Reality is a concept that’s bewildered me since I was a young boy. I have never given it too much thought for the sake of my mental health and sanity. If i’m going to narrate my view on reality, let us begin by understanding what everything is made of. When it comes to this topic, I believe myself to be a materialist. I believe that everything is made of physical things that can be explained by science such as atoms and quarks and whatnot. The world around us can all be explained by science and it follows laws that science has discovered. Everything is made of matter, plain and simple. But atlast, everything must have an origin, a beginning and an end. So where did the physical originate from? Where did matter and atoms and all things science come from? The answer is something akin to the Big Bang Theory. Granted it’s only a theory and not indisputable fact, but it’s the best answer we have at the moment. Just because science can’t definitively explain something right now doesn’t mean that the answer isn’t based in science, it just means we need more time to figure out what the right answer is. Until that day comes, for the sake of simplicity, I will presume that the Big Bang Theory is correct and that it is the origin of the universe around us that is made of matter. As for me, I believe that my mind is made of the experiences around me that form memories. My psychology teacher would always tell us, what are humans if not an amalgam of their memories? Everything I experience, touch, feel, see, smell, etc… all goes into my brain and forms neural connections that turn into memories. It is because of these memories that I am who I am. These collections of memories, which is ultimately what the brain is, allow me to remember my name, allow me to function in the world, and they allow me to proceed in life with an understanding of how the world operates and how I interact with it. My awareness of my surroundings such as the fact that I'm currently typing this is a combination of my memories telling me how the world operates and my senses informing me of what I'm doing. I can see that i’m typing this paper, I can hear my keyboard type as I do it, and from this I am aware that I’m currently writing this paper.
However, my senses do not lead me to true knowledge nor were they designed to do so. I am aware of the fact that I am writing this, but how do I know that this is real? How am I to be certain that my surroundings do not deceive me and that this is not all a dream(Meditations,2)? The answer to this varies and I will not claim to know it. All I do know is that my abilities, my senses, and my memories are the tools in which I use to navigate this world. I believe that empiricism is how we find knowledge in our material world. Though senses are prone to deception, they, along with memory, are the compass that guides us throughout. Knowledge to me is what my senses that are guided by my memories tell me. It’s what science would have me believe with extensive scientific proof and evidence. When one thinks of the human imagination, one thinks that it is unbounded, with limitless possibilities. However, you will find that it is impossible to imagine a new color, and many complex thoughts and ideas are just combinations of simpler ones that you acquired via your senses(Hume,8). One could easily make the argument that the world around us and even science itself could be fake, all part of a dream and that our reality is not real. To that I have two responses. One, even if my reality is fake and my surroundings deceive me, I can be certain that I am real because for one to even contemplate the idea of existence itself, one must exist. The more popular saying goes: I think therefore I am(Meditations,8). I know at the very least that I exist because I am able to think, to criticize, and to doubt. My second response is that I will not be spooked by the shadows on the wall. I will not chase ghosts my whole life while ignoring what is in front of me. It is true that this could all be fake, and if it is, then prove it to me. I understand what I ask, a seemingly impossible task. As a materialist, I look at the world around me and I take from it what it gives me. And the world around me, using my senses and my memories, has given me everything I am able to see, feel, touch, smell, etc… Why should I doubt my senses when they are the only thing guiding me along with my memories. Knowledge of the world around me is given to me by these tools, and I will believe it to be true knowledge until proven otherwise, as impossible as that may be.
The concept of right and wrong have been debated for centuries and a clear answer is yet to be given. Could this be because there isn’t a clear and simple answer to what is right and wrong? I believe that the concept of right and wrong changes with the situation and is determined by the beholder. Before we begin, where do our morals stem from? Are they innate or is it something that we are taught to believe and live by? Famous psychologist B.F. Skinner once claimed that were he given a dozen healthy infants, he could turn them into any profession he so wished, be it a doctor, a lawyer, or anything else. Skinner was saying that you can teach a human to become and do anything. I agree with Skinner and I believe this applies to morals and values as well. We are taught from a young age simple values and morals such as to not steal, to not hurt the innocent, to treat others fairly. But why is that? It’s because we humans acquire whatever morals we need to benefit ourselves. There is an invisible social contract between us that agrees not to commit injustice upon another for the fear of having injustice done to you. Being a person with “good” morals is beneficial to our survival(Plato,37). However, in a hypothetical world, if a human was to be trained from birth to commit horrible acts of evil and it was all they were accustomed to, their perception of right and wrong is different than mine. And after all, what makes my perception more correct? The number of people agreeing with something is meaningless and a fallacy. Right and wrong is something that we choose to benefit us and it’s something that we are taught. It is also purely situational. We agree that it’s wrong to kill yet there are thousands of soldiers out there fighting on our behalf for a cause we believe to be “right”. We kill home invaders and “bad” people and believe that to be justified. What is right and what is wrong changes like the wind, it is dependent on what we’ve been taught, what will benefit us, and what we believe in. There is no one size fits all morality.
Now, with all my views being stated, I believe my philosophy to be somewhat reasonable but overall unconvincing. Let’s begin with the obvious, my whole life I’ve believed in the material. I followed the word of science and what it told me about the world around me. However, at the same time, I was raised in a christian household. I’m a materialist who believes in God. While I personally don’t think the two are mutually exclusive, it does poke some holes into my worldview. When I stated earlier that I was an empiricist, it was because my senses and my memories are the main tools I use to explore the world, so what I find with them will be true knowledge until proven otherwise. Nevertheless, this can be wrong for many reasons. For one, senses can be deceived and how can we trust something that is prone to error. How do I know that my senses aren’t deceiving me right now. I don’t. Another hole is again tied with my use of senses to find the truth. If I use my senses for the world around me and I believe in a higher power such as God, how am I to know that this world isn’t fake, an illusion created by God? While my philosophy has many holes, I believe it to be the compass that guides my life and that’s all I need.
The history of laws pertaining to capital punishment can be traced all the way back to the Code of King Hammurabi of Babylon in 18th century B.C., listing twenty-five different crimes to which capital punishment can be used as a punishment. As times have changed and the methods used to execute criminals have evolved, the nature of the act still remains barbaric. Capital punishment fails the cost-benefit analysis as it has no demonstrable deterrent effect, costs exceedingly high to perform and is morally abhorrent to practice.
When going about researching this topic, I strove to eliminate my own personal bias and view the issue outside my echo-chamber. I simply googled, “Should the death penalty be allowed” and went through the results. Unsurprisingly, almost all the articles, peer-reviewed journals, and published policy research were adamantly against capital punishment. I also used Google Scholar which, according to Google itself, is a “freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.”I discovered the same results, a wave of published work with the same message: Capital Punishment should not exist.
Each of the four sources I used had their own way of delivering their message but all ultimately arrived at the same conclusion. The New York Times article “Should We Abolish The Death Penalty” by Jeremy Engle covered the decision made by California Governor Gavin Newsom to grant a temporary reprieve for over 700 inmates on death row. The article focuses more on the political side of the impact of this decision. Since California has the largest death penalty system in the US, any decision made regarding the issue will have rippling effects across the nation. The move by Newsom is noted as “highly symbolic” and many hope the Governor’s actions will influence support for the removal of capital punishment entirely. Newsom touches on the morality of the issue in a speech he gave about his decision, stating “I know people think [an] eye for [an] eye, but if you rape, we don’t rape. And I think if someone kills, we don’t kill. We’re better than that.” The ACLU further expands on this morality argument on top of their constitutional and factual arguments for getting rid of capital punishment. The American Civil Liberties Union takes a strong stance against capital punishment and lists a plethora of reasons for doing so. Like Governor Newson, they too bring up the hypocrisy of the punishment using the same quote listed above. Unlike the New York Times article, the ACLU chooses to deliver its message through facts, evidence, and morality. They expand on issues such as the higher cost of execution vs the alternative of life without parole or how there is no actual evidence that capital punishment deters crime. They tackle the moral argument by answering questions such as “[Do] murderers deserve to die?” The ACLU also makes a case that capital punishment “ is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment” and discriminatorily applied, violating the Fourteenth Amendment. However, unlike the two previous sources, Death Penalty Focus chooses to focus solely on facts and ignore the morality behind the issue. The article looks at five commons myths about the death penalty such as the common belief that it’s financially cheaper to execute someone than life without parole and debunks these myths. In fact, according to DPF, “Studies of the California death penalty system, the largest in the US, have revealed that a death sentence costs at least 18 times as much as a sentence of life without parole would cost.” This source focuses purely on the facts of the matter and debunking common myths as opposed to the last two sources which took a moral stance. The final source is a peer-reviewed article by the Northwestern Journal of Law and Social Policy titled “Reflections on Capital Punishment” by Rob Warden. Warden begins by outlining everything his paper is going to address and the order his arguments against capital punishment will be presented in. As a fitting final source, this paper takes all three of the previous sources and combines it into an amalgam of information, facts, evidence, and moral arguments against capital punishment. Warden addresses all points on the issue, from the punishment’s lack of deterrence to morality to constitutional legality. In a thirty-two page pdf, Warden perfectly explains how and why capital punishment should be removed and does so with consummate brilliance.
When it comes to viewing the bias in each source, one must do so with great care. Both the New York Times and ACLU are often described as “left-leaning” by many which can cause someone to view their work as bias even before reading it. This publication bias is not apparent with the DPF or Warden’s paper. The New York Times article is unique with its bias due to its political side of the issue. One can easily argue that the article portrays Newsom and his decision in a favorable light and attempts to make the decision more grandiose than it possibly should be, again, quoting it as “highly symbolic”. The ACLU to some suffers from publication bias but the material in the article itself was, for the most part, not bias. The article did have moral arguments as did the New York Times piece and the paper by Warden. Any argument about morality is subjective and therefore bias because that is the very nature of morality. However, the facts presented in the ACLU piece, the DPF article, and the Warden paper are all demonstrably true and there was no bias pertaining to the evidence. The DPF article was the least bias due to its pure focus on the facts of the matter and their ignoring of the political or moral side of the issue.
I was against capital punishment going into this literature search assignment and they have not changed. If anything, I am more adamant about the removal of the death penalty. Doing research for this assignment has sparked a fire inside me that will not burn out until this barbaric, antiquated practice is eliminated from society. I believe I’ve always viewed the death penalty in a negative light due to a childhood obsession with a superhero: Batman. The most important part about the Batman superhero is his refusal to kill his enemies. As a child, Batman’s parents were killed right in front of his eyes. He understands the pain and suffering of death can cause and he understands that even the evilest people in the world have families. Even the worst of the worst deserve to live because if he kills, then what separates him from the man who killed his parents. He chooses not to kill because he does not stoop down to their level. I think we can all learn something from Batman. George Bernard Shaw puts it best, “[m]urder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind.” Rape is not the punishment for a rapist, burning down an arsonist’s home is not the punishment for an arsonist, so why is death the punishment for those who kill? We as law-abiding citizens cannot allow our primal need for vengeance take over us, we must not stoop down to their level, we must not kill.