I do not believe that we can know if our behaviors are ethical. There have been great changes in the past decade but many of these have led to differing ethical opinions. Many people have turned to the law for the answers and other to their religion. Since there are so many opinions it becomes harder to find one that you can personally agree with, and once you do you find an opinion you agree with you are not able to know if it is still the right opinion. It has become hard in our age to find an opinion that can be proven completely wrong, because of this we cannot know if our behavior is ethical.
             Capital punishment is a great example of how we cannot know if our behavior is ethical. Throughout the ages, the death penalty has been used as one of the severe ways to punish or deter people from breaking all range of laws from petty theft to murder. Capital punishment is a great example of how there are no set ethics. Over the years, in the United States, the standards for sentencing the ultimate punishment have changed. Because of these changes one can see how ethics cannot be determined. The constitutionality of the death penalty is a highly controversial issue leading to seemingly circular arguments. Both the pro- and the anti-capital punishment viewpoints can be justified in legal scope; however the validity of the death penalty policy can be further examined. The death penalty satisfies the public's need for retribution, relieves the anguish of the victim's family, and permanently removes the actual incorrigible criminal from society. The capital punishment can be justified in many ways. In 1976 the United States began creating a bifurcated trial procedure that would legally allow imposing the death sentence. The states did so in response to the 1972 (Furman vs. Georgia) Supreme Court decision which ruled that death penalty statutes were too vague and ambiguous, thus unconstitutional and illegal. The notion of the capital pu...