yeahiknow3

Honest question, why are people so obsessed with living? I’d want to be euthanized at the first sign of dementia. Just give me like a week to get my affairs in order. It’s bizarre that people would rather exist as mindless husks than die peacefully at a time of their choosing.

Maybe it’s fear. Most humans live and think like animals whose impulse to survive overrides rationality. Or is there another explanation?

I genuinely want to understand.

Pointing out that killing women and children is bad is “divisive.”

Amazing.

That could be the case with extremely rare diseases, but sadly that’s not the case here.

Give them their Darwin awards.

Let me again recommended this textbook on Ethics: https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/living-ethics-9780197608876

The death penalty is chapter 20.

Also,

1. “Death” isn’t (or should not be) a punishment. We don’t “punish” rabid dogs when we euthanize them. Sometimes the alternative is simply worse.
2. Earlier you said that “evil cannot be quantified” and therefore doesn’t exist. However, quantifiability is not an ontological prerequisite. If it were, then almost nothing would exist, including you and me.
3. You don’t need to resort to straw men. Respond to my arguments instead of arguing with yourself.
4. Moral claims wouldn't be “arbitrary” unless nihilism is true, which you’ve denied.

The only person using rhetoric here is you. There are morally depraved people out there whom we colloquially refer to as “evil.” I don’t know why you insist on having a semantic argument. If “[moral depravity] does not exist,” as my interlocutor claims, then nihilism would indeed be true.

I would also like to point out that the ethical arguments against the death penalty in the scholarly literature are very weak and it remains an open question whether the death penalty is advisable on practical grounds. Morally it’s unlikely that any good argument exists to make it impermissible to kill “evil” people. You can check out the latest edition of any textbook on ethics, such as Living Ethics by Schaffer Landau, which syllogizes a variety of arguments on this topic.

To be fair, he wasn’t wrong.

What’s extra comical about this claim is that if nihilism were true, as you claim, then a fortiori the death penalty would be completely permissible.