JulyJumping

Opponents of the death penalty are moral cowards because they sacrifice true justice for an easily satisfied deontology. Liberals think "killing is wrong" is an actual categorical imperative that defines a good person, rather than a starting point for moral development. You teach a child that "it's wrong to kill" because they are too simple to understand or enact justice. It's more important that they learn first that it's wrong to hurt other kids. Eventually children will grow up and some of them have to put on a uniform to dispense the violence of the state. It's also morally defective to look into the eyes of a murderer or career criminal and see an equal human soul. "Everyone is equal" is the organizing principle of a playground activity, not a civilization. You teach kids to share and respect each other's dignity because the classroom is a repeated game, a pretend society where they all have to cooperate rather than secure relative status hoarding all the pencils. As youth develop they enter a world in which their position is not guaranteed, where status is gained or lost, and where rules controlling behavior become more serious. If you break the rules you become more of a burden and we have less of an obligation to you. We jail people rather than killing them immediately because they still have some default virtue or redeemability as a member of our society, which is good to keeping people believing in the reciprocity of the tribe. But if you become a serious threat to society you eventually lose even the basic expectation of being fed and housed, and it is better to the collective that you die rather than be kept alive forever as a show of basic solidarity. Someone protesting for the rights of the criminal to the bitter end has forgotten the purpose of extending charity and has become detrimental to the group's interest. For people raised in modern urban environments, removed from conflict and material pressure, the default tendency is not to be a primitive tribalist clamoring for revenge, but an oversocialized aspiring sophisticate to whom calling for death is low-class behavior. It is necessary for the elite of such a society to re-invent ritualized violence as a rejection of the default tendency of their social class. Today, It takes courage to declare humans as superior and inferior, virtuous and wicked. By cleaving to the simple idea that every life has dignity and is worth protecting, the liberal avoids the social discomfort of being viewed as judgmental and regressive, and avoids the personal discomfort of having to commit to an ethical system, by which they or their friends might be viewed as imperfect. The liberal substitutes instead the non-virtue of tolerance, of being indiscriminate as a good in itself. This makes them virtuous by definition, without any effort or struggle against their natural tendencies.