It drew me to think about my own reservations about capital punishment. I'd appreciate your thoughts and comments (if any of my readers can forget my recent flights into flimsiness and deal with a weighty matter for a moment).
There are many moral arguments for or against the permissibility of the death penalty in the case of serious offenses. I'll leave behind the question of "how serious is serious" because my own reservations start before you even get to that point.
My position on capital punishment is more linked to pragmatic human limitations. IMHO, the philosophical arguments for or against are subordinate to the question, "Is it likely, or even possible, that a system of capital punishment will execute only the guilty and spare the innocent?" As long as this question is answered in the negative, then the abstract question of whether the guilty should be executed seems moot. It's never right to take innocent life.
On a less analytical level, I have additional reservations about cutting someone's life short who might -- given additional days, months or years -- otherwise have reflected on their lives and believed the gospel.
So . . . what do you think?
