Really? Didn't realise the ground rules of civilised societies were set in stone...
It's pure common sense! AAAAAAAA! Which one do you call a civilized society; situation A where we go around killing and torturing each other freely or situation B where we don't? Which one makes a better society?
Well, the proposal on question did not involve torturing people freely. Torturing people in rare and extreme cases is a different matter.
Also, "common sense" is NOT a valid logical argument.
Morals and civilized behavior are not decided by the government. It's pure mathematics. Murder + murder = two murders. Murder + no murder = Murder. No murder + no murder = No murder. How we'll reach such society is a question mark, but one thing's for sure, NOT BY MURDERING AND TORTURING! There is nothing philosophical about this.
To adress the problem mathematically, as you seem to be doing, what you have here is a greedy algorithm. It'll find the local minimum number of murders, but not the global. One of the main arguments for capital punishment and these things is that they are better at finding the global minimum. In other words, they cause more deaths in the short term but less in the long term.
Whether or not they are effective is a different argument entirely.
Common sense my hairy arse.
Common sense would dictate that we remove those undesirable elements from society, permanently.
Okay.. I don't like what you're saying or doing to this world. Does that give me the right to murder you? "To permanently remove you from this society" as a harmful agent?
You need to abandon this idea of a univeral 'right'. They're a construct of our society. Although in our current society, you would not have such a right, in an alternative society you might.
Sacrificing to gods or ABB thinking he's a hero of the mankind has nothing to do with rationality or logic. People thinking that something is a good thing is only subjective and has nothing to do with the objective reality.
I don't agree with your definition of "civilized."
Don't say that just because something is subjective it has nothing to do with rationality of logic. One can create different logical systems based on subjective beliefs which will work perfectly well.
For example, there are
multiple definitions of the natural numbers. You could take one definition, and I could take another. Each of those systems would be perfectly valid. We could create multiple statements that hold in both systems, or statements that hold in one but not the other, or statements that hold in neither. Just because a certain statement holds in my theory but not yours, it doesn't mean that one of them is irrational.