1481 sats \ 5 replies \ @Undisciplined 16 Sep 2023 \ parent \ on: Do you support capital punishment? meta
I think people have trouble separating the question "Do some people deserve to be killed?" from the question "Should the state be used to kill people?"
My answer to the first question is "Obviously", but my answer to the second question is "No".
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AFAIK the state by definition has a license to kill. This is what every law and tax is based on. Try not pay the tax, try not pay the resulting fine, try not show up for the resulting court case, try resisting the ppl that will force you to show up. They are allowed to escalate violence against u until you submit or is dead. That's the whole point behind the state :)
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This, technically, varies by nation.
As a rough rule if the police force are armed with lethal weapons then yes, the state fundamentally reserves the right to kill citizens.
Where the police force are not routinely armed with lethal weapons, is a statement that the state are civilians too. (In practice this is rarely the case due to factors wider than policing.)
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Wherever agents of the state assert the right to do things to you that you are not allowed to do to them, they are not civilians.
Wherever agents of the state assert no more rights than civilians have, there is no state.
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I'm pretty sure they didn't get that license legitimately. What you mean is "The state, by definition, asserts a license to kill." I'm under no obligation to agree with that assertion.
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