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I assume that psychological issue would apply to any sort of executioner regardless of the method, there’s not really a way around that if you’re killing someone, there has to be a person, or likely several, that actually does the deed, or at least is the last human to be involved in it. I don’t think its humane either, I just meant that in the relative sense where anything can be said to be if the other thing being compared can find a way to be just a bit worse.
Historically that’s also why we moved away from execution methods like hangings.
We kind of distilled down a way to remove people from the equation as much as possible to both I guess spread responsibility (making a large group of people have a hand in the execution to the point where no one person is singularly responsible), but also we seem to have gone out of our way to automate a lot of what goes into an execution to sterilize it of guilt as much as possible. This is at least part of why I don’t believe in it.
I feel that execution is vengeance based. It’s not about making the person pay for their crimes (because very often prison is a worse experience than death).
Justice is about repaying a debt to society and being rehabilitated. If rehabilitation is off the table then the next best thing is to incarcerate a person so they can’t be a threat to themselves or others.
The US is terrible at both somehow and I don’t like or believe in our justice system but for a bar that was already in the basement we sure did find an elevator headed down didn’t we.
Lately I’ve come to have doubts about the ethicality even of prison, though I don’t yet know what I’d suggest instead. In general Ive come around to the idea that the very notion that causing suffering creates a “debt” that must be repaid with more suffering on the part of the perpetrator is itself toxic, because if some way can be found to cause a person to live a life that will not inflict more harm without hurting that person, then that method would be better, at least in a utilitarianist sense, than something more “fair” relying on punishment. The challenge of course is in finding that way is.