Resolved: The United States should abolish the death penalty

Thanks to Kohai for doing this debate with me!

Overview:

Because the resolution says "The United States should...", it is assumed that the actor of the resolution is the United States (or, by extension, the United States federal government [USFG], as we're talking about a legal/penal process).

Framing:

A) Governments have an obligation to base their laws around defendable moral norms and principles. Long gone are the days where "the law is the law". In short, people tend not to follow bullshit laws, so legal code ought to be based on external moral principles. In this way, governments ought to act as rational agents and follow moral guidelines. Magsino[1]:

"... People do not conform their behavior to the law simply because it should be that way. There must be a more rational justification to following rules than merely evoking authority. ... It is not the intrinsic "power" the law supposedly possesses that grants it legitimacy. Rather, legitimacy is bestowed by its being justified by reason through a normative claim."

B) Ontologically speaking, identity is important to understanding moral responsibilities. The self is constantly in relation to social others and, thus, is vulnerable. White[2]:

... ontologies emerge from the conjunction of two insights: acceptance of the idea that ... fundamental conceptualizations of self ... are contestable, and awareness that such conceptualizations are nevertheless unavoidable for any sort of reflective ethical and political life. ... ontologies do not proceed by categorical positings of ... human nature or telos ... Rather, they offer figurations of human being in terms of certain existential realities, ...These figurations are accounts of what it is to be a certain sort of creature: one entangled with language; conscious that it will die; possessing, despite its entanglement and limitedness, the capacity for radical novelty; and, finally, giving definition to itself against some ultimate background or "source" that evokes awe, wonder, or reverence.... 

This highlights an essential ontological truth: life is precarious and can't be statistically defined. Rather, we exist in an interdependent state. Ethics must, thusly, be grounded in actualizing the grievability of life. Life is injurable and defined by a shared vulnerability. Butler[3]:

Precariousness implies living socially ... that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other. It implies exposure both to those we know and to those we do not know; a dependency on people we know or barely know, or know not at all. ... constitute obligations toward others, most of whom we cannot name and do not know, ... we could say that we have such obligations to others and presume that we know who we are in such an instance. ... precariousness underscores our radical substitutability ... in relation both to certain socially facilitated modes of dying and death ... Only under conditions in which the loss in which the loss would matter does the value of the life appear. ... we imagine that an infant comes into the world, is sustained in and by that world through to adulthood and old age, and finally dies. ... there can be no celebration without an implicit understanding that the life is grievable, that it would be grieved if it were lost, and that this future anterior is installed as the condition of its life. ... Without grievability, there is no life, ... there is something living that is other than life. ... is a life that will never have been lived, ... and ungrieved when lost. ... 

Thus, the standard for evaluating the round ought to be who best actualizes the grievability of life. These precede other framing justifications because they're grounded in how we ought to construct the individual, which guides our ethical decisions. Butler[4]:

... before we can speak about a self who is capable of choice, we must first consider how that self is formed ... the sphere in which the subject is said to emerge is ‘‘ontological’’ in the sense that the phenomenal world of persons and things becomes available only after a self has been formed ... To describe this scene is to take leave of the descriptive field in which a ‘‘self ’’ is formed and bounded in one place and time and considers its ‘‘objects’’ and ‘‘others’’ in their locatedness elsewhere. The possibility of [ethics] ... presumes ... the self and its ... world have ... been constituted ... 

And, this also precludes other discussions of ethics because ethics become impossible without an understanding of our relation to the Other. Rejecting the Other rejects subjective narratives and opens the door to ethical violence and oppression. Butler[4]:

... to ... not ... have the grounds for agency and the conditions for accountability, it may be that this way in which we are, from the start, interrupted by alterity and not fully recoverable to ourselves, indicates the way in which we are, from the start, ethically implicated in the lives of others. ... our incoherence ... establishes the way in which we are implicated, beholden, derived, constituted by what is beyond us and before us. If we say that the self must be narrated ... then we say that we cannot survive with an unconscious. ... In the language which articulates the opposition to a non-narrativizable beginning resides the fear that the absence of narrative will spell a certain threat, a threat to life, and will pose the risk, if not the certainty, of a certain kind of death, the death of a subject who cannot, who can never, fully recuperate the conditions of its own emergence. 

And grievability is the primary and sufficient source of moral obligations and acts as a gateway to other moral decisions. My framing is the best guideline under which to make moral decisions. Butler[5]:

[Grievability] can be a point of departure for a new understanding ... we might critically evaluate and oppose the conditions under which certain human lives are more vulnerable than others, and thus certain human lives are more grievable than others. From where might a principle emerge by which we vow to protect others from the kinds of violence we have suffered if not from an apprehension of a common human vulnerability ... this conception means that we are vulnerable to those we are too young to know and to judge and, hence, vulnerable to violence; but also vulnerable to another range of touch, a range that includes the eradication of our being at the one end, and the physical support for our lives at the other. ... we cannot recover the source of this vulnerability: it precedes the formation of “I.” this is a condition, a condition of being laid bare from the start with which we cannot argue. ...  

Thus, my sole contention is that the death penalty violates the grievability of life.

1) The face to face encounter with the Other requires a prohibition on all violence, regardless of what the other has done. The death penalty is most certainly an act of violence, as we're ending someone's life, and can never be permissible. Butler[4]:

... We do not take responsibility for ... Other’s acts as if we authored those acts ... we affirm the unfreedom at the heart of our relations. I cannot disavow my relation to the Other, regardless of what the Other does, regardless of what I might will. ... responsibility is not a matter of cultivating a will, but of making use of an unwilled susceptibility as a resource for becoming responsive to the Other. Whatever the Other has done, the Other still makes an ethical demand upon me ... There are situations in which responding to the ‘‘face’’ of the other feels horrible, impossible, and where the desire for murderous revenge feels overwhelming. But the primary and unwilled relation to the Other demands that we desist from both a voluntarism and an impulsive aggression grounded in the self-preservative aims of egoism. ... 

2) The death penalty denies our shared vulnerability and denies we can always be affected by the Other. Rejection of our shared vulnerability is a rejection of the Other leads to the harms outlined in the framing. Butler[4]:

It is always possible to say, ‘‘Oh, some violence was done to me, and this gives me full permission to act ... ’ Many atrocities are committed under the sign of a ‘‘self-defense [or realiation] ... because it achieves a permanent moral justification for retaliation, knows no end and can have no end ... It delineates a physical vulnerability from which we cannot slip away, which we cannot finally resolve in the name of the subject, but which can provide a way to understand that none of us is fully bounded, utterly separate, but, rather, we are in our skins, given over, in each other’s hands, at each other’s mercy. ...

Sources:

[1] - Magsino, Marion. Jürgen Habermas' ​ Between Facts and Norms.

[2] - Stephen K. White. As the World Turns: Ontology and Politics in Judith Butler. Polity, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Winter, 1999), pp. 155-177 

[3] - Judith Butler, PhD, Yale, Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, “Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?”, Verso, 2009,

[4] - Giving an Account of Oneself. Judith Butler [Maxine Elliot Professor of rhetoric at Berkley] University press.

[5] - Judith Butler. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence 2004. Pg. 30-31 

Thanks Kohai.

Pro Framing:

Everything above my contention arguments was cold conceded by Con. So lets do some extensions to show why this debate is already over.

Extend the Magsino evidence. Magsino does a really good job of elaborating that laws and principles of justice need to be based on external moral codes and principles. People don't follow laws just because it's the law, but rather because there is some reason to believe that the law is good through some other normative claim. This means that before we can even evaluate any impacts coming off of Con's framing, we need to accept some other underlying moral framing. This is damning because I'm the only one providing any kind of moral framing. So in order for Con to access any offense off of their case, they have to be linking into my framing. I'll be going over in the contention level offense why this is impossible for them.

Extend the first Butler evidence. Butler explains that the only way that life has any kind of ontological meaning is through an understanding that life is precarious and something worth protecting in and of itself. Specifically, it is through being alive that we understand and protect the grievability of life, and that precariousness is harmed if this life is taken away from a person (like, for example, when they're killed).

This is damning to Con's case for multiple reasons:

1) It's still the only moral framing that is present within the round, so Con's only chance of having offense via the conceded Magsino evidence is through linking offense to Butler.

2) This is impossible for Con to do because Con's plan is state-sponsored killing of people. I'm the only one advocating for not killing people. Full stop, vote pro here. Con can literally never garner any kind of offense off of my framing.

And, don't let them provide an alternative moral framing in the next round because they've conceded the three reasons why my framing pre-empts and comes before other moral framings (that's the second, third, and fourth Butler arguments).

Pro Contention:

Extend the first Butler argument I make under my contention level offense. Regardless of what other people do or who they harm, they still impose ethical demands on us as their lives are still grievable. Therefore killing them via the death penalty is impermissible.

Their response to this is to say that life imprisonment is also violence, as is self-defense. They also claim that the victim's lives are also grievable, so we have to protect the victims of these crimes. These responses fail for numerous reasons:

1) We can't protect the victims as they're already dead if we've reached the point of discussing the death penalty, per Con's own advocacy. Further escalating the violence by killing more people via the death penalty only makes things worse and furthers the cyclical violence that results from violating the grievability of life (that's the third Butler argument in the framing and the second Butler argument in the contentions). The only way to stop the cycle of violence is voting Pro.

2) Per the resolution, I only have to defend abolishing the death penalty. It's replacement, if any, is beyond the scope of the resolution.

a) Even if it's not, forcing me to defend life imprisonment is a false dichotomy, as rehabilitation exists.

b) Even if you don't like rehabilitation, life imprisonment is still preferable to the death penalty because at least they're still alive. Refer back to the first Butler argument I make under the framing where it's specifically being alive that's important.

Con's Case:

Overview:

Con's plan is specifically to keep the death penalty around for the following crimes:

1. Terrorism
2. Mass Murder
3. Genocide
4. Crimes Against Humanity

Keep that in mind, as it makes their proportionality argument absurd.

Con's Framing:

Con's value of Justice is pre-empted by my own framing (see the Magsino argument). The only way for them to garner offense off of it is through my own framing, which is impossible for them.

Then look at their goals of the criminal justice system. The death penalty only actually achieves two of them - retribution and incapacitation. Both of those feed into the cyclical nature of violence against grievability and make them bite further into the harms of the Pro framing (again, refer back to the third Butler argument in the framing and the second Butler argument in the contentions), but they also fail to defend the other three:

Rehabilitation is impossible because there is no life outside the justice system for them - they're dead now, under Con's plan.

Restoration is impossible because killing the offenders doesn't miraculously give life back to their victims. It just ups the body count.

And deterrence isn't achieved for a litany of reasons:

1) National metastudies show no causal link between the death penalty and deterrence. They examined 35 years of studies on the death penalty's effect on crime and came to the following conclusion:

The committee finds the failure of the panel studies we reviewed to address or overcome the primary challenges discussed above sufficient reason to view this research as noninformative with regard to the effect of the death penalty on homicides. ... No connection has been established between these measures and the perceived sanction risks of potential murderers. Neither the fixed effects multiple regression models nor the proposed instruments are credible in overcoming challenges to identifying a casual link between the death penalty and homicide rates. The homogeneous response restriction that the effects are the same for all states and all time periods seems patently not credible.

2) The National Institute of Justice provides a laundry list of reasons why the death penalty specifically doesn't factor into deterrence, including:

1. Getting caught mattering more than the specific punishment
2. Increasing severity of punishment doing nothing for deterrence
3. The death penalty specifically doesn't deter criminals

3) Saying the death penalty deters crime implies that criminals are thinking before committing crime about what punishment they'll face if they're caught, which is nonsense since a) most offenders don't plan to get caught, and b) it ignores crimes that occur within the moment with little to no pre-planning occurring.

This is game over for Con because not only is it impossible for them to fulfill my framework, but the death penalty doesn't even meet their own framework.

Con's Subpoint B:

The only thing Con has left standing is their subpoint b saying that the death penalty upholds proportionality. But this is a hilarious argument to make because in what world is killing a single person proportional to crimes like mass murder, terrorism, or genocide? Even a simple body count will easily show that one person =/= dozens/hundreds/thousands of victims. Proportionality via the death penalty is impossible.

Their source is even more entertaining:

1) I'm not sure how credible the Catholic World Report is when we're considering US law, especially because the source is specifically showing how the death penalty is valid under Catholic doctrine.

2) Look at their quoted text from their source. Literally none of the criminals listed in there would qualify for the death penalty under Con's plan. So even if their source is right, it's not applicable to Con's case.

3) All of this assumes that the death penalty would actually deter more crime, which isn't actually shown in this source and I've illustrated above how it wouldn't. If it's sole purpose is to literally just punish them for committing crime by killing them, then not only do they sever any possibility of linking to my framework, but they can't link to their own ideals of justice as well. That means that regardless of who's framework you look at, there's no reason to allow the death penalty.

Conclusion:

Con concedes the entirety of my framing and instead tries to show how the death penalty prevents future violations of people's grievability. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of my framing, and I do a very clear job of explaining that the death penalty can never be allowed to be a thing under my framing as killing anyone, for any reason, is inherently wrong. Life is precarious and grievable, and it is through living life that life has value (that's the first Butler argument under the framing). Following death with more death is like saying two wrongs make a right.

They've also conceded the Magsino argument that says that laws need to be based on external moral principles. This means that before you even evaluate Con's case, you have to vote off my framing. I'm the only one upholding the grievability of life by abolishing the death penalty, which means that it's a clear Pro vote here.

Don't let them propose a counter moral framework in the next round.

a) The time to propose framings to evaluate arguments under is reserved for the first round, and making it so my only time to respond to their new framing is the final round is explicitly unfair to me.

b) They've conceded the three reasons I have in my framework as to why my framing comes before other moral theories (which is the second, third, and fourth Butler arguments), so regardless of whether or not they do so, you still look to my framework first.

But even if you don't like my framing, I've shown pretty clearly how the death penalty fails to meet their conceptions of justice and proportionality. This means that regardless of who's framing you evaluate the round under, the death penalty should be abolished.

Back over to Con.

Pro Framing:

Extend Magsino. Governments have an obligation to base laws based on moral claims, otherwise there are no reasons for people to follow them. Con explicitly agrees with this argument. This is a game over mistake for them:

1. I'm the only one proposing any kind of moral framing or justification for any kind of action in this round. This means you default to evaluating the round under the framework of grievability.
2. Con's claim that their framework functions as a normative moral claim is factually wrong. No moral theories are defended by Con. Not util, not deontology, nothing. Their argument is the state has an obligation to protect people, but never states where that obligation is derived from. In Con's world, the state makes laws so those laws are moral and just. This is precisely what Magsino criticizes. With no moral justification to base their laws off of, the laws they would propose cannot be considered legitimate. This collapses the entirety of Con's framing, making it impossible for them to achieve their value of Justice.

Don't let them propose some other moral justification in the final round - I have no more rounds to respond to anything.

Don't let them say that they're using my framework as their moral justification either -

1. they've spent the first round trying to link to it, then said in the second round that it can't guide state policy. By their own admission, this can't justify their framework.
2. they continue to drop the argument coming out of the first Butler argument in my framing that living life and being alive is what makes life grievable. By endorsing literally killing people as state policy, they cannot link.

And don't let them say "protecting people" is their normative claim - they need to be doing the work to show who is worth protecting (I am, it's everyone), when we extend that protection (I am, it's always), and why that protection is important (I am, it's because otherwise life has no value and our understanding of identity is meaningless). They're doing none of those things. I'm the only one attempting to do these things via Butler.

Speaking of Butler, extend the first Butler argument coming from my framing. Because we live in an interdependent state, all life is inherently precarious and grievable. Being alive is what gives life value, so attempts to harm this (i.e. killing people) can never be justified. They make a number of criticisms against Butler:

1) Why care about Butler?

1. Butler is the only moral framework proposed in the round. Given the conceded Magsino argument, which says that governments must base laws off of external moral claims, we must care about Butler if we're talking about state policy.
2. Extend the second, third, and fourth Butler arguments I make in my framing that are all reasons why grievability is the most important moral justification to consider within the round and how grievability acts as a gateway to even begin any other moral discussion of ethics. None of these arguments were ever responded to. Hold Con to these concessions.

2) The state can't work with Butler

1. Given that the US processes hundreds of thousands of crimes without killing offenders and millions of people live normal lives, I think the state can do just fine upholding grievability.
2. The interview they quote of Butler explicitly states that her ethics can be used to guide state action:

It is not a book that is full of prescriptions or absolute principles. But it does seek to develop a political ethos that is informed by ethical commitments.

3) Nonviolence doesn't work

1. Con seems to be really hung up on one tag line while refusing to engage with the actual warrants of what Butler is saying. Again, the first Butler argument in my framing is very clear that taking life away from people is what harms grievability. Alive = good. Dead = bad. That is the claim Butler is making, and that is the claim I'm defending. I brought this up last round, I'll do it again here. I don't know how to be more clear than this.
2. Butler doesn't defend absolute pacifism. Their own interview clarifies (they really should've read this more):

AD: You have already mentioned that you do not see nonviolence as some kind of absolute principle ... But if you were to draw a line between violence and self-defence where would you try to draw it?

JB: ... My answer is twofold: On the one hand, I would say that there are enormously forceful and aggressive forms of nonviolence that can be used to oppose state violence ... I do not understand nonviolence as passive. ... Nonviolence can be raging and ... defined as a way of ... redirecting rage in such a way that it does not reproduce the violence it opposes. The question I would ask in any given instance is the following: is my action reproducing the violence that it opposes? If it reproduces the violence it opposes it ... cannot be a good solution ...

This condemns the death penalty - Con opposes killing people by checks notes killing people. Vote Pro here, clear as day.

And can we please move on from the pointless self defense talk? Con's trying to say that my case means we can't practice self defense, then says Butler says self defense is fine (while miscontextualizing the quote, because the line Con quotes is her referencing something someone else claimed), so by their own admission this entire point is a wash. And don't let them extrapolate this into some weird concession about killing people - there's more ways to practice self-defense than just killing your attacker.

And, just so Con can't say I dropped the random examples of people who escaped prison and killed more people:

1. This is making the implication that some lives are more grievable than others, which is false. Regardless of the Other's actions, they still impose ethical demands on us, so we must uphold grievability in all instances.
2. Saying that we can prevent future killings by killing offenders implies that there's some kind of deterrence effect on crime, which they've conceded isn't true. This puts them in a double-bind. Either a) we can't protect the victims as they're already dead, or b) they have to defend that the death penalty has a deterrence effect (which they've conceded it doesn't). And saying that the ability to escape imprisonment breaks the double bind is nonunique - it's not like the second people are sentenced to death they die, so there's still potential for them to escape imprisonment in Con's world.

So on the Pro side, the debate is crystal clear - life is grievable, so killing people, for any reason, is wrong. The death penalty kills people, so it is wrong. Therefore, vote Pro.

Con's Framing:

Con never responds to my argument that Magsino pre-empts their value of Justice (yes, it was there in multiple places, scroll back up). This means that before you can evaluate anything in Con's case, you have to vote off my case first.

Then Con makes the argument that they don't have to uphold each of their five points to what makes a punishment just. Oh boy...

1. This is clearly shifting the goalposts. Their argument literally is that the justice system has five goals - saying that you don't have to meet every goal after I've shown why Con doesn't meet most of them is clearly abusive.
2. Even if it's not, they've conceded that the death penalty doesn't meet most of them, so at best for Con it shows that we're unsure if the death penalty is just or unjust. At worst, it's more likely to be unjust rather than just.
3. Even if you don't buy that, their argument after is that proportionality is what matters most, which isn't one of the listed goals, so why do we care about Con's criteria under Con's own framing?
4. Even if you don't buy that, then all we care about is proportionality and this entire section is just something they're trying to kick out of. However, they can't because they concede the argument I make that the goals of retribution and incapacitation, as it's applied to the death penalty, further the cyclical violence that the Pro case condemns. This means that Con's framing cannot be morally justified, which a) collapses their entire framing again, and b) means they can never fulfill the requirement placed on the state by Magsino.

Speaking of proportionality, let's talk about it.

Extend the response I make last round that the death penalty can never be a proportional punishment to crimes like mass murder/terrorism/genocide/etc. because killing one person doesn't balance out for the dozens/hundreds/thousands of victims. THIS IS 100% DROPPED BY CON. Nowhere in their last round do they address this. Their only claim to saying that it's proportional is their Catholic World Report source, where the warrant is literally just one dude saying it is with zero justification for why it is. It's really as simple as 1 =/= more than one. The only way to make it proportional would be to also execute the offender's family/friends/loved ones until the body count is even, which a) Con probably doesn't defend, and b) shows exactly why the death penalty bites into the cyclical violence that my case condemns. For the crimes that Con is proposing to keep the death penalty around for, proportionality is literally impossible. This is game over for Con - not only do they have no offense towards either framing, but if all we care about for justice is proportionality, then the death penalty isn't proportional so we should reject it under their framing.

Again, this was cold conceded by Con. Hold them to it since this is the last round and I don't have a chance to respond to whatever they might say in the final round.

Conclusion:

This debate is super simple to evaluate. My framing stands easily - life is grievable and killing people violates that grievability. The death penalty kills people, so we ought to reject it. States must also base their laws off of external moral norms (that's Magsino), so we reject the death penalty. The death penalty also isn't proportional, so it violates Con's framing as well.