Growing up in a country that capital punishment is legal, it seemed reasonable to me that execution was the proportionate way to perform justice on people who outrageously violated the rules of a society. However, it is always controversial that if death penalty should still exist, and if there should a more humane way of punish those who violate the law so outrageously. This class focus on the topic empathy and ethics in general, going into depth in the topics such as poetic justic and the limits of empathy. When people feel empathy towards someone, they tend to see others’ struggles, and sometimes people would go out of their ways to help those they feel empathy towards. So the question for my research project would be: should people have empathy to those who are on death row? And whether that empathy can lead to a more humane way of punishing the prisoners? My research would focus why scholars support or against death penalty, and the possible alternatives for capital punishment.

Sources:

Bazelon, Emily. “Where the Death Penalty Still Lives.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 23 Aug. 2016.

Breyer, Stephen G., and John D. Bessler. Against the death penalty. Brookings Institution Press, 2016.

Davidson, Mark. “Compassion and the Death Penalty.” Journal of Theoretical & Philosophical Criminology, vol. 7, no. 2, 1-20.

Wanger, Eugene G. Fighting the death penalty: a fifty-Year journey of argument and persuasion. Michigan State University Press, 2017.

Williams, Kenneth. “Why the death penalty is slowly dying.” Southwestern law review (2008), vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 253–274.