Ed Koch Shows Us an Example of a Fallacious Argument

When people argue passionately for or against a concept, they often create partially fallacious statements or arguments to support their position on the issue. When Edward Koch made his statement in support of the death penalty, despite the attempt at a rational appeal, even he made a few fallacious arguments in an attempt to persuade his audience.

In his first point in support of the death penalty, wherein he actually rejects opponents' emotional appeals, he draws a parallel between the extreme measures that people employ to cure cancer with the death penalty. Just as chemotherapy may be considered radical, and may one day be considered by future doctors as barbaric, capital punishment is the tool we have now to prevent murderers from murdering again. However, this is a false analogy, in that capital punishment is being compared to those techniques used to cure a bodily ill-except in this case, the 'cure' is for a societal ill. But capital punishment does not prevent murder itself. It would have been just as false to conclude that the best way to cure cancer would be to kill the cancerous patient. After all, then the patient would not have to worry about having a relapse and developing new tumors.

Ed Koch's second point in favor of capital punishment brings up another example of a fallacious argument. Herein he cites statistics illustrating the U.S.' horrific murder rates in relation to other major democracies to show the need for the death penalty in the U.S. He basically states that in other countries, murder rates are low, so therefore they do not need the death penalty. In the U.S., the murder rates are high, so therefore we do need the death penalty. It would be just as easy to take this false cause and flip it, and to say that murder rates are higher in the U.S. because of state-supported capital punishment, and lower in other democracies because the death penalty is not state-sanctioned. Either way, the argument remains circular.