The applied ethics issue of capital punishment involves determining whether the execution of criminals is ever justified, and, if so under what circumstances it is permissible. Philosophical defenses of capital punishment typically draw from more general discussions of punishment. The issue of corrective justice in legal philosophy distinguishes between two principal theories of punishment: utilitarian and retributive. Accordingly, defenses of capital punishment are usually either utilitarian or retributive in nature. By contrast, most criticisms of capital punishment seek to expose flaws in popular justifications of capital punishment. Thus, in the absence of any good reason for executing a criminal, the critic of capital punishment concludes that the criminal should be allowed to live (Bedau, 1997).
Perhaps the most common defenses of capital punishment are on utilitarian grounds. For utilitarians, punishment in general is justified only insofar as it creates a greater balance of happiness vs. unhappiness. From the utilitarian perspective, then, capital punishment is justified if it (1) prevents the criminal from repeating his crime; or (2) deters crime by discouraging would-be offenders. For, both of these contribute to a greater balance of happiness in society. There are several immediate problems with this line of reasoning. First, the burden of proof is on the defender of capital punishment to show that the same effects could not be accomplished with less severe punishment, such as life imprisonment. This is especially pertinent since the goal of utilitarianism is to reduce as much unhappiness as possible and this entails imposing the least severe of two possible punishments when everything else is equal. Italian political theorist Cesare Beccaria argues this point in On Crimes and Punishment, one of the first systematic critiques of capital punishment from the utilitarian point of view. According to Beccaria, capital punishment is not necessary to deter, and long term.....
