For most of my life, I implicitly viewed capital punishment as a very accepted and normal part of society. Having spent 12 years of my adolescent life in Singapore, capital punishment was not only accepted, it was also very welcome; many Singaporeans believe that capital punishment is a strong crime deterrent. Needless to say, this acceptance became the bedrock of my understanding of morality – bad deeds lead to bad outcomes (aka karma or “you get what you give). Having grown up in a Hindu household, karmic values were further reinforced by my parents and relatives. That said, I never explicitly thought about my views on capital punishment. Like many other beliefs I was conditioned to have, this one also was uninformed and went unchecked.
Fast forward to my adult life, where one afternoon, my friend and I were talking about capital punishment. That’s when my views on this issue were brought to the forefront of my thinking [or attention]. I think it was the first time I explicitly stated that I supported capital punishment and that people who have committed harm to others ought to die. I was very firm on my stance based solely on the ‘logic’ that bad people ought to die and that capital punishment is an effective crime deterrent, and that its absence would not incentivise people enough to decide against committing a crime. Even the argument of “what if that person was innocent” didn’t make my stance falter – obviously, here my (again) uninformed assumption was that this made up a small minority and that it shouldn’t encourage us to remove capital punishment as a type of sentence. I also failed to think about the ‘possibility’ that suffering is suffering, regardless of whether someone is innocent or guilty.
A few years ago, I was educated about the scale and intensity of nonhuman animal suffering in animal agriculture. This led me to making changes on a personal level so that I was no longer contributing to this suffering – following a vegan diet was the primary change. Like many other people living a vegan lifestyle, I went through an “angry” phase hating on every human omnivore and holding them personally responsible for the mass slaughter and suffering of farmed animals. I would spend copious amounts of time thinking about the things people would (indirectly) do to nonhuman animals that they would never do to a fellow human.
It is only when my focus shifted from the problem of mass nonhuman animal suffering to actually solving it (thanks to my introduction to Effective Altruism) that I realised I had to look past people eating animals and address the underlying problem of speciesism. I realised there were other ways to solve this problem than trying to turn people vegan – a high-effort task with very low scalability. I suspect that because I was considering other (more effective) methods to reduce animal suffering, I began to create the mental space needed to understand and accept the reasons (without justifying them) people eat animals – be it due to cultural norms, habit, perceived health benefits or centuries of conditioning.
The issue of capital punishment was brought to the forefront of my thinking again recently. That’s when I realised that I viscerally feel differently about capital punishment now than I did previously. I wondered why, and landed on the possibility that in the process of understanding people who (directly or indirectly) kill and eat animals, I had also subconsciously developed an understanding of people who harm other people – their biology, upbringing, greed etc. Since being exposed to the mass suffering of farmed animals, my effort has always been to assign, as much as practically possible, the same moral weight to nonhuman animals as I do to humans and use that to drive my views and decisions. For this simple reason, I had to update my views on capital punishment to maintain moral consistency across the way I treat humans and the way I treat nonhumans. So, at this stage, I do not support capital punishment in principle.
This is not to undermine what I might feel when I’m informed of gruesome and cruel crimes (e.g. extreme emotions of vengeance, anger, sadness etc.). I am definitely ‘guilty’ of wishing the worst for people who have committed rapes and brutal murders (amongst others), but I’m now better able to reconcile raw human emotion with rationality. I’m able to feel strong emotions without them necessarily driving my views on certain issues like capital punishment.
Some caveats: I decided to write this post when I realised my views on capital punishment had updated resulting from equalising moral consideration between humans and nonhuman animals. The premise of this post (or my current views on capital punishment) does not include considerations such as utilitarianism (i.e. the meat-eater problem, utility of people sentenced to life imprisonment and the resources they consume) and the effectiveness of capital punishment in deterring crime in different parts of the world. My current views operate under the assumption that capital punishment entails more suffering than the next most likely counterfactual – life imprisonment. This is likely a contentious topic, so I have decided for the comparison between capital punishment and life imprisonment to be out of scope for this post.
This post is part of the duck dive series.
Executive summary: The author's compassion for animals and rejection of speciesism led them to reassess their views on capital punishment, ultimately opposing it in principle to maintain moral consistency across human and nonhuman considerations.
Key points:
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