Government has vast rights citizens don't have. Government can tax you. Government and regulate your conduct. Government can arrest you, take any possessions and even your children away from you. Send you to war. Gun you down. Premise 1 is just false.
Premise one is a statement about what
should be, not what is right now. If it is false, it is because you think the government
should do all of the above for any other purpose than in direct defense of an imminent threat.
Premise 2
Some of your logic actually doesn't work - I think - for your views. A person is drawing a gun down on me, but I shoot first and kill him. Absolutely, my murder was 'premeditated." Push that back in time. Running towards me with gun-in-hand etc.
However, you can oppose pre-meditated killing. At least circumstantially, that also means you must accept that there are circumstance that I must accept that people must die for your ethic. However, I suppose you can claim the government's hands are clean of innocent victims lives on the theory of no-action, no-fault. I don't believe inaction against evil to others when only you have the authority or power to act is inaction. I believe it is collaberation with the evil.
Premeditated meaning planned. Any action in direct defense of one's life is by necessity not of their own planning. They may have the means of protecting themselves, but they didn't plan on having to do so.
I acknowledge that sometimes peopel arte within their rights to kill, but only in direct defense against an imminent threat.
That is when I believe the governemnt should also have that right.
Premise 3
I agree that the death penalty is pre-meditatively killing someone.
I doubt we'd every agree on the question of "punishment" as a justification - where I see a murderer who killed a family then laughing over cards and having sex with his prison "wife", living a full live in a full counter prison culture in a life of being provided for by a pure welfare system for him as the most fundamental injustice.
Again, not to belabor the point, but reformation of the prison system is a separate issue.
So you would not allow putting the word "justly" in front of "pre-meditative."
Any use of "Justly" would need multiple premises to determine what a just homicide is, and then it would need to be shown that this is a right that the govenrment
should have while the people do not.
But I also would put the words "to save the lives of others" at the end of your premise 3.
Defense from imminent danger does not qualify as pre-meditated homicide. That is something I have no problem with. The way you write it though is circular logic. You are adapting the premise to suit your conclusion.
You need a separate premise to determine what constitutes "saving a life" and when lethal force is necessary ion order to do so. How imminent is the threat to the life, etc.
What if the govenremtn decides to start trying people who have Schizophrenia in capital cases because tyhey have a high propensity for commiting homicide? Is that justified in order to potentially save lives?
The only response you have to that is because you also want a perfect (in that regards) prison system. YET YOU DON'T HAVE THAT AS A CONDITIONAL PREMISE!
Because that is a separate issue entirely. It has no bearing on the death penalty becasue they are unrelated issues. And a perfect system is unnecessary. Just a separated system.
What's the saying? "If if's and buts were candy and nuts, what a Merry Christmas we'd all have."
Its a good thinkg I'm not basing my argumetn on the state of the prison system. It is a totally separate issue. Your arguemtn is liek throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The prison system doesn't work, so lets killl them instead of prison.
I could use that logic to say "The adoption system doesn;t work, so we should abort all unwanted babies."
I could use your logic to argue that no one should ever be put in prison:
Premise 1: The government should not have a power than the power of its citizens.
Premise 2: Citizens do not have the right to involuntarily imprison another citizen.
Premise 3: Therefore, government does not have the right to involuntarily imprison another citizen.
The problem is that premise 2 is technically false here. You technically do have the right in the case of a citizens arrest. Bounty hunters do it all the time.
I believe in the most real terms, it comes down to not if someone is "pre-meditatively" killed. That is a factual certainty. Rather, it is who is pre-meditatively killed." In terms of current reality, I believe those killed under your system are generally far more innocent that those killed in my system.
Aside from the fact that you have 0 evidence to support that claim, it
still doesnt justify granting the government the authority to commit homicide.
