Should Prisoners Be Treated as Human Beings?
SOC 120: Introduction to Ethics & Social Responsibility
June 10, 2012
SHOULD PRISONERS BE 2
Should Prisoners Be Treated as Human Beings? Some people believe that once a person commits a crime or breaks the law, they no longer get to exercise their human rights. In fact, they believe that prisoners do not deserve human rights. The treatment of these inmates come into question; especially when most facilities and prisons are overcrowded, receiving more mentally ill prisoners, and female incarceration is on the rise. The problem with some of society is they do not want prisoners to be treated with any common, human decency. They believe inmates have it great by eating healthy and receiving adequate medical care. Being able to work out and learn new trades for the future has some of society’s members upset with paying tax monies for these types of “amenities”. I believe that every human has the right to meals and preventive health care. …show more content…
Ethical egoism argues that our moral decisions should be based on our desires and goals (Mosser, 2010). Our personal goals and desires are what motivate us make many of the decisions we make in our lives. If an outcome does not appeal to our goals and desires, we tend to find a way to dispute that. Finding a person’s virtue may conflict with our personal goals and desires. A person may have been robbed once before, and now has a biased toward anyone that has committed a crime, regardless of their motivation to commit the offense. If the victim’s personal desire is to see any person who commits theft to “rot” in prison, they will not consider the virtue ethics of a prisoner, therefore, the unethical treatment of prisoners seeming completely ethical to the ethical