Capital Punishment Between Suppression of Life and Ethical Justification

Authors

  • Iasmina Petrovici West University of Timisoara
  • Ivan Dean West University of Timisoara

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18662/po/11.4/237

Keywords:

Capital punishment, the suppression of life, the right to life, applied ethics

Abstract

Is the capital punishment a solution? Can a basis for rejecting or justifying it be established? How should and how can a criminal be punished? Can the capital punishment be replaced by another type of punishment? Is this really a cruel, violent and unusual punishment? Questions like the previous ones, to which, of course, many others can be added, cannot be avoided once the still controversial issue of capital punishment has been addressed, being considered a major infringement of human rights. Uncomfortable and complex, sensitive and profound, it appears, first and foremost, as a fundamental theme for philosophical reflection and not only, being of a special significance to the applied ethics, as it is a point of contention that concerns life itself. The importance of this theme is conferred in particular by the fact that it deals with different aspects regarding the suppression of a person's life in a legal, deliberate and justified way, an obvious importance by the very purpose of this punishment.

From a compositional point of view, we have structured the present study in such a way as to include, using the critical dimension, the highlighting of some of the relevant philosophical perspectives that are subsumed to the topic, and which can still be an argument, at least an ethical one, against the application of capital punishment. At the end of the study, we sketched some current distinctive reflections, pointing out an argument in favour of one's own choice on the subject of the study, not necessarily considering that this is not a solution, but also that an ultimate basis cannot be established to support it.

References

Amnesty International. (2020a). Death penalty. https://www.amnestyusa.org/issues/death-penalty/?gclid=CjwKCAjwxLH3BRA

Amnesty International. Death Penalty in 2019: Facts and Figures (2020b, April 21). https://www.amnestyusa.org/issues/death-penalty/?gclid=CjwKCAjwxLH3BRA

Camus, A. (2008). Reflectii asupra ghilotinei [Reflections on the guillotine]. In A. Koestler & A. Camus, Reflecţii asupra pedepsei cu moartea [Reflections on the death penalty] (pp. 117-169). Humanitas.

Cojocaru, D., & Sandu, A. (2011). (Bio)ethical and social reconstructions in transmodernity. Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, 10(30), 258-276. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1962236

Derrida, J. (2011). The Beast and The Sovereign (2nd. vol.), The seminars of Jacques Derrida. University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, J. (2017). The death penalty (2nd vol.). The Seminars of Jacques Derrida. University of Chicago Press.

Foucault, M. (1997). A supraveghea şi a pedepsi [On crime and punishment]. Humanitas.

Hood, R., & Hoyle, C. (2015). The death penalty. A worldwide persepective (5th ed.). Oxford University Press.

Koestler, A. (2008). Reflectii asupra ştreangului [Reflections on hanging]. In A. Koestler & A. Camus, Reflecţii asupra pedepsei cu moartea [Reflections on the death penalty] (pp.25-115). Humanitas.

McCloskey, H. J. (1995). Dreptul la viaţă [The right to life]. In A.Miroiu (Ed.), Etică aplicată [Applied ethics] (pp.68-89). Alternative.

Nagel, T. (1995). Moartea. In A.Miroiu (Ed.), Etică aplicată (pp. 90-100). Bucuresti: Alternative.

Sandu, A. (2012). Appreciative ethics: A constructionist version of ethics. LAP Lambert Academic Publishig.

Singer, P. (2011). Practical Ethics. (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Thomas Aquinas. (2009). Summa Theologica (1st vol.). Polirom.

Downloads

Published

2020-12-18

How to Cite

Petrovici, I., & Dean, I. (2020). Capital Punishment Between Suppression of Life and Ethical Justification. Postmodern Openings, 11(4), 309-322. https://doi.org/10.18662/po/11.4/237

Issue

Vol. 11 No. 4 (2020): Postmodern Openings

Section

Theoretical articles

License

Copyright (c) 2020 The Authors & LUMEN Publishing House

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  • Authors retain copyright and grant this journal right of first publication, with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work, with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  • Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g. post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
  • Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g. in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as an earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

Postmodern Openings Journal has an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
CC BY-NC-ND

CC_BY_NC_ND