You know what, I’ll help you out. Why not. We put down rabid dogs for two reasons. They pose a danger to everyone around them, and we can’t cure them. Psychopathy has these same relevant features. If you want to defeat this argument, your goal should be to attack the dog-human component of the analogy, not the disease component. Why? Well, because even if I granted that rabies and psychopathy do not share the relevant features of being incurable and dangerous, we would just be back to square one, when I point out that:

1. We put down dogs that attack children. And since dogs and humans are both animals, we should put down humans who attack children, too. Bingo bango, you’re back to square one.

If you follow my advice and instead attack the human-dog comparison, you stand a better chance of defeating this analogy.

Spoiler alert, your efforts will fail. This is a really good analogy. To succeed you’ll need to appeal to practical matters that don’t focus on the morally justified treatment of people and turn your attention instead to the practical matters of administering a government.

You’re welcome. Don’t bother responding, because I blocked you.

deleted by creator

killing innocent people is bad*

Now that we can agree about your hypocrisy, there’s not much left to discuss.

You’re right, none of us know anything. We can presume no facts, nor make even the most salient observations. All social science is false, and nihilists like you are right about everything.

If you’re so against killing innocents, I assume you’re vegan. Or… is your morality as twisted and inconsistent as I suspect?

If you hate killing so much, you must be vegan, right? Or do you kill some non-human animals but not other non-human animals?

Listen, if you want to keep a psychopath alive in your basement for some unknown reason, well, as long as he doesn’t get out and maul anyone that’s fine by me. But you’re insane if you think normal people should spend their hard-earned money contributing to that exercise in immiseration.

Are you… trolling right now, or do you genuinely not understand how analogies work?

deleted by creator

Forum discussions about food are like a biochemist’s personal hell. No offense, but you’re all dumb as shit.

Do you formulate your opinions based on reasons you can articulate or is this just a fleeting thought you’re having?

No, I am genuinely against the death penalty.

It’s important not to conflate moral facts with practical policy. Most of your arguments focus on how people should be treated, whereas the relevant question is how governments should behave and why. These are very different things.

Regardless of what people deserve, no government should go around killing its own citizens. That is because killing as a punishment makes a spectacle of death. It is profoundly unhealthy for any civil society to revel in death. That’s the answer. It has nothing to do with what serial killers deserve. They do not matter.

Why is everyone anti-science when it comes to nutrition? Sorry, but you’re just wrong, which I suppose isn’t too surprising when your reference is a three-decades old book written by a goofball non-scientist who knows about as much biochemistry as you do. None whatsoever.

Saturated fat is processed by the liver from Chylomicrons to VLDLs to LDLs in an incredibly taxing process directly responsible for fatty liver disease. No faster way to get diabetes than eating lots of saturated fat and sugar. Both are absolutely horrible and very poorly tolerated by humans, who are apes that evolved eating mostly plants. These are empirical facts. Stop treating food like a religion and just eat a fucking vegetable.

Not all diseases are communicable or infectious. Psychopathy is a serious neurological pathology that robs humans of anything resembling humanity. That makes it a hell of a lot worse than rabies to my mind, but of course that’s debatable. Regardless, I’m not sure how ranking one horrible affliction against another makes much difference for this analogy.

Rabies and psychopathy are diseases. The prognosis is terminal in both cases, and death would be a mercy. Rabies is also far less harmful than psychopathy, because it results in less collateral damage. After all, psychopathy is responsible for almost every evil you can see in the world today from famine to poverty and war.

Again, there is an argument against the death penalty but protecting psychopaths ain’t it.

In the event that I were guilty of causing great harm to innocent people, then I should be killed. Not in revenge, but as a matter of course, given that my life would no longer be worth living.

This is the golden rule in action, which is about how you would want to be treated in similar circumstances.

it is fundamentally inhumane to kill someone that knows it’s coming (mental torture)

That killing serial killers causes them harm isn’t a particularly compelling point, since we disagree over whether harming them is, in fact, good.

risk of executing an innocent

This is a good point and one I would explore further. However, it leaves open exceptions where the evidence is overwhelming.

it is hypocritical to kill someone for killing

Killing isn’t always bad. Killing innocent creatures is bad. Killing serial killers is tantamount to putting down rabid animals.

I’m against the death penalty, and I know the best argument against it, something nobody in this thread has even approximately articulated.

Currently, as far as I know, there is only one strong argument against the death penalty, and it has to do with moral proscriptions against treating the death of a person as a spectacle, which I notice nobody mentioned.

Idk what’s the upside of killing rabid dogs? Most dogs are better than most humans, so how does the math work out there?