Crime and Punishment

While we're on the subject of capital punishment, here's some stuff on new research into punishment:

• Mark Kleiman, professor of public policy at UCLA, has a new book called When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment. He argues that smaller, swifter punishments can greatly increase deterrence.
• Here's a review of When Brute Force Fails.
• Kleiman runs a blog called Same Facts.
  
• Here's a video dialogue about Kleiman's book:
  

Death Penalty Box

Here are some links related to our discussion of the death penalty:

• An encyclopedia of philosophy article on the death penalty.
• A large collection of resources on the ethics of capital punishment. I mean, wow.
• What's up with punishment in general? That's a big ethical issue.
  
• What about the financial cost of the death penalty? Although it's common sense to think that keeping a criminal in prison for life would cost more than putting her to death, some studies suggest that the opposite is true. The additional legal battles in death penalty cases may cost more than a life sentence.
• A nice article on measuring the reliability of the justice system. How often do courts convict the wrong person? How reliable is eyewitness testimony?
• Of course, for some death penalty opponents, it's not about whether innocent people are sentenced to death.
  

Quiz #2

We're having another quiz! Quiz #2 is worth 7.5% of your overall grade, and will be held at the beginning of class on Monday, November 23rd. You'll have about 25 minutes to complete it. It will consist mainly of short answer questions, and will be on everything we've covered since the midterm:

• abortion (Warren and Marquis)
• euthanasia (Rachels and Doerflinger)
• animal ethics (Singer, Norcross, and Machan)

Can Death Harm Animals?

Here is a short post with some thoughtful analysis regarding the topic of our 2nd paper on the moral status of persons (specifically, on non-persons and killing animals):

• Can Death Harm Non-Persons?

I recommend reading it to help you start developing your own arguments on these issues for your paper.

Hunting vs. Shopping

-via FailBlog

Moopheus

Here are some links on animal ethics:

• Vegetarians Still Love the Smell of Bacon
• David Foster Wallace: Consider the Lobster
• How to Cut Back on Meat Slowly
• What Is The Meatrix?
• What If We Could Make Pain-Free Animals?
  
• Animal Research (Peter Singer's Sometimes OK with It!)
• Peter Singer on Michael Vick & Dog Fighting
  
• Audio Interview with Peter Singer
• Michael Pollan's "An Animal's Place"
• Huge List of Resources on the Moral Status of Animals

The Ethics of Killing

I don't often recommend an entire book to students, but if you're interested in some thoughtful analysis of abortion, euthanasia, killing, and personhood, among other things, you should check out Jeff McMahan's The Ethics of Killing. Here's a short description of the book:

"This magisterial work is the first comprehensive study of the ethics of killing, where the moral status of the individual killed is uncertain. Drawing on philosophical notions of personal identity and the immorality of killing, McMahan looks carefully at a host of practical issues, including abortion, infanticide, the killing of animals, assisted suicide, and euthanasia."

McMahan teaches philosophy at Rutgers. He also just wrote a follow-up book called Killing in War. I'm not saying I agree with everything in this book, but it's exactly the kind of careful, thought-out approach that I think complicated, serious issues deserve.

Extra Credit: The Box

Here's an optional extra credit assignment:

Go watch the new movie The Box and write a short (about one page) response to it. What did you think of the movie? What ethical issues did it raise? How might you react if you were given such a box? How should one react? Try to relate the movie to ethics, and especially what we've discussed in class.

Youth In Asia

Ali G's Take on Euthanasia
[More on euthanasia]