If you want to humanely kill someone, an overdose of morphine or similar will do it. The problem is that it’s too pleasant a way to go out to qualify as capital punishment; no society with the death penalty will give its traitors and child-murderers the kind of death reserved for a beloved old dog.
If you’re in the business of executing those condemned on the direst charges, you’d typically want it to be as unpleasant as your values still count as civilised rather than barbaric. Of course, values drift, and as we have seen large parts of the world reject capital punishment altogether, it’s conceivable that societies that currently execute criminals by, say, lethal injection or something similarly clinical are an episode of mass psychosis away from bringing back medieval ordeals.
If you want to humanely kill someone, an overdose of morphine or similar will do it. The problem is that it’s too pleasant a way to go out to qualify as capital punishment; no society with the death penalty will give its traitors and child-murderers the kind of death reserved for a beloved old dog.
If you’re in the business of executing those condemned on the direst charges, you’d typically want it to be as unpleasant as your values still count as civilised rather than barbaric. Of course, values drift, and as we have seen large parts of the world reject capital punishment altogether, it’s conceivable that societies that currently execute criminals by, say, lethal injection or something similarly clinical are an episode of mass psychosis away from bringing back medieval ordeals.