A Report on Capital Punishment

Capital Punishment Definition:  

"The legally authorized killing of someone as punishment for a crime."

What is Capital Punishment/Capital Punishment Facts

Capital punishment is the practice of executing someone as punishment for a specific crime after a proper legal trial. It can only be used by a state, so when non-state organizations speak of having 'executed' a person they have actually committed a murder.
Capital punishment is the death penalty. It is used today and was used in ancient times to punish a variety of crimes; The Death Penalty is a controversial issue because there are people that state the Death Penalty is wrong and good in some way.

History of Capital Punishment:

In 1947, at the time of independence, only homicide and treason were punishable by death penalty. The important evolution occurred between 1977 and 1988 under General Zia ulHaq’s regime, and the beginning of the Islamisation of the country. The peak of executions by year was reached in 1978, with 207 executions. The lowest happened in 1989, where no execution took place.
During the last year of Benazir Bhutto's reign (1996), only 9 executions occurred. Her father had been sentenced to death and executed after an unfair trail under General Zia ulHaq’s regime. The last five years have seen an increase of convictions to death after the 2003 Supreme Court ruling which stated that, in cases of murder, “the normal penalty of death should be awarded and leniency in any case should not be shown, except where strong mitigating circumstances for lesser sentence could be gathered”.

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Capital Punishment According To Ethical Theories

Capital Punishment According To Ethical Theories

The Ethical Theories of Punishment:

Following are different approaches of capital punishment:
• Vengeance
• Retribution
• Deterrence
• Incapacitation

Vengeance :

Vengeance is a raw, human emotion that is normal in family members of murder victims, but it can never be used to justify a public policy given that policies are supposed to be based on reason and empirical science.  Additionally, the state is technically/legally the victim when a crime occurs and is incapable of feeling vengeance.  A careful analysis of the entire Bible, taking the whole Bible in its historical context, does not provide a mandate for capital punishment, even for murderers.

Retribution :

Retribution is a state sponsored rational response to criminality that is justified given that the state is the victim when a crime occurs.  The government is justified in pursuing justice when it is harmed in order to re-balance the scales of justice that were tilted to the benefit of the offender when he or she broke the law.  In reality, however, the death penalty does not generally achieve retribution because it is so rarely applied to murderers.

Deterrence:

Deterrence is the notion that by administering punishment to offenders, the state can cause fear in both the offender and in others (general deterrence) so that they will not want to commit crimes in the future.  Obviously, capital punishment cannot achieve special or specific deterrence because once the offender is dead, he or she cannot be afraid of future punishment.  The available scientific evidence with regard to general deterrence suggests that the death penalty is not a deterrent to murder and cannot be for the simple reason that the most important element of punishment is missing -- certainty.  Punishment must be certain in order to deter, whereas the administration of the death penalty is so rarely applied and so unlikely to be applied to any individual that to even suggest that the death penalty is a general deterrent is a very weak claim.

Incapacitation: 

Incapacitation means taking away a person's freedom so that he or she cannot commit another crime.  The typical form of incapacitation is incarceration (in a jail, prison, etc.).  The ultimate form of incarceration is death.  As with retribution, this is a legitimate justification for the administration of punishment because the primary responsibility of government is to protect its citizens from harm, and one of the goals of our justice systems is to reduce criminality.  Unless you believe in reincarnation, you will agree that the death penalty achieves these objectives, but only for those few that we execute.  Like with retribution, we generally do not meet this objective simply for the fact that the death penalty is so rarely applied (less than 2% of aggravated murderers are sentenced to death and FAR LESS than 1% of all killers are sentenced to death).

Right or wrong:

The Death Penalty is a controversial issue because there are people that state the Death Penalty is wrong and good in some way.

According to first school of thought:

Capital punishment is favourable according to one side of the mirror. Some perspective factors are given as:

Human Rights

It is wrong as it spoils human rights. A unique facet of the modern debate about capital punishment is the characterization of the death penalty as a human rights issue, rather than a debate about the proper punishment of criminals. Modern opposition to the death penalty is seen as a reaction to the political history of the 20th century.

Execution of the innocent

The most common and most cogent argument against capital punishment is that sooner or later, innocent people will get killed, because of mistakes or flaws in the justice system.

According to Ethics:

Right Theory

Rights of one person implies the duties of another person, it is called correlativity of rights and duties. British Philosopher John Locke argued that the law of nature mandate that we should not harm any one’s life, health, liberty because these are our natural rights given to us by God.

Everyone has an inalienable human right to life, even those who commit murder; sentencing a person to death and executing them violates that right. As capital punishment is against human rights. Everyone has a right to live and it is our duty to prevent the rights of other. Moreover, moral values also restrict capital punishment. We could not practice the power of controlling one’s time of death. Survival of an individual is his prior right. We have to save our cardinal values by giving the right of life.

Second school of thought:

Capital punishment is due and right as it is a controversial issue and shows both phases of morality. 

Consequentialist theory:

An action is morally right if the consequences of that action are more favourable than unfavourable.

 Consequentialist theory is a general normative theory that bases the moral evaluation of acts, rules, institutions, etc. Solely on the goodness of their consequences, where the standard of goodness employed is a standard of non-moral goodness.

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Capital Punishment In the Light of Islam

Capital Punishment In the Light of Islam

Life is sacred, according to Islam and most other world faiths. But how can one hold life sacred, yet still support capital punishment? The Qur'an answers, "...Take not life, which God has made sacred, except by way of justice and law. Thus does He command you, so that you may learn wisdom" (6:151).
The key point is that one may take life only "by way of justice and law." In Islam, therefore, the death penalty can be applied by a court as punishment for the most serious of crimes. Ultimately, one's eternal punishment is in God's hands, but there is a place for punishment in this life as well. The spirit of the Islamic penal code is to save lives, promote justice, and prevent corruption and tyranny.

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Intercultural Communication

What is Intercultural Communication

Intercultural Communication Definition

Intercultural communication is the process of sending and receiving messages between people whose cultural background could lead them to interpret verbal and non verbal signs differently. Different people have different cultural backgrounds, because they belong to different cultures and with that they also have different verbal and non verbal signs. These signs in one culture could create hassles in other culture. 

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BUSINESS ETHICS

Definition

Business ethics are implemented in order to ensure that a certain required level of trust exists between consumers and various forms of market participants with businesses. For example, a portfolio manager must give the same consideration to the portfolios of family members and small individual investors. Such practices ensure that the public is treated fairly.

or

The study of proper business policies and practices regarding potentially controversial issues, such as corporate governance, insider trading, bribery, discrimination, corporate social responsibility and fiduciary responsibilities. Business ethics are often guided by law, while other times provide a basic framework that businesses may choose to follow in order to gain public acceptance. 

What is Business Ethics?

Business ethics (also corporate ethics) is a form of applied ethics or professional ethics that examines ethical principles and moral or ethical problems that arise in a business environment. It applies to all aspects of business conduct and is relevant to the conduct of individuals and entire organizations.

Business ethics has both normative and descriptive dimensions. As a corporate practice and a career specialization, the field is primarily normative. Academics attempting to understand business behavior employ descriptive methods. The range and quantity of business ethical issues reflects the interaction of profit-maximizing behavior with non-economic concerns. Interest in business ethics accelerated dramatically during the 1980s and 1990s, both within major corporations and within academia. For example, today most major corporations promote their commitment to non-economic values under headings such as ethics codes and social responsibility charters. 

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WHAT IS ETHICS

What is Ethics?

ETHICS

At its simplest, ethics is a system of moral principles. They affect how people make decisions and lead their lives.
Ethics is concerned with what is good for individuals and society and is also described as moral philosophy.
The term is derived from the Greek word ethos which can mean custom, habit, character or disposition.

Ethics covers the following dilemmas:

• how to live a good life
• our rights and responsibilities
• the language of right and wrong
• moral decisions - what is good and bad?
Our concepts of ethics have been derived from religions, philosophies and cultures. They infuse debates on topics like abortion, human rights and professional conduct.

Approaches to ethics

Philosophers nowadays tend to divide ethical theories into three areas: metaethics, normative ethics and applied ethics.
• Meta-ethics deals with the nature of moral judgement. It looks at the origins and meaning of ethical principles.
• Normative ethics is concerned with the content of moral judgements and the criteria for what is right or wrong.
• Applied ethics looks at controversial topics like war, animal rights and capital punishment

What use is ethics?

If ethical theories are to be useful in practice, they need to affect the way human beings behave.
Some philosophers think that ethics does do this. They argue that if a person realises that it would be morally good to do something then it would be irrational for that person not to do it.
But human beings often behave irrationally - they follow their 'gut instinct' even when their head suggests a different course of action.
However, ethics does provide good tools for thinking about moral issues.

Ethics can provide a moral map

Most moral issues get us pretty worked up - think of abortion and euthanasia for starters. Because these are such emotional issues we often let our hearts do the arguing while our brains just go with the flow.
But there's another way of tackling these issues, and that's where philosophers can come in - they offer us ethical rules and principles that enable us to take a cooler view of moral problems.
So ethics provides us with a moral map, a framework that we can use to find our way through difficult issues.

Ethics can pinpoint a disagreement

Using the framework of ethics, two people who are arguing a moral issue can often find that what they disagree about is just one particular part of the issue, and that they broadly agree on everything else.
That can take a lot of heat out of the argument, and sometimes even hint at a way for them to resolve their problem.
But sometimes ethics doesn't provide people with the sort of help that they really want.

Ethics doesn't give right answers

Ethics doesn't always show the right answer to moral problems.
Indeed more and more people think that for many ethical issues there isn't a single right answer - just a set of principles that can be applied to particular cases to give those involved some clear choices.
Some philosophers go further and say that all ethics can do is eliminate confusion and clarify the issues. After that it's up to each individual to come to their own conclusions.

Good people as well as good actions

Ethics is not only about the morality of particular courses of action, but it's also about the goodness of individuals and what it means to live a good life.
Virtue Ethics is particularly concerned with the moral character of human beings.

Searching for the source of right and wrong

At times in the past some people thought that ethical problems could be solved in one of two ways:
• by discovering what God wanted people to do
• by thinking rigorously about moral principles and problems
If a person did this properly they would be led to the right conclusion.
But now even philosophers are less sure that it's possible to devise a satisfactory and complete theory of ethics - at least not one that leads to conclusions.

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MEDIA ETHICS REPORT

MEDIA ETHICS

Introduction

For many years now, globally, the media has assumed and reinforced its important role as a legitimate reflection of public interest and opinion. Since Edmund Burke’s famous remarks made in the House of Commons in England in 1774 in recognition of the important contributions the press made, the place and position of the media in society and governance structure of states continues to be recognized and consolidated as the fourth estate. This is very true of the Pakistani media which is fast becoming a strong pillar, catalyst and tool of democracy since 1994 when Pakistan re-embraced multi-party democracy with a liberalized, plural media..... 

Ethical Conduct a safeguard of Media Freedom  The initiative by the Pakistan Electoral Commission (MEC) to facilitate a process of self regulation through a code of practice to guide the conduct of the media during the 2009 general elections lies at the heart of Media Council of Pakistan’s (MCP) mandate to safeguard media freedom through self regulation. The number one objective of Media Council  of  Pakistan  is  to  defend  and  safeguard  media  freedom  in  Pakistan......

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