The part of the presentation I found to be the least clear was the conclusion of the section on the prison industrial complex. Over the course of the section, there was mention of problems in the 6 components of the PIC, but not much discussion of specifically how they came to be. With mention of corruption and an unclear background, suggesting that people vote to prevent this seemed like an unsatisfying ending. Furthermore, where it says “It seems like it isn’t much of an issue outside of prisons,” it is entirely unclear what “it” is in this case. If “it” refers to privatization, I would suggest looking at schools or healthcare and other areas in which there are definitely arguments that suggest privatization is an ongoing and significant issue. Overall, the conclusion would just benefit from less vague language, and having more detail to pull from in the presentation in order to take a stronger and clearer position.
My strongest objection to the content is to the objection to Retributivism regarding its reliance on moral judgments to determine appropriate of punishment, as well as the similar challenge to Utilitarianism that it is empirically limited. The use of this objection seems to presuppose that there could hypothetically even exist an empirical (separate from biases to put it most simply) method of determining punishment, which is a fairly significant claim. The idea of punishment itself seems inherently rooted in morality. In any theory, it seems punishment exists either to bring about good, uphold the good, or to be good in and of itself. What is good, however, is wholly subject to, at the least, beliefs about morality. Thus, if any conception of punishment by its nature draws upon morality (even when it ostensibly claims to be empirically based), objection on that basis seems a fairly weak one, unless one wants to actually make the further claim that because it is so subjective, punishment as a whole ought to be abandoned. If they don’t wish to take it that far, then so long as any means of determining punishment is limited by the use of moral judgments, the objection would need to be rooted in the approach to morality rather than the limitations of morality on empirical methods.
The greatest contribution of this presentation was the discussion on race and the death penalty. Specifically, in looking at the racial biases that emerged, the speaker brought our attention to what appears to be an issue with the second-order rules of our society. Specifically, despite our law system theoretically being set up in an equitable way, the rules and division of labor have not succeeded in dealing with the problems that arise from our societal biases, such as those that emerge from a culture of white supremacy. I think it’s a helpful illustration of different orders of rules in which we are able to see the potential failings of higher-order rules.
