If a man is heartless, can he still yet be alive? Modern science would say that one cannot sustain life without a heart to pump its copious amounts of crimson blood to veins and vesicles alike.
If one such man were to commit a murderous crime, would it be possible to punish him with yet another? If he is truly heartless, then is it possible to bring death upon him? If in his heartlessness he is still capable of achieving death, would it be wrong to bring such upon him as he had already brought upon another?
Surely, if you were to rip him open, his blood would spill before him on the ground and there contained within his chest would be his beating heart. So if not heartless, then perhaps mindless.
The mind is the source of all thought, and without thought no consequences would hinder his actions. If he is incapable of thinking about and understanding morals and ethics, what is to stop his endless slaughter of innocent victims? Would it now be wrong to punish him for his crime with yet another? He would neither understand what the punishment is for, or even that is a punishment.
Perhaps it is not even punishment that we seek; maybe we merely want judgment so that we can rest in peace. But judgments of one’s rights and wrongs is subjective and must be based on some belief system.
But who’s? Surely not his own because society has long since neglected his rights whether the law has or not. Even if he were allowed to be judged based on his own beliefs, who’s to say that murder is not acceptable in his belief system? Then what judgment can be decreed? Innocence? That is an absurdity. So once again, who’s beliefs is his judgment to be based on if not his own?
Surely no one of them can be said to be more correct than another. But with all this to weigh, if one set of beliefs is still chosen above all the rest, who is in the right to judge? Will it then be up to people to judge or some divine power? Regardless, will those who believe differently feel they’ve been avenged for the crimes committed against them by such a man if their own belief system was not used in choosing his punishment?
But surely the punishment should be equal to the crime and death must be the only thing that equals death. So all must agree that he will die and feed the worms who’ve committed no crime.
But what if he’s accused of slaying more than one entity? Can a man die more than once in a lifetime? Such an idea is beyond human thought but all reason would force the assumption that no such possibility could ever exist.
So what punishment could be forced upon him that would make up for his crime? Again assuming that if his heart cannot be absent, his mind must surely be in its place. Are the mindless, however, any more capable of dying?
Learning, reasoning, socializing: all things that are aspects controlled by the mind. Would one not say that they are required for life?
If one does not have the means to live in their possession, how can they be alive? Our reasoning would be spoiled yet again as we’d have to agree that this walking, talking, breathing mass of human flesh and features is indeed alive. Then we must change our whole approach to the situation at hand. If he is already dead, he obviously cannot be punished by death. But if he is still very much alive, then there is still a chance to punish him with such methods.
Then another question of morality must be posed. Are we in the right when killing a living man? It is after all the crime he is being punished for. How is it right for he himself to be murdered if it was not alright for he himself to murder? If it is right in one instance then it must be right in all instances. And he is therefore being punished for something that is not a crime.
The executioner would then be guilty merely for carrying out the punishment and not for murdering him in itself. For if one act is committed in response to another in order to leave a lesson learned, then it is a punishment regardless of whether it is or is not a crime.
But assume death is an applicable and acceptable punishment for murder, which in our lifetime is viewed as a crime. If death is a punishment, why is it given freely to the innocent? If the innocent are deserving of such, then perhaps it is not as good of a punishment as we expect.
What if it is in fact a reward for innocence? Then by killing the guilty among us we are rewarding them for their crimes. For murder is a crime is it not?
What if the monster’s victims were not of the human form? Do different rules apply because apposable thumbs separate us from them? We all breathe the same air and inhabit the same Earth.
If death truly can be discerned from a reward and be recognized as a punishment, then surely the whole race of man is worthy of the plagues and war that defeat them. The race as a whole has yet to unify, that must be punishable at least, for disunity has brought more than its fair share of deaths. Disunity is, after all, merely a side effect of the existence of man and therefore man is guilty of murder. The whole race is at fault and no one is innocent. The fault is inheritable.
And if no being fashioned in man’s likeness can be innocent, then we no longer have to fear that the innocent are being punished unjustly. In fact, we may rule out death as a reward altogether unless you would argue that all men in their sinful ways are to be rewarded.
Assuming you have not taken the aforementioned path you must agree that the man mentioned earlier in this text is deserving of death just as were his victims.
Only if the faults of our forefathers, present in their hatred and murderous tendencies, can some how be atoned for can we erase our deservance of death. And for that reason alone must we live, in an effort to see our deed done in our lifetime and spare those who would live after us.