This post was inspired by the book, Logic of Life by Tim Harford.
Is it better for 100 guilty people to go free than for 1 innocent person to go to jail? What exactly is a guilty person? Murderers are guilty of murder, and pickpockets are guilty of pickpocketing. I think most people would agree that we can survive 100 guilty, but free, pickpockets stealing a few wallets here and there in the face of taking an innocent person’s freedom.
But is it logical to allow 100 guilty murderers free rather than have 1 imprisoned innocent? What if we let those 100 go free, and 10 of them each kill a person. We prevented one man from going to prison, but 10 people lost their lives.
Should we allow 10 people to live, rather than send one innocent person to jail? Seems obvious when put that way.
Self-righteous pontification about fairness and freedom can get people killed. I have no interest in sending innocent people to jail, but I also don’t want a system where murderers and rapists get acquitted of crimes that we know they committed, but some cop didn’t cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s so “in the interest of justice” some despicable human being is released to commit another crime. Punish the cop, not the rest of us.
How about you liberals stop acting so certain about such uncertain things?
While it doesn’t apply to all liberals, most support a “woman’s right to choose” whether to abort a fetus or not, but oppose the death penalty for any criminal, no matter what they did. Pro-abortion, anti-death penalty. This is not consistent.
It is rational to be against the death penalty. There is a rational train of thought that can conclude that just because someone killed a lot of people does not mean a government has the right to kill that person. The rationale is that killing is killing, and killing is wrong. That is rational even if it is simplistic.
But for that same person to be supportive of a woman’s right to arbitrarily end the existence of an 8 1/2 month old fetus, or even a 9 month old fetus that is in the process of being birthed, makes no sense. I’m not talking about situations where the baby will die anyway and the mother needs the abortion to survive. I’m talking about the liberal position that you can NEVER infringe upon a woman’s right to “privacy.” Being for abortion but against the death penalty is inconsistent, and makes no sense.
I have a solution. Instead of calling it the “death penalty” we will refer to it as “post-birth abortion.” If a woman has the right to choose the fate of an innocent fetus, a society should be allowed to choose whether to abort a guilty adult. Do you think liberals would get mad if “post-birth abortions” were carried out with the same techniques used for fetal abortions?