[Philosophy] Anime Death note's Protagonist

[Dragoon Fighter]

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Back Ground Info for toughs who do not watch the anime
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Well, I finally got around to finishing the rather popular anime Death Note. While the story of suspense is entertaining enough for those who have watched the series know of the underlying philosophical message. To fill in toughs who do not know the story, basically high schooler Yagami (Misspelled?) Light gets a magical note book in which if you write down someones name in it, they die. He decides to use it to write down the names of the worlds most vile criminals, and plans on making a utopia by killing everyone he thinks is evil. The international government send legendary detective known as the letter L to stop him.

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The Debate
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How would one determine if one has the right to decide weather you live or die, if such a thing is even moral? Is it right for the protagonist to mass murder a group of criminal or even just one? Is it right for anyone man/woman to decide a criminal must die for any reason, how about a group of people to decide that?

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My Opinion
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I do believe in the death plenty as there are people in our world who deserve to die, however I am strongly against the idea of one person making the choice of weather a person should live or die. As for how one determines weather a person is worth keeping alive I say unless the person is violently inclined to continually kill or **** someone, they do not deserve the death penalty, however as I stated in a previous sentence, I disagree with just one person deciding that, Ideally it should be an educated group of random impartial people. Of course this is not an ideal world so juries are the closest thing to an educated group of impartial people.

What is your philosophy on the subject?

Hi debate hall it has been a while.

 

[asianaussie]

Light was a megalomaniac portrayed as a hero. Early on he attempted to kill those who were dangerous to him. He considered killing those who were not truly bad or evil, but instead of no use to society. His actions should not necessarily be reflected upon in this debate.

This sort of power ultimately comes down to raw judgement. A single person has no right to mete out decisions of life or death, and should at the very least have an excess of information and a moral decision committee(s) supporting this decision. Death is not something to be taken lightly, especially if it is only one person making the decisions. Morals are hardly absolute, and even collective cultures do not always agree on a set of morals.

In short, no single person should ever, ever have this sort of power. The death penalty is something to which I have only insignificant personal objections, and while I am hardly in support of it, I can see precisely why I would support it. Capital punishment is something you can argue in favour of; giving one person the power to decide who is executed is flawed and absurdly questionable.

If you wanted to edge into the hypothetical, this becomes a debate of morals (hi underdogs): is there an absolute line one cannot cross?

 

[A Pimp Named Slickback]

Why is that one person can't order someone to die, but multiple people can?

Does the addition of a few people suddenly make it okay to kill someone?

 

[rvkevin]

This is why I am against the death penalty. Fairly self explanatory. Juries make mistakes, they have biases that go unchecked by the courts, etc.

Edit: More is not necessarily better. They are all human, so they have the same biases and unless they are aware of them, it will affect their judgment in the same way. They will not balance out, it will only result in all of them reaching the same mistaken conclusion.

 

[Budget Player Cadet_]

Why is that one person can't order someone to die, but multiple people can?

Does the addition of a few people suddenly make it okay to kill someone?

Yes, because the judgment errors of individuals are mitigated by the judgment of others; i.e. if one person oversees something, two people overseeing it is less likely, a whole committee overseeing it is very, very unlikely.

 

[A Pimp Named Slickback]

Can you really differentiate between a conspiracy to commit murder and a panel/jury which sentences a man to death?

Both believe that the victim should suffer death. What makes the judgment of the latter better than that of the former?

 

[Budget Player Cadet_]

The reasoning. The former is for whatever reason (personal gain?). The latter is for the purpose of furthering society by removing the weight of a person who simply is incapable of fitting in.

 

[A Pimp Named Slickback]

Personal gain and furthering society are one and the same, are they not? Isn't furthering society motivated by personal gain?

In both cases a person's life is put at the mercy of other people who have their own self-interests in mind.

 

[Dragoon Fighter]

Edit: More is not necessarily better. They are all human, so they have the same biases and unless they are aware of them, it will affect their judgment in the same way. They will not balance out, it will only result in all of them reaching the same mistaken conclusion.

That is why they try there best to look for bias people in the jury. Although you are more than right, more often than not there is incredible bias in the juries, so I can see that point of view. If there are more people it decreases the chance of of all of them coming to the same conclusion (As we are all generally speaking raised in different back grounds and raised to think in different ways). So more is better, though still subject to all the problems one person could have, it is just slightly more unlikely to have said problems occur.

 

[ballin4life]

I agree that they do try to look for biased people on the jury. It's just that the biased ones are the ones that they keep.

 

[KrazyGlue]

1. A Jury is better than a single person. A jury is ideally, as Dragoon said, a collection of random, intelligent, and diverse people. Yes, most humans share a certain set of biased opinions that will affect their decisions in the same way. However, other factors in the case, such as the accuracy and reliability of the evidence presented by each side, will affect different members of the jury in different ways. This is why split decisions are reached sometimes. Also jury members can debate amongst each other, thinking of points that they hadn't considered before. It's not a perfect system to be sure, but it's better than just giving the decision to one person.

2. However, I don't believe in the death penalty, even when decided on by a jury. Not only is it more expensive to administer the death penalty than it is to incarcerate someone for life, there's also the problem of evidence sometimes being faulty, withheld, not discovered, or not technologically analyzable at the time of the case. Or, of course, the jury could be biased or make a wrong decision.

 

[ballin4life]

2. However, I don't believe in the death penalty, even when decided on by a jury. Not only is it more expensive to administer the death penalty than it is to incarcerate someone for life,

Yeah it's beyond ridiculous that administering the death penalty is more expensive than life in prison. Seriously how that's even possible I'm not sure I'll ever understand.

there's also the problem of evidence sometimes being faulty, withheld, not discovered, or not technologically analyzable at the time of the case. Or, of course, the jury could be biased or make a wrong decision.

The thing is, this is a problem for ANY criminal punishment. It's a pretty terrible outcome if someone is wrongly sentenced to life in prison too.

 

[KrazyGlue]

The thing is, this is a problem for ANY criminal punishment. It's a pretty terrible outcome if someone is wrongly sentenced to life in prison too.

Of course, but the idea is that there is a much longer time period generally before the person's death to uncover the evidence. Whereas on death row you'll be dead in just a few years, prisoners who are innocent yet have the rest of their life in prison could be saved after, say, 10 years. It's obviously a very rare occasion, but every life counts. I'd agree that life in prison is as bad as the death penalty, and could even be worse depending on the person and their age.

 

[Theftz22]

If you wanted to edge into the hypothetical, this becomes a debate of morals (hi underdogs): is there an absolute line one cannot cross?

*I've never watched any of this and my knowledge of the series is only what I've read in this topic.

Well, making the assumption of a subjective If desire to preserve order, safety, and security (which is not an assumption really when it comes to society as a whole), I'd say that it is in society's best subjective interest to destroy any book that has the power to instantly kill people on the grounds that it could easily get into insecure hands and is too powerful of a weapon for any one person or even group of people.

Assuming he also values his own security, it would be morally rational for the protagonist to peacefully hand over the book or destroy it, or else be taken out by an angry mob or government agency or some ****. And if he doesn't value his security then he'll start killing people and he'll be taken out anyway so it's like lol w/e.

 

[Budget Player Cadet_]

Personal gain and furthering society are one and the same, are they not? Isn't furthering society motivated by personal gain?

In both cases a person's life is put at the mercy of other people who have their own self-interests in mind.

Your life vs. the clear and definite betterment of all society. It's not just personal gain, it's the gain of all other members of society as well.

Not only is it more expensive to administer the death penalty than it is to incarcerate someone for life

WHAAAAT?
WHAAAAAAAAT?

It's more expensive to kill a person humanely than it is to keep them fed, clothed, and housed for 20-50 years? How the hell do they pull that off, one-way solid gold needles? Enough energy in the chair to vaporize a horse and keep NYC lit for years? What the hell?!? That doesn't even make any sense! I could kill a person for a few bucks; just give me a knife or a gun. I could humanely kill a person on a few bucks per person via CO poisoning or Helium overdose.

 

[KrazyGlue]

WHAAAAT?
WHAAAAAAAAT?

It's more expensive to kill a person humanely than it is to keep them fed, clothed, and housed for 20-50 years? How the hell do they pull that off, one-way solid gold needles? Enough energy in the chair to vaporize a horse and keep NYC lit for years? What the hell?!? That doesn't even make any sense! I could kill a person for a few bucks; just give me a knife or a gun. I could humanely kill a person on a few bucks per person via CO poisoning or Helium overdose.

I think it's mostly the trial process that leads to the high cost, but the actual execution is very expensive as well.

An interesting article on the death penalty's absurdly high cost vs. that of life incarceration: http://www.deathpenalty.org/article.php?id=42

The death penalty is much more expensive than life without parole because the Constitution requires a long and complex judicial process for capital cases. This process is needed in order to ensure that innocent men and woman are not executed for crimes they did not commit, and even with these protections the risk of executing an innocent person can not be completely eliminated.

Using conservative rough projections, the Commission estimates the annual costs of the present (death penalty) system to be $137 million per year.

The cost of a system which imposes a maximum penalty of lifetime incarceration instead of the death penalty would be $11.5 million per year.

Some more interesting stats: https://www.msu.edu/~millettf/DeathPenalty/6.html

- North Carolina spends $2.16 million per execution more than the costs of a non-death penalty murder case.
- Florida has spent around $57 million on the death penalty for just 18 executions. This averages to about $3.2 million per execution.
- In Texas, the death penalty costs an average of $2.3 million per execution, three times more expensive than imprisoning someone in a single cell at the highest security level for 40 years.
- The State of Ohio spent $1.5 million to execute a mentally ******** man who wanted to be executed.
- California spends $90 million annually on the death penalty over the costs of their regular system. $78 million of that money is spent at the trial level, proving that the death penalty costs come almost completely from the trial level.

 

[rvkevin]

It's more expensive to kill a person humanely than it is to keep them fed, clothed, and housed for 20-50 years?

It has everything to do with the legal process and nothing to do with the actual process. Court time involves many people and that has its costs (salaries for the Judge, bailiffs, witnesses (overtime for police officers), death penalty means they have automatic right to appeal=more appeals, slow appeals process means longer time on death row which is more expensive than general population, this time spent on death row subtracts from costs otherwise saved from application of death penalty, after conviction a separate trial to determine if death penalty should be applied at which time mitigating factors can be presented which involves more guidelines to the jury and more testimony, significantly more time given to jury selection to probe their opinion about the death penalty). Basically anything that prolongs the court is costly.

That is why they try there best to look for bias people in the jury.

While they look, the method they use is completely ineffective. For example, an experiment was done concerning the reliability of eyewitness testimony. They would be shown a lineup and after their decision, the person administrating the test would clap (you could probably substitute any positive reinforcement, i.e. a big smile, etc.) in one group and be neutral in the control. They found that the clap made the participant increase their confidence in their decision. They then would ask what the judge would typically ask the witness, "Did anyone do anything that would influence your decision?" or "Did ___ influence your decision?" Those that said "no" and those that said "yes" were equally biased. This means that questioning the person's bias does nothing to filter out those who are biased. Considering that people typically consider eyewitness to be very reliable and don't know how easy it is to influence them, this is not very promising for the defendant. Now not directly transferable to jury selection, this is the same method they use on jury questionnaires; "Has ___ ever happened to you?", "Will this affect your ability to serve fairly and impartially?" Basically, asking someone who is biased if they are biased is not an effective method of filtering out biased individuals. There other problems as well that involve the analysis of evidence (i.e. Peter Donnelly: How juries are fooled by statistics Starts @ 3:36). I think it is unrealistic to expect a jury who is aware of all of the potential errors that come with the territory.

 

[Budget Player Cadet_]

I think it's mostly the trial process that leads to the high cost, but the actual execution is very expensive as well.

An interesting article on the death penalty's absurdly high cost vs. that of life incarceration: http://www.deathpenalty.org/article.php?id=42

Welp, the world has officially gone full-out ********. Is there a ship to mars any time soon?

 

[adumbrodeus]

Welp, the world has officially gone full-out ********. Is there a ship to mars any time soon?

BPC the reasonis very practical, if a person is improsoned for life the possibility exists that evidence might later overturn it. In cases of death penalty this becomes impossible so the justice system has provisions to make sure there isn't even a shread of doubt about the guilt of the individual involved.


And even it STILL doesn't get everyone.

Most western democracies have a justice system based on the idea that it's better to let 10 guilty people go free, then incarcerate one innocent one.


And yet wrongful convictions have not gone away, nor have wrongful executions, can you in good conscience say somebody should be executed when you know that the state of the justice system means there could be a reasonable possibility that they're innocent?

A justice system that would "risk it" and execute anyway isn't one I would support.

 

[ballin4life]

Except that those same people would be sent to prison for life anyway ... that's pretty bad if you are wrongly convicted.

Also he was talking about the fact that it costs the government more to administer the death penalty than to give life in prison.

 

[adumbrodeus]

Except that those same people would be sent to prison for life anyway ... that's pretty bad if you are wrongly convicted.

Also he was talking about the fact that it costs the government more to administer the death penalty than to give life in prison.

Read the link, the cost differential is much more tied with the addittional controls applied to administering the death penalty in terms of guarenteed appeals and the like as opposed to the administration of the act itself.


The reason that life imprisionment is superior in such a case is that if your innocence is subsequently proven it is possible to release and compensate the person. Obviously, it's not the same as the years they lost but at least it's something that the state can do to make up for it's error. You can do nothing for a dead man.

 

[ballin4life]

Except that it's not like the investigation actually stays open for all those years you are in prison. Once you are wrongly convicted you are pretty much done.

 

[adumbrodeus]

Except that it's not like the investigation actually stays open for all those years you are in prison. Once you are wrongly convicted you are pretty much done.

Thought I replied to this.


That's why personal resources and organizations to do this exist. One of the major ones was referenced earlier.

 

[Sucumbio]

I'm watching Chrono Crusade atm but when I'm done I may have to get into this so-called Death Note. Hm...

How would one determine if one has the right to decide weather you live or die,

For years I've essentially defined the word "authority" as having "the right to decide." So in essence your question could be stated "how would one determine if they have the authority to kill someone else." In a strictly legal sense this is not uncommon in several instances; a "license to kill" afforded peace officers and military, for instance and depending on the circumstances.

if such a thing is even moral?

Ah, the rub. In the example of Death Note, not only is a seemingly random person given ridiculously powerful means to be a vigilante (or plain murderer depending on whom they jot down) but there seems to be little moral consequence to their actions. True I've not seen it, and so I may be missing some key plot elements/character flaws/developments, but in essence, this person is morally void. If they perhaps suffered some serious and everlasting consequence for each name given, making each choice a difficult one, then one may see moral dilemma in play, but as it sits, it's just one person, killing another, because everyone else doesn't like them. I see nothing moral about this.

If you pose the question of morality against peace officers and the military, then the answer is no less difficult to accept, but easier to apply. Law enforcement is largely responsible for the protection of the State and its citizens. It is normally volunteer, though some societies have mandatory enrollment for a set period of time. While in this capacity it may become necessary to terminate the life of a human being. I submit this is morally acceptable (the actual killing) given the precedent (why are you killing?), the checks and balances (was the kill authorized?), etc. Deserving to die is a difficult thing to tackle. Did Hitler deserve to die for what he did? Does **** Cheney? As has been pointed out numbers don't exactly mean anything. Even if everyone in the US agrees X person should die, there could be 5 other nations worldwide who think they shouldn't. And yet we may still have this person killed through a military operation, thus ... appeasing our own sense of moral justification, and yet still violating a greater sense of moral culpability.

Is it right for the protagonist to mass murder a group of criminal or even just one?

Well again I don't know the background of the character, why he has this power, what consequences he suffers for it if any, etc. But on cursory examination, I'd say no, they have no "right" to anything of the sort. But as per above, it's arguable whether anyone has such a right. Strength in numbers, sure, but this suggests that morality is really just a conglomeration of agreed upon ideals and if this is the case, then woe betide you if you land in the wrong area of the world!

Is it right for anyone man/woman to decide a criminal must die for any reason, how about a group of people to decide that?

I see this is how the death penalty debate kicked off... the death penalty is a poor deterrent. It IS prohibitively expensive, and it really doesn't do what it's intended to do. The only instance I can think of that I agree with is Treason.

"...whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States." -source

But in general I feel life imprisonment can achieve the same end, which is making them not a part of society any more (except as a tax burden). The actual killing is, well barbaric to say the least. And in most cases, rehabilitation should always be pursed, and it's quite unfortunate that our penal system is so poor at this.

As for 1 vs Many, well... in general there does tend to be better results in decision making when multiple minds are involved. Leaving any decision up to just one person can result in strong bias. This is true even for parenting, where we have children of 1 parent vs. 2 or in some rarer cases, 3+ ... If there must be a death penalty it stands to reason that it'd be better for a group of people to decide this rather than a single person, given the grave nature of the decision, and the consequences should there be the possibility of error.

 

[Budget Player Cadet_]

Does **** Cheney?

Off topic, but:

 

[Sucumbio]

lol yeah I saw that and was like o.O but to not censor the word would mean way more work for us red-coats.

 

[KrazyGlue]

Honestly I don't see any problem with censor dodging that word as long as you're using it to mean "Richard" or whatever other names it's used for.

 

[Namaste]

I don't really see how people say Light can be the protagonist, especially since close to the end he was killing innocent people or people who were just in general ****s but not violent criminals. The problem isn't that it's one person who condemns someone to die, that's how most legal court systems actually act. The problem is that when we kill someone it's after they have a fair trial, and the seat that holds the power of it is up for re-election, which is suppose to mean they represent us.

Also, Light did not only kill the worst people. He killed violent criminals, or crimes against the weak, but he killed all of them. As soon as they were arrested and he had their face and name. Some drug addict who should be in rehab is desperate for money so he robs an older couple, bam dead. No attempt to see if he could be rehabilitated. Just a world ruled on fear.

I still like his character and don't think anyone else could be the main character of the series. It's similar to movies like The Town, where you want the main characters to do well even though in real life you obviously wouldn't be rooting for bank robbers in a shootout with cops.