A punnishment can be morally right if it achieves justice
properly without crossing over into the world of vengeance. The
reason why capital punnishment is immoral is because in capital
punnishment, the State is conducting vengeance on the behalf of the
murder victim's family, sometimes even without their consent. And
that's for murder; for drug-trafficking, you are conducting
vengeance for the drug addicts, when possibly all the addicts want
are freedom from the influence of drugs.
It is naive to think that justice is not about conducting
vengence in any extent. Get real if u think that the sentencing of
even the lightest penalty didnt come about from the slightest
consideration of vengence and accountability to the victim.
Well although justice is about vengence, the structuring of the
penalties (not sentencing of penalties) is based largely on the
consideration of it as a deterrent because it is the responsibility
of the state to ensure law and order and little is the state
responsible for conducting vengence for the victims.
Jailing is morally right as long as the prisons have acceptable
conditions - obviously, they have to be spartan - and prisoners
don't undergo torture while they are in jail. Think of it, jailing
is merely a more severe form of "grounding".
To say that jailing is 'morally right' is wrong. Everyone by
birth have their entitlements and rights to be free. Not only about
rights and entitlements, humans always aspire to be free. Humans
are willing to the extent of fighting and dying for their right to
be free. It shows how much we humans value our rights to be free
and possibily as much as our rights to live at times. Since the
right to be free is given to us by birth and is highly regarded by
us to the extent we are willing to die for it, it is morally wrong
to take that very right away (be it a life time or a period of
time).
Jailing is morally right as long as the prisons have acceptable
condition is an excuse and a lie like execution is morally right as
long as death is quick and relatively painless.
Jailing is morally wrong but for social utility, a neccesary tool
of law for every society and thats why it was legalised by all
states. Remember no society is governed only by what is morally
wrong or right but what is pragmatically neccesary.
Taxation is not immoral in itself, since funds are required to
run a country, but excessive taxation eg. continual raise of
transport fares, unexplained increases of GST etc is immoral, as is
the granting of excessively high salaries to top government
officials with the hypocritical aim of preventing corruption.
I will not want to go into this as it deserve a new thread on
it's own.
