Marina V. Maksimenko, Сand. Sci. (Philosophy), senior lecturer at Criminal and Penal Enforcement Law chair of Perm Institute of Federal Penal Enforcement Service of the Russian Federation, Perm, Russia.

The relevance of this study is attributable to the fact that the possibility to use capital punishment has been high on the public agenda. The study aimed to examine tendencies in attitudes of Russian society to the death penalty based on public polls and to identify socially meaningful conditions for shaping non-acceptance regarding the risk of capital punishment. The author considered the preventive effect of the factual existence and execution of this penalty on the formation of law-abiding behavior through experiencing fear of death and a wrongful conviction. The tools exploited in the study involved general academic techniques including a secondary method of statistical processing – the factor analysis. The author used the data of sociological polls, expert judgments published in scientific reviews, materials from periodicals, and statistics on recorded offenses. The study geography embraced moral assessments of the population from countries where the death penalty is not imposed – the RF, Great Britain, and states where, to this day, the death penalty has been exercised – the USA and the Republic of Belarus. The paper offered a brief retrospective of views and opinions of prominent politicians, lawyers, and philosophers relating to the possible use of the death penalty. The main finding of the research was progressing humanistic tendencies in understanding justice among the Russian inferred from the growing number of death penalty opponents.

Maksimenko MV. An Ethical Dimension of Applying the Death Penalty. In: Perelygina EB, Zotova OYu, Drozdova AV, Tarasova LV. (eds.) Wellbeing and Security in the Face of Social Transformations: Collection of academic papers from the 10th International Symposium (Yekaterinburg, July 9–10, 2019). Yekaterinburg: Liberal Arts University – University for Humanities; 2019. p. 308–316. Available from: doi:10.35853/LAU.WS.2019.MD11.

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