Maria Roque filed numerous police reports and got a protection order. But the system that was supposed to protect her failed.

Maria Roque was just 34 years old when she was shot and killedon the steps outside her West Side Chicago home, in front of her 8-year-old daughter.

Her daughter and her 14-year-old son both witnessed Roque take her last breath.

In the weeks before she was killed, Roque repeatedly took all steps domestic violence victims are told to take. She got a protection order against her former boyfriend, Kenneth Brown. She also repeatedly went to the Chicago Police Department for help. She filed one police report after another and never gave up.

But the system failed her.

  • yeahiknow3@lemmy.world
    11·
    1 month ago

    The only person using rhetoric here is you. There are morally depraved people out there whom we colloquially refer to as “evil.” I don’t know why you insist on having a semantic argument. If “[moral depravity] does not exist,” as my interlocutor claims, then nihilism would indeed be true.

    I would also like to point out that the ethical arguments against the death penalty in the scholarly literature are very weak and it remains an open question whether the death penalty is advisable on practical grounds. Morally it’s unlikely that any good argument exists to make it impermissible to kill “evil” people. You can check out the latest edition of any textbook on ethics, such as Living Ethics by Schaffer Landau, which syllogizes a variety of arguments on this topic.

    • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.ee
      3·
      1 month ago

      The issue here is that you use the arbitrary “evil” label to strip humanity from people who commit wrongs. You’ve decided that these people deserve the most extreme forms of punishment imaginable, and then pretend that anyone challenging you on that is somehow defending the actions of the people you are asking be killed.

      This then leads to the absurd situation where someone says “violence is unacceptable under all circumstances” and you accuse them of abetting “evil” because you demand that everyone want to kill the same people you do.

      You honestly don’t see the issue here? I mean, you already have to be jumping through some serious mentality hoops to arrive at the conclusion “not killing people is evil”, but c’mon now…

      • yeahiknow3@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 month ago

        Let me again recommended this textbook on Ethics: https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/living-ethics-9780197608876

        The death penalty is chapter 20.

        Also,

        1. “Death” isn’t (or should not be) a punishment. We don’t “punish” rabid dogs when we euthanize them. Sometimes the alternative is simply worse.
        2. Earlier you said that “evil cannot be quantified” and therefore doesn’t exist. However, quantifiability is not an ontological prerequisite. If it were, then almost nothing would exist, including you and me.
        3. You don’t need to resort to straw men. Respond to my arguments instead of arguing with yourself.
        4. Moral claims wouldn’t be “arbitrary” unless nihilism is true, which you’ve denied.