We should not accept moral nihilism unless we find strong arguments to do so.

The perspective that many today are beginning to see as fully realistic is that democracy in our country, and in our part of the world, will suffer the same fate as the Swedish monarchy did before. The democracy is beeing emptied of all power political content at the same time as the forms remain, treated with reverence and preservasion.

I have now come to the conclusion (roughly) that capital punishment is defensible, if it can be shown to have a deterrent effect on murder. In that case, a few executions save not only some people from being murdered but also some people from becoming murders.

To kill or not to kill, that was the question that haunted me.

Utilitarianism condones killing of innocent human beings, even murder, if it makes the world a better place.

I am now a decided non-naturalist realist. And today we may even speak of a trend towards non-naturalist moral realism.

It is hard to tell if capital punishment has such an effect. And even if, in some contexts it has (such as in the American South with a very high incidence of murder), this effect may very well go away if a decent welfare state was replaced for the existing social order.