Question

Which is the best assessment of this line from the passage? a.This statement is justified because the suffering caused by capital punishment is less than the cumulative suffering due to any other form of punishment. b.This statement is unjustified because the speaker presents his own opinion without considering the opinion of the ones who will be punished.C.This statement is justified because the speaker is deeply concerned about the state of the criminals and the suffering they face in prison.D.This statement is unjustified because the speaker loathes criminals and is unconcerned about their

Answer 1

. . . while it inspires more terror, is less cruel in actual fact than any punishment that we should think of substituting for it.

Answer 2

In Favor of Capital Punishment
by John Stuart Mill (excerpt)

There is not, I should think, any human infliction which makes an impression on the imagination so entirely out of proportion to its real severity as the punishment of death. The punishment must be mild indeed which does not add more to the sum of human misery than is necessarily or directly added by the execution of a criminal. As my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton [Charles Gilpin] has himself remarked, the most that human laws can do to anyone in the matter of death is to hasten it; the man would have died at any rate; not so very much later, and on the average, I fear, with a considerably greater amount of bodily suffering. Society is asked, then, to denude itself of an instrument of punishment which, in the grave cases to which alone it is suitable, effects its purposes at a less cost of human suffering than any other; which, while it inspires more terror, is less cruel in actual fact than any punishment that we should think of substituting for it. My hon. Friend says that it does not inspire terror, and that experience proves it to be a failure. But the influence of a punishment is not to be estimated by its effect on hardened criminals. Those whose habitual way of life keeps them, so to speak, at all times within sight of the gallows, do grow to care less about it; as, to compare good things with bad, an old soldier is not much affected by the chance of dying in battle.

Answer 3

what was the answer