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24 paź 2013 · Government’s abysmal track record in administering the death penalty is reason enough to reject the practice. But what does libertarian theory say about the death penalty? After surveying how the death penalty fails as a policy, we tackle this deeper question.
15 sie 2008 · The issue of capital punishment divides libertarians just as it does other Americans. Debates among libertarians and others generally fall into two areas: the abstract question of whether the state may ever legitimately puts its citizens to death, and the more specific question of whether capital punishment is just and fitting as it is actually ...
15 sty 2020 · Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, who were both fans of Beccaria’s work, advocated for limiting the death penalty to treason and murder. At the same time, Benjamin Rush argued for incarceration as opposed to execution, all inspired by Beccaria.
21 mar 2018 · The principle of proportionality, as put forward by Murray Rothbard (The Ethics of Liberty, Chapter 13, 1982), further asserts that only murder can be punishable by death. The purpose of punishment is twofold: restitution and retribution .
Indeed, recent public opinion polls show a wide margin of support for the death penalty. But human rights advocates and civil libertarians continue to decry the immorality of state-sanctioned killing in the U.S., the only western industrialized country that continues to use the death penalty.
Capital punishment is anathema to liberal notions of human rights and civil liberties. It is time to finally cast it aside as an anachronistic vestige of bygone times. The death penalty is fundamentally incompatible with a truly liberal state. American history is replete with hypocrisies, contradictions, and imperfections.
This review addresses four key issues in the modern (post-1976) era of capital punishment in the United States. First, why has the United States retained the death penalty when all its peer countries (all other developed Western democracies) have abolished it?
