The conclusion should be: If rights exists, murderers have right to life.

But the first premise in updated argument is still unfortunate, since there could exist rights other than the right to life.

The premise you want to make is that there is an universal right to life, applicable also to criminals - people in favor of capital punishment would reject that premise. The entire argument seems as circular, given it's propose.

Fair observation. As my professor like to say when he is corrected: “I put that there on purpose to make sure people are paying attention” 😂

I was going to put it this way:

1. IFF people have the right to life.
2. Murderers are people.
3. So, murderers have the right to life.

Anyway, the growing pains continue 😉

(1) is malformed - the meaning is unclear. Are you sure you didn't mean something like "an entity has the right to life iff it is a person" instead?

But this would seem to be a premise that is still likely to suffer rejection in the minds of a capital punishment proponent, as the original disagreement about whether being a person suffices for having the right to life remains applicable.

I think people who believe in the death penalty would probably say the right to life is not absolute.

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Just to be clear I would posit that:

Yes, all people have the right to life, and I would have to agree that all murderers are people, therefore deserving the right to life. They are also responsible for their actions and have to live with those consequences. The social paradigm will determine the ramifications and punishment for those actions, and whether or not one agrees with the determinations made we have to make a decision: Does society have the right to negate life as that punishment, or is this right to life inviolate?

What happens when the ‘murderer’, as in the case of Parkland which was just in the news last week, we have a young man who shot and killed 17 children? The issue of mental competence is somewhat moot since I believe that anyone who kills is to some degree damaged goods. What do you do with such an inhuman human? What if it were your child, your wife, your mother or your siblings? Would that change the determination?

Where did the ‘if it is a person’ enter the conversation? When did ‘people in favor of capital punishment’ become ‘capital punishment proponents’? Can we talk about issues of import without letting our ideology and prejudices get in the way of a reasoned argument? It would be interesting to understand what you mean by ‘being a person’ and what determines that state of being.

I personally have little interest in the debate on capital punishment, but I am interested in people being accountable for their actions. We don’t seem to teach or even believe this to be true anymore. The right to life is inarguably an ‘absolute’, but unfortunately so is the concept of ‘death’, and no one seems to be representing the victim who was, I again assume, completely innocent of any wrongdoing or the precipitation of the act of the murder.

The discussion of legitimate concepts, taken out of context, tends to only confuse and obfuscate the debate, and invariably an incapability of coming to valuable insights and conclusions. I think we should continue to think deeply about the issues involved and attempt to achieve some semblance of fairness and justice in our determinations.

I really enjoy the investigation of concepts such as the right to life and the inevitability of death. Do you realize that it is only humans that commit murder for whatever reasons? Animals kill but they do not murder, they do not hate, they do not judge. I find that interesting.

I would suggest that this is an oversimplification and presents a fairly narrow perspective. Yes, we can believe that everyone has the right to their life, but what is not addressed is what happens when this ‘murderer’ (which infers that there was no accident nor an act of self-defense) takes the life of his victim, who, I hope that we can agree, also has that same right to life? I, of course, assume that this was a completely ‘innocent’ individual with no culpability in the act.

I find it disturbing that the narrative immediately begins the process of painting someone who may disagree with some ‘absolute’ right as ‘people in favor of capital punishment’. I think that is unfair and inconclusive. This is not a simple concept of black and white. There are multiple issues that must be considered, contemplated, and concluded.

Can an individual commit murder with abandon and then claim some nebulous and undefined right to life? Is there no responsibility or obligation that is inherent in every law? The victim could be the father of twelve children with parents and grandparents, not to mention another dozen brothers and sisters and a hundred relatives, all replete with children of their own. They may all be impacted by this horrible act. Does this person who commits murder have any culpability at all? The family may well be destitute without their ‘breadwinner’. How are all these things addressed?

Without a ‘lot’ more information, I would not judge those in favor of capital punishment too harshly, they are not the individuals that killed without compunction and I would tend to think without ethics or morality as well. Where does justice play its part?

I advanced no claims about the criteria of personhood as I merely wished to point out the fact that (1) cannot be translated into a well-formed formula (and thus its truth value would be indeterminate) without my modification - in which I rearranged the position of 'iff' such that it is between the two atomic propositions implicitly contained within the original premise.

To make my interpretation (the motivation of which is to sort out the logic) of what OPs malformed premise was trying to express even more clearly, I give the following formalization of the rectified argument:

Domain: all entities Predicates: person(x) - 'x is a person', righttolife(x) - 'x has a right to life', murderer(x) - 'x is a murderer"

1. ∀x (person(x) <-> righttolife(x)) (premise)
2. ∀x (murderer(x) -> person(x)) (premise)
3. murderer(a) -> person(a) (∀E 2)
4. person(a) <-> righttolife(a) (∀E 1)
5. person(a) -> righttolife(a) (<->E 4)
6. | murderer(a) (assumption: want righttolife(a))
7. | person(a) (->E 3)
8. | righttolife(a) (->E 5)
9. murderer(a) -> righttolife(a) (->I 6-8)
10. ∀x (murderer(x) -> righttolife(x)) (∀I 9)

I considered 'people in favor of capital punishment' broadly similar with 'capital punishment proponents' in terms of their moral intuitions and used these terms interchangeably. While there may be instances where drawing a distinction between these groups would be useful, I do not see the need to do so for the purposes of determining whether a given premise is likely acceptable to their moral intuitions.

Well said, I'm highly against capital punishment. Take a life for a life(ves) will not bring those killed to life. Speaking of which the criminal "justice" system in the USA is broken. There is no rehabilitation going on, just big business making money on the mistakes of others. Other countries like Canada and Denmark focus properly on true rehab.

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I apologize if I sound argumentative or critical but my only point was that, while I accept that you made no ‘claims’ about the criteria of personhood, I fail to see the relevance of mentioning it at all. Introducing the concept is distracting and does nothing to bring clarity to the issue of the right to life for a murderer. I mentioned the rights of the victim to see what the response would be to someone with no culpability in the action of taking a life. This particular question remains unanswered.

I must also apologize for having no comprehension for the values you offer or what they might bring to the discussion. I appreciate that they may have some significance in the realm of theoretical mathematics but they do nothing for me to understand the issue in any greater detail. I am looking for practical perspectives and personal positions on the issue and they fail to offer me any insight or understanding.

My position would be similar with the ‘people in favor of capital punishment’. Since I am not one of those people, I would have liked a more neutral characterization so as not to be divisive and inflame those prone to emotion. I believe ‘capital punishment proponents’ is an even stronger derogatory term that only detracts from an important and significant issue. None of these things were in the original post and were introduced without bringing a deeper understanding of the concepts in question. I hope that you can understand my position.

The whole idea of a moral intuition is rather nebulous and contradictory, at least for me. Morality is made through philosophical investigation and contemplation and while emotion may be of value in the process, I find it neither substantive nor significant.

If you don't like introducing the concept of person-hood to the discussion, then you should take it up with u/thenousman instead of me - for I see no way of interpreting his phrase 'people have the right to life' without invoking the notion of personhood. What else could it mean if it wasn't about assigning the right of life to entities belonging to the extension of the predicate that maps said entities to a group known as 'people'?

Although it is understandable that some may have no exposure to symbolic logic, it should be noted that my formalization of arguments is no mere exercise in theoretical mathematics - it uses first order logic to bring clarity to what I think the underlying logical structure of u/thenousman's argument looks like. OP should be able to look at it and give us a statement about whether that is what he meant or not - and propose a different formalization to describe the true form of his argument if he does not agree with it (I believe that OP should be able to comprehend it as it is quite clear that he is a student of philosophy in a university). Stating things in formal terms is also a tremendously useful technique in evaluating the validity of an argument - as I did with a proof by natural deduction.

It is difficult for me to understand how speculating on the likely beliefs of people who support capital punishment is somehow degrading to their status. I have never heard of calling someone a 'proponent of x' being understood as an insult before (assuming that whoever is stating this does not use other obviously offensive epithets in conjunction with it), but I shall use your preferred terminology for the sake of convenience if nothing else.

My issue here is that I don't think it is methodologically sound to discuss how various substantive issues (such as the issue of whether the right to life is absolute, as you've raised elsewhere) affect the implications of u/thenousman's argument without first getting a clear understanding of it - which we still haven't managed to do despite me expending quite a bit of effort to rectify the malformed nature of (1) . I will however acknowledge that if my interpretation of his argument is correct, and the formalization basically accurate, then your criticisms of it undoubtedly have merit.

I will note one more potential issue with (1) here (without saying that it actually is an issue due to the aforementioned problem of clear understanding): the use of "iff" means that aside from personhood being sufficient for having the right to life, personhood is now also a necessity of it - which would seem to be tremendously disagreeable to anyone in favor non-human animal rights who do not simultaneously believe that non-human animals are persons.

At this juncture, if OP would please tell us what he actually intended to express, it would be much appreciated.

Woah, just noticed this as I’m not getting any notifications from Reddit. I agree that it’s still unclear. Originally, (1) was just: people have the right to life, but later I was trying to change it to a conditional and yeah got into some trouble. I’ll give a better response with full clarifications in a couple of weeks time for my next blogpost. Thanks!

Well, so difficult to solve this problem...

It isn't easy when you want an answer based in promises...

The question is : where start and where ends the right to an human... We must to answer these questions...

Well, what is right ? Well, the rights that you are defending is based in the justice? Well, what is justice?

Well, many people around the world are lifting flags to defend some kind of idea, they have this right to think... And I can argue they can to do it because to think is part of the nature of the beings human, it is so inside that none government can forbidden it ! Even a prison are thinking in the jail!

So, of course these premises will help us make good argument, but the hole is much more deep than simple questions