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The wringing of ethical hands
over the question of capital punishment – whether its okay for the state or any
other authority to take the life of a person who’s taken the life of a person
who’s taken the life of another person – has been around for centuries now.
That’s because no one’s absolutely sure about their own or their religion’s take
on the subject. Like, for instance, does He demand an eye for an eye or is He
the most merciful? So different countries have been vacillating between
abolishing it, re-introducing it, abolishing it again, and so on. Others with a
guiltier conscience try to make the execution as quick and painless as possible
– even though the murderer may have agonishing tortured
his or her victim to death.
However the point is, with rapid developments in medical technology taking
place, in the future this whole morally muddled problem could easily be
relegated to the past forever. If for example when doctors know how to safely
bring a person out of a coma whenever they wanted or needed to, then convicted
people could be put into one at the start of their sentence and brought out of
it 20, 40 or a hundred years later as the case may be. Jest the knowledge of
what was going to happen and for how long would in itself be punishment enough
even though the actual passage of time in between is apparently not felt by the
comatose person.
Not only would the process be more cost-effective and hassle-free than long
periods of incarceration, it would also satisfy most interpretations of
religious texts as well as the principles and value systems of atheists and
agnostics.
For those who still insist that since the comatose would not feel the length of
imprisonment it’s not a punishment, we would have to tell them to wait a little
longer for the time when scientists are able to reverse death itself. (Like the
people who’ve had their bodies frozen after dying and are waiting for science
to bring them back to life again one day.) Because then we could actually carry
out the execution – say for a length of 50 years – before reviving the prisoner.
During that time, we may even believe that he or she would probably also suffer
a personal hell reserved for such people, if there’s one of course. (One note of
caution that would still have to be taken into consideration: what would happen
if the person already reincarnated during the death sentence? If such a thing
ever happens of course.)
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