styles systems for a similar reason I think that we have a moral duty and responsibility to pour our resources into rehabilitating people wherever and whenever we can, and that this is going to be the main thing that improves the structure and nature of society as well as of course, eliminating systemic injustice and I'm a huge fan of rehabilitation and I think that it actually creates the social conditions such that victims are able to live in a better world. You got it. I would just I would just really quickly add to that I mean I agree with everything that the both Dylan and drama said but but I would. I would add that, you know, drama brought this up earlier, you know whether it would be possible to have a system like that and still rarely apply, you know, still have the death penalty on the books, you know, but you know and sometimes applied but very rarely. I think it you know it might be possible but I think realistically it's deeply unlikely I think that the kind of changes in societal attitudes towards crime that would get us the kind of system that Dylan and genre advocating are ones that it's it's very hard to imagine that that happening without them being accompanied by the abolition of the death penalty. I do want to also add that earlier like I talked about there are there are numbers to back this up that when it comes to getting people justice in this feeling of like, you know, we can start to heal. Trying to find the guy or find the woman find whoever they were rarely helps, if at all, and a lot of times there's this moment of like, I wanted it to bring them back, and it didn't bring them back, it can actually be a moment of kind of reflective sadness. So I don't I think even if you wanted to get this idea will it will emotionally help them heal a lot of times it doesn't. Thank you very much. We'll jump to this next question from Farron. Oh, sorry about that. Yeah, so I'm going to echo that I am and also very much in favor of restorative system with gentlemen Dylan and Ben. It's also important to note that justice is not exhausted by harm reduction, or by psychological healing. There are other things in play. You got it. And thanks for your question. Farron Salah says, Thanks, James, Ben, Dylan, President Sunday and Jalma for your time and preparation this evening crushed it. I couldn't agree more. This honestly, people really enjoyed this in the chat. And so thanks so much to our speakers and another one from Will Stewart says, Ben and Dylan, if it is immoral or unjust for the state to execute. Is also therefore is it also therefore moral and unjust for one to protect their life through lethal force in self defense. No, no.  I'm a known supporter of the second amendment. My household is a firearm household. No, I don't think so. I think the difference would be in those scenarios that we're talking about. I can't exactly properly confine the person into a pretty no they're if they're trying to kill me then I don't have many options, whereas when somebody is confined and no longer a threat. We have the option of confinement. Gotcha. And thank you very much for your question. This one coming in from. By the way, let's see Lord Bryant says hello President Sunday and then big thang Bruce Wayne. Thank you for your question says should the death penalty include economic criminals, white collar criminals do more damage to society than violent individuals. For me it's still the same no I don't definitely but I think it would this would be something for Sunday and the other. Well it's directed to you Sunday so go first. That's actually a difficult question. I don't, but I intuitively know. I'm just trying to think through. Sorry, can I have it. Could you again like I That one's tricky I think it would almost be like I would have to confess that that's, that's a major overstep of the state were to make that kind of decision. Sorry, John, what are you saying. I just want to hear the question again really quickly.  Well I think crucially we weren't making a retributive arguments that's that's not really a factor here. We weren't making a deterrent one either. The point was in the event where you have a person who's continued existence was sorry. For whom prolonging their continued existence was also to prolong a pernicious activity that was causing harm and dishonor to their victims and their victims families, that would be that would be inappropriate. But you could also answer that really quickly because I'm kind of in the same general side. Sorry, is that okay then I'm just going to jump in quickly. Oh yeah. Okay, alright. So basically what I would say is that I don't think talking about distal overall large scale, mass scale harms, we're in. We're talking about the actual downstream or tertiary or secondary effect of a specific action should have a punishment that is directed typically towards a specific firsthand thing. So like if it's like so what I'm saying is like in that basis like we're really stretching the limits of things and we're not and we want to be able to keep this as morally drawn moral and legal grounds as specific to the person and the actions and the party that committed the actions, knowingly and you know with males for thought presumably whatever else we want to say, we want to keep it as narrow as possible because there's there's a point at which then we start. And again like I don't know why that in the rare instance in which capital punishment would be the salute the, the, the way of dealing with the situation. In that instance, in particular, you will be going after a white collar criminal whose actions had led to many deaths because that's also letting divers is murdering. If that white collar criminal gone in directly murdered a bunch of people in a specific way and it managed to get extraordinary reach in that process or people had been used by him as his arm or something that maybe there's another there's another that could occur but again like this seems to be murdering and letting dies one, the one about the direct consequences and effects of individual actions on a person and the moral status associated with that as another. I just think it'd be a very strange way to strange place to start with capital punishment and very, very extremely rare once 100 years instance where that would actually happen so I think it'd be strange. Let's jump back in really quickly just just for clarification. The argument wasn't that a person did something really really bad and therefore should be killed for it the argument was, if this is the only thing that is left to us in order to terminate an ongoing an ongoing pernicious activity that that would be that would be a case so I mean I just doesn't seem like an analogous so so but that's that's that's the part I don't understand because it seems like, given the sort of scenario that you have in mind it would be no at all to concoct a version of that for for white collar crimes I mean like and we can look at me we can think of like many real instances, you know we can think about the nron executives laughing or laughing over the phone about the the rolling blackouts they were doing in California we can think of the of the managers at Tyson chicken, who in you know like office jobs, who had, who actually had a betting pool about how many of their workers would would contract coven. And so it's it's it shouldn't be any stretch of the imagination to imagine somebody who's been imprisoned for for an economic crime that led to massive amounts of suffering, constantly tormenting those around them by, you know by by bragging about about all the suffering that happens by by mocking you know their victims by talking about how hilarious they found it that you know somebody whose pension they took away you know wasn't able to pay for kids insulin, you know I don't really see the disanalogy. Well, okay that's an important point I think the disanalogy rests in the nature of the thing about which they are bragging I think there is something qualitatively distinct about rape and murder in particular. And that is not carried over to the kinds of admittedly being this thing that you're referring to. I'm actually a little bit ambiguous on this now. I mean, like, truth be told, I think at this stage you have to think about it more I think I'm largely just uncomfortable with the idea of telling people for those specific kinds of crimes, because it seems to require a different kind of activity on the part of the perpetrator One exactly that's one thing I would say to their there could be distinction again also between like being really vicious and hideous and evil and letting people die and have being in a position of power to be able to enact things, and capital punishment in a rare instance of set of conditions whereby somebody had committed individually specific acts that were in the realm of murdering specific people in a specific context instead of letting them die and then all the demanding this because everything else we talked about actually obtained in that case, that seems like a unique and specific sort of thing. That being said, I'm not 100% on this either and I also want to make it clear that the distinction isn't between retribution on the one hand and one where we couldn't really figure out how to engage in retribution like we're not, we're not supporting retribution at all necessarily in saying that there might be something unique about murder that ought to be considered in a bunch of different lights, it doesn't have to be a retribution light that we consider it in and we also need to have another think about what constitutes murder what constitutes downstream effects what constitutes the liberteness and actions is a bunch of philosophical problems, like trolley problem level right. And if I can just just jump in quickly. I have no problem saying whatsoever that such a person equally deserves to die. So it's not a matter of retribution. Next up, thanks very much Brenton Langel is in the house good to see you Brenton. Oh, that's right so I got to remind you guys we are very excited as you guys you don't want to miss it. It's going to be epic on the bottom right of your screen. And there he is Brenton will be taking on destiny and that will be a lot of fun and so we hope you make it Friday. Brenton says everyone be sure to check out Ben's give them an argument and namely podcast and YouTube channel both right Ben. And also Dylan's hippie-dippy round table and I got to tell you guys I mean I want to encourage you to go to all the links of all the speakers that we have on tonight especially like I this has been a joy you guys have all been really civil and it's been fun and enthusiastic. And I also want to mention Dylan burns I love is it fair to say you have a it's a debate channel and I have to say I love your showmanship it's a fun. It's just it's very fun. So yes, our guests are very much. Oh, absolutely. And so I want to encourage you folks to check out our guests that are linked in the description. Oh, it's just one click away and spider the Ateo. Thanks for your question. Oh, one invisible ninja first set here is a little something to help grow the channel gave extra so glad Ben is back. Thanks so much for your support. And yes, we do appreciate Ben and all the other speakers. Thank you very much. And spider the Ateo thanks for your question said, was it okay to execute Gordon Prescott in 1926. I don't know who that is, but it was a well secure prisoner note was not okay to execute him. Yep. Thanks to Ben and Dylan for jumping off the docking board first I also don't know who that is or what was going on so I can't really speak to that. Yeah, I'm not sure of the of the contest. Yeah, that's same here. I'm in the same boat. And let me see if there was any. Let's see. That is it for our questions. We do want to want to give a huge thank you to our guests. We really do appreciate them. It's been a total blast and thanks everybody out there for your support. Super encouraged to just hang out with everybody tonight. Both I should say all of our speakers as well as everybody in the chat. Thanks for hanging out with us. And so I will be back in just a moment with a post credit scene about upcoming debates. So stick around folks. And one last thank you though to Ben Dylan, President Sunday and drama it's been a true pleasure to have you. Props to wonderful Sunday for the Douglas Adams reference. You all have a blessed one. Thank you so much James is really lovely being on. Thank you James and Ben Burgess it was actually a pleasure to have it heated but I respect you guys do and it was, it was fun. Thank you and we'll be back in just a moment folks. Thanks so much. I'm so pumped. That honestly one that was the first time we got to do that topic. And it was really interesting and I just loved it. It was a fun and enthusiasm. I love it.  That's so when I t