The death penalty is defined by Alesina & La Ferrara, (2014) as the kind of punishment given to individuals who have committed capital crimes. When trying to justify punishment, one can adopt either a consequentialist or retributive justification. Pojman arguments in favor of the court’s decision is a combination of consequentialist and retributive reasons. Consequentialist justification views that harming those who have committed wrongdoing serves as an example to those who may want to do the same in future.
Retributivists on the other hand claim that physically harming those who have committed criminal offenses is an intrinsic good. According to this explanation, consequentialists focus on the future impact of punishment while retributivists focus on the past, what the offender actually did. Pojman first argues from the retributivist view to support death penalty. He views that it is right and proper to punish those who are guilty of wrongdoing and that the reserved punishment for murder is death. Therefore, it is okay to put to death those who have been accused of murder. This argument promotes revenge because the penalty of the wrongdoer is proportionally inflicted to the type of crime committed.
Secondly, he argues on the issue of innocents being victims that the intention of the death penalty is not to execute the innocent and that the act of murder by the wrongdoer is. Pojman response views that capital punishment actually respects human dignity. He explains this by saying that it respects the worth of human dignity by killing the offender the same way he killed the victim. In response to MegFall’s objection, Pojman claims that it is false because they give murderers enough time to reflect their doing and repent before the death penalty. He also says that the habit of murdering is incurable and even backs this up with evidence from the failed rehabilitation programs.
However, even if this is done, the heinousness of the dead offender still remains and people will be left questioning whether the dignity of the innocent life taken is being recognized by the government in their attempt to enact justice. There are several questionable steps in Pojman’s argument. Pojman is not right in his argument on human dignity because if we allow the offender to be executed then we are no different from the offender as we are also committing murder.
Pojman’s support for death penalty means that people are punished according to their mistake and this makes it impossible for a kind person to demand a life for an eye as it is based on ‘an eye for an eye.’ Pojman is wrong in his argument concerning innocents wrongly accused of crimes. Surely, there are many innocent people serving jail terms for crimes they did not commit. It is also not clear that dignity creates the right to live, when dignity is defined in terms of rationality and self-consciousness as in the case of Pojman’s argument, then this raises further problems.
It creates doubts because one does not necessarily lose rationality and self-consciousness by intentionally killing another person (Alesina & La Ferrara, 2014). This can be explained using the case of a fetus whereby it would be argued that since a fetus lacks a right to life it means that it deserves to die. Would the loss of the right to live mean that there is duty to kill? Therefore, it is clear that Pojman’s use of retributive justification is not persuasive enough to justify the death penalty.
Reference
Alesina, A., & La Ferrara, E. (2014). A Test for Racial Bias in Capital Punishment. American Economic Review, 104(11).
