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Can The Death Penalty Ever Be Justified?

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Can the death penalty ever be justified? The legitimacy of the use of capital punishment has been tarnished by its widespread misuse , which has clouded our judgment regarding the justifiability of the death penalty as a punitive measure. However, the problems with capital punishment, such as the “potential error, irreversibility, arbitrariness and racial skew" , are not a basis for its abolition, as the world of homicide suffer from these problems more acutely. To tackle this question, one must disregard the currently blemished universal status quo and purely assess the advantages and disadvantages of the death penalty as a punitive measure. Through unprejudiced examination of the death penalty and its consequential impacts, it is evident that it is a punishment that effectively serves its retributive, denunciatory, deterrent, and incapacitative goals. Many contend that the death penalty is morally impermissible due to some irreversible miscarriages of justices . However, capital punishment can be defended in both consequentialist and deontological terms. Kantian ethics claims that, for exceptionally heinous crimes committed with malice aforethought, the penalty of death is not only morally justifiable but is morally obligatory. Consequentialists can substantiate the use of capital punishment through the claim that the death penalty is more effective than other more moderate punishments in averting the murder of innocents through inducing the fear of consequences in

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