[MD] Capital Punishment

[Ham Priday]

Hi Platt, Arlo --

I trust you have unpacked at least the necessities from your move, Platt,
and are equipped with your new server.

Although I agree that Morality is important, and Arlo was justified in
changing the title of this thread to Capital Punishment, I'm not going to
give up on the Quality vs. Value issue.


On the question of capital punishment, to which Arlo and I are personally
opposed, I have taken the Christian position of "render unto Caesar",
accepting the death sentence as the law of our society.  Ideally, I would
like to see alternatives to this practice, such as life imprisonment without
pardon; but it would have to be managed in a way that provides maximum
restitution for the crime and alteration of the criminal's values.  Western
society does not have the means to implement these objectives in its current
justice system.

Arlo begs the question as to whether slavery is "absolutely immoral", based
on my assertion that individual freedom is a "moral imperative".  I am using
this term in the same sense that  Kant did (and for what I suspect is the
same reason).  Since you've also raised the question, I checked Wickipedia
for an "official definition" and have quoted the following pertinent
paragraphs which articulate Kant's moral position quite clearly:

"Kant viewed the human individual as a rationally autonomous self-conscious
being with full freedom of action and self-determination.  For a will to be
considered "free", we must understand it as capable of effecting causal
power without being caused to do so.  But the idea of lawless free will,
that is, a will acting without any causal structure, is incomprehensible.
Therefore, a free will must be acting under laws that it gives to itself,
and which are universally and objectively valid.

"Although Kant conceded that there could be no conceivable example of free
will, because any example would only show us a will as it appears to us - as
a subject of natural laws - he nevertheless argued against determinism.  He
proposed that determinism is logically inconsistent: The determinist claims
that because A caused B, and B caused C, that A is the true cause of C.
Applied to a case of the human will, a determinist would be arguing that the
will does not have causal power because something else had caused the will
to act as it did. But that argument merely assumes what it set out to prove;
that the human will is not part of the causal chain.

"Secondly, Kant remarks that free will is inherently unknowable.  Since even
a free person could not possibly have knowledge of his own freedom, we
cannot use our failure to find a proof for freedom as evidence for a lack of
it.  The observable world could never contain an example of freedom because
it would never show us a will as it appears to itself, but only a will that
is subject to natural laws imposed on it.  But we do appear to ourselves as
free.  Therefore he argued for the idea of transcendental freedom - that is,
freedom as a presupposition of the question "what ought I to do?"  This is
what gives us sufficient basis for ascribing moral responsibility: the
rational and self-actualizing power of a person, which he calls moral
autonomy: "the property the will has of being a law unto itself".

This leads to the first formulation of the categorical imperative:

" 'Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will
that it would become a universal law'."

Notice that the word "absolute" doesn't appear anywhere in this position
statement.  I am in full agreement with Kant's concept of the "human
individual as a rationally autonomous self-conscious being with full freedom
of action and self-determination."  If you accept this definition, then I
think you would have to conclude that autonomy is an "absolute principle"
insofar as it applies to "free choice" in a relativistic world.  Any form of
slavery works against this principle, hence is immoral by definition.

[Platt]:
> Perhaps my own logic is weak or I have misconstrued your words. If so, I'm
> eager to be corrected. My questions boil down to: "In your philosophy, do
> absolutes (other than Essence) play any part? If not, how can you claim
the
> existence of a moral imperative?

Can morality be absolute?  No.

Only Essence is Absolute.  Because we can't logically apply "absolute" in a
relational context, I defer to Kant and, instead, refer to slavery as a
violation of the categorical imperative.  In other words, slavery is
categorically immoral.  So is the manipulation and control of another
person's freedom or values.  But even this is not an "absolute" maxim, since
the exercise of freedom cannot be allowed to threaten or cause injury to
mankind.  Thus, society disciplines the child and penalizes the offender as
part of its morality system.

Good to have you back, Platt.

Essentially yours,
Ham