I believe in the right to life and find it hard to see how quite so many feel so free to dole out death as a punishment for crimes; mind, I can see nothing but defence for the utilitarian ideal of the greatest good for the greatest number, perhaps the best of what is left when you take away the extreme and unreasonable ideologies from the right and the left, and if there is such a thing as society then society should work together to eliminate crimes for the benefit of humankind by effecting a deterrent that has the greatest impact on what we can agree is bad, which means that as a society we can take into consideration the right to life but ultimately we should make the assumption that the greatest good for the greatest number is the one guiding principle that we should take to make the laws that ultimately dictate the way we live our lives, because life is for living, and if we believe in the right to life then we should work out a way of giving the right to life to the greatest number of people that we can give it to, because if a single death saves a million lives then surely we cannot deny that that one guy who takes a million lives does not have a million times the right to life of the million that will die as a consequence of his actions: actions that spell complete disaster for not just the victims of such crimes but also the victims’ wives, husbands, mothers, brothers, friends and lovers, whose lives like a bubble will burst, and so it is the worst of crimes that should be the first of crimes to eliminate from our world, and so first we must define crime, and to save time let us define crime as an action taken against the law – a law set by a social norm – committed with malice aforethought, and it is this malice aforethought that is, of course, the cause of all the crime that we want to prevent with the selection of a deterrent, and to have malice aforethought you must have prior knowledge of the odious consequences that you can cause, and the most catastrophic odious consequence that you can cause is multiple deaths; the biggest threat of multiple deaths (according to informed scientists, who we will just have to trust know the best) is the magnitude and range of disasters that will occur with climate change, and climate change is the effect of the release of CO2 into the atmosphere; releasing CO2 into the atmosphere is the effect of burning fossil fuels; we all know that burning fossil fuels releases CO2, which causes climate change, and that climate change causes death, so to burn fossil fuels is to act with malice aforethought to commit murder – mass murder – and because I believe in the right to life for the millions who will die if sea levels rise, because I care about potential death in places like Holland, Cumbria and Bangladesh, and because I believe that the conceivable catastrophe that could be caused by climate change is something that we can prevent, then I believe that we should bring back hanging for bicycle theft; yes, bring back hanging for bicycle theft, because I believe in the right to life but ultimately make the assumption that the greatest good for the greatest number is the one guiding principle that we should take to make the laws that ultimately dictate the way we live our lives, and if we can make an example of the enemies of the prevention of climate change with a careful and choice selection of an effective deterrent instead of crude trade in death for death – an eye for an eye – then we will look to find a crime committed against the most vulnerable and helpful people, the people who sustain human life by taking part in the race on a bike, the people who deny themselves the pleasure of speed and the greed of convenient consumption, the people with the gall and gumption to go against the grain because they believe that they can gain the right to life for future generations, and you may say with some justification that this unusual approach is letting off killers scot-free, but that need not be if we see that we implement the laws to hit them where it hurts, which we can do if we outlaw oil, condemn coal, make sustainable life the one uniting goal, enforce the law, fine the rich power-producing pirates, imprison the oh-so-freely polluting pilots and drivers, but let’s not dole out death willy-nilly, because I believe in the right to life, and I believe that the right to life is something that we should respect and protect, except we should bring back hanging for bicycle theft.
