Capital punishment is one of the clearest cases in which philosophical principle and empirical evidence converge against a dominant practice: it does not deter crime (the evidence is consistent), it is applied with racial and economic bias that is structurally impossible to eliminate, and it has killed provably innocent people. The philosophical arguments for it — retribution, the expression of society's ultimate condemnation — rest on a view of punishment as intrinsically valuable rather than instrumentally useful. The arguments against it converge across traditions: from the Catholic consistent ethic of life to abolitionist human rights frameworks to the Buddhist insistence that even the gravest wrong does not give the state the right to extinguish the possibility of change.
Juana