• Pros:
  
  • retribution (or "justice")
  • an eye for an eye, punishment fits the crime
  • deterrence (except for places where shown ineffective)
  • cost (except for places where execution is more expensive than alternatives, depends on legal system)
  • permanent incapacitation (e.g. prison escape and subsequent recurrence avoided)
  • practical
  • modern science grants higher certainties (DNA, genetics)
  • everyone dies eventually in any case [aligns with opening post]
  • closure to victim's family and friends
• Cons:
  
  • wrongful execution (seemingly faced with faceless/anonymous executioners) [also see argument below]
  • finality [also see argument below]
  • consistency [also see argument below]
  • slippery slope; plus potentially setting dangerous precedence
  • sending wrong messages (why kill people who kill people to show killing people is wrong?); two wrongs don't make a right
  • human rights, value of human life, "inhumane" societal action, international trust/acceptance
  • execution may be painful and accompanied by emotional anguish
  • somewhat "barbaric", "brutal", a "primitive feel", or otherwise uncivilized (two wrongs don't make a right again)
  • capital punishment makes it easier to ignore in-depth understanding, e.g. social causes
  • edge cases (like mental illness)
  • victims cannot be brought back to life in any case
  • impact on convict's family and friends

• wrongful capital punishments are known to have occurred (even youngsters); who's responsible?
• in such cases, those that endorsed death penalty have (knowingly) caused wrongful deaths (ultimately like murder in nature)
• those that endorse death penalty should not hide behind legalities as a means to justify death penalty, while (cowardly?) sitting safely back in their chairs
• the similarities among allowing wrongful capital punishments and murder cannot be ignored, especially taking the severity (and irreversibility) into account
• in case of wrongful capital punishment, the endorsers should be subject to their own sentiment
• are you (the supporter of the death penalty) willing to stake your own life thus?

• they lack in proportionality among claim and justification (we're not just talking The Loch Ness Monster here)
• they lack in uniqueness; there isn't much pointing specifically at their god, and nothing else
• there's much more evidence for directed indoctrination, cultural dependencies and magical thinking, for example, than for any of the gods of theism
• they tend towards known cognitive biases (personification of the unknown, etc)
• sometimes there's a degree of narrowmindedness, incredulity or gullibility involved; broader horizons warranted (including history, science, biology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, etc)
• inconsistent epistemic standards (like evolution versus scriptures)
• some definitions/arguments (like definitions from theism → problems of suffering → unknown greater good defenses → extraordinary appeal to ignorance → …) quickly turn wholly "academic" while remaining sufficient cause for existential doubts
• there's no clear demarcation of what warrants devoted worship, and how to differentiate such worship, and other religious practices, from obsession
• ...

As the old saying goes, you can’t misplace your body, but you can lose your mind. :) — jorndoe

• mind: comes and goes, starts and ends, un/consciousness (anesthetic) — temporal
• body (of which brain is a part): left to right, top to bottom, front to back — spatial

• mind without body: no credible examples — “mind moving among bodies”, “free floating minds”, “possessions”, …
• body without mind: examples abundant — the deceased, rocks, body persists (structurally) throughout mind, …

• mind is process-likes that change object-likes
• body is an object-like doing process-likes

every physical effect (i.e. caused event) has physical sufficient causes † — Agustin Vincente

Trump is merely molotov cocktail in the face of neo-liberalist capitalism and mass-consumption democracy for me - he's a cleansing of the scene — Agustino

• suspension of the US Refugee Admissions Programme for 120 days
• an indefinite ban on Syrian refugees
• a 90-day suspension on anyone arriving from seven Muslim-majority countries: Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen
• some visa categories, such as diplomats and the UN, are not included in the suspension
• priority will be given to religious minorities facing persecution in their countries, in an interview Mr Trump singled out Christians in Syria ^†
• a cap of 50,000 refugees to be accepted in 2017, against a limit of 110,000 set by former President Barack Obama
• a suspension of the Visa Interview Waiver Program, which allows consular officers to exempt some applicants from face-to-face interviews if they are seeking to renew their temporary visas within a year of expiry
• exceptions could be made on a case-by-case basis

In the present case, the argument can be made that Christians and other non-Muslim minorities in the Middle East are the most in danger and in need of assistance, so I see nothing wrong with privileging them as refugees over and against others from the region. — Thorongil

ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS. — Animal Farm by George Orwell

The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. — 1984 by George Orwell

To die hating them, that was freedom. — 1984 by George Orwell

What's with all this welcoming refugees nonsense. Send them all back, they'll only create problems and undermine our civilisation. — unenlightened

I was briefly a mod on the old philosophy forum about 11 years ago (as notquitethere). It's remarkable how the new owners could mess the place up so much. Maybe the residual ad revenue covers their costs? Goes to show that a community discussion group shouldn't be run for profit. — jojo

Suppose you've gotten yourself a headache. No aspirin at hand. Instead you go scan yourself, fMRI or whatever the latest may be, doesn't really matter. You now have two different angles, the experience of the ache, and a visual overview of your gray matter (need not be visual alone). If only the angles differ, in an ontological sense, then what makes them different? (Does anyone really doubt that feeling hungry (usually) means the body needs replenishment?) Understanding the scan, in this context, would converge on understanding the headache; a straight identity is not readily available, or deducible. The headache itself is part of your self-experience, or, put simpler, just part of yourself — bound by (ontological) self-identity, like self-reference, regardless of any scans or whatever else. Others cannot have your headaches (identity), but others can check out the scans (non-identity).

Watery stuff: H[sub]2[/sub]O
Squarey stuff: [i]x[/i][sup]2[/sup]

Just for @Banno, add super- and subscript to the button list above the comment box. — Michael

A relevant article from yesterday, which puts some meat on the bones of my post:

Why Have People “Had Enough of Experts”? — jamalrob

Ehmm yes he commits the sophistry of looking at it in terms of percentages. Ahh only 1% of the world's population died during the World Wars! Not a big deal! It's 1% - look in the past, more than 1% died! In the tribe having 100 people as population, 10 died per year, much bigger you see? 10% - not a big deal! Just another statistic as I've said. The chance of dying violently was much greater! 10 times greater in fact! Woah, what a discovery! — Agustino

CAUSATION is entirely outside the realm of science. Even immediate causation can only be stated in terms of "we see this, and then we see that. it seems to always happen in this order." — taylordonbarrett

Indeed, the whole, say a car, is an assembly of interacting parts. These parts weren't assembled by themselves, but were put together by human, who also conceive the the property, interactions, forms, and the structure of the car.
However the same parts that wasn't put together by human remains a pile. — miosim

Do we need to invoke emergence to understand this? — miosim

I don't buy emergence beyond it being a way of saying that properties depend on dynamic structures, but again, relations/structures/processes are parts in my opinion (a fortiori because all parts in the normal "object" sense are dynamic structures in the first place) — Terrapin Station

moral actions are not always decidable (the trolley problem again)