I chose my issue because I felt it was an intriguing issue that is often neglected, because emphasis is usually given to the judicial process but not on why the process is there in the first place. When I first started out thinking about this issue, I wasn’t sure which direction I was going to go. What I had in mind initially was a more philosophical approach that was influenced by my readings of Nietzsche. But keeping in mind that this was a social sciences project, I began to delve into the anthropological aspects of punishment, and I began to think about the changes in punishment that have happened throughout human history. At first I saw the change as a more simple one: we had simply moved on from seeking revenge to seeking true justice, and we have become less barbaric in our methods of punishment. However, I then began to think about the implications of this, and I realized how psychological punishment is not any milder than any physical torture that was used before. It is the torture of the mind, and it is still every bit as inhumane. Also, the reasons we punish criminals nowadays cannot be purely for consequential reasons because there still exists in humans a desire to seek revenge. I think nothing is ever that simple, especially the matter of the origin of punishment, which has a history so steep we can no longer fully discover the real origin.
1 comment:
I think that your line of thinking is interesting and that you have came very far from your initial interest in the topic. I also think that your topic is a very interesting one and something that I am interested. Yours, also, is not black and white because there are obviously people who seek different things with the death penalty. There are those that want revenge and those that want it just as a consequence. I think you did a good job analyzing both of these and showed us both sides.
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