Speech in Favor of Capital Punishment - Article Example

John Stuart Mill delivered this famous speech to the English Parliament in 1868 and he opposes the bill that aimed at banning capital punishment. According to him, capital punishment should be defended on the very ground on which it is commonly attacked, i.e. the ground of humanity to the criminal. “If in our horror of inflicting death, we endeavor to devise some punishment for the living criminal which shall act on the human mind with a deterrent force at all comparable to that of death, we are driven to the inflictions less severe indeed in appearance, and therefore less efficacious, but far more cruel in reality.

” (Mill, 304) According to Mill, it is more humanitarian to adopt capital punishment on a criminal than to inflict a punishment that the criminal carries all through the rest of his life. To compare the severity of punishment, one may compare between “consigning a man to the short pang of a rapid death and immuring him in a living tomb, there to linger out what may be a long life in the hardest and most monotonous toil, without any of its alleviations or rewards – debarred from all pleasant sights and sounds, and cut off from all earthly hope.

” (Mill, 304)In a reflective exploration of the speech delivered by Mill, it becomes lucid that the author has a very valid point to make, about the value of human life and about humanitarian considerations for a criminal.