Is this an argument?
If the recent evidence of deterrence is shown to be correct, then opponents of capital punishment will face an uphill struggle on moral grounds.
Premise: If the recent evidence of deterrence is shown to be correct
Conclusion: then opponents of capital punishment will face an uphill struggle on moral ground
Making it a valid, strong and sound argument?
Im having REAL difficulty finding arguments in real life instances.
Here is the source.
Capital Punishment May Be Morally Obligatory
The most common basis for resisting this conclusion, and our principal target here, is some version of the distinction between acts and omissions. Opponents of capital punishment frequently appeal to an intuition that intentional killing by the government and its agents is morally objectionable in a way that simply allowing private killings is not. Whatever the general merits of the distinction between acts and omissions in the moral theory of individual conduct, we think it gets little purchase on questions of governmental policy. Government cannot help but act in ways that affect the actions of citizens; where citizens decide whether or not to kill each other in light of government's policies, it is not clear even as a conceptual matter what it would mean for government not to act. For government to adopt a mix of criminal-justice policies that happens not to include capital punishment is not an "omission" or a "failure to act" in any meaningful sense. Likewise, deontological injunctions against unjustified killing, which we have not questioned here, are of little help in these settings. Unjustified killing is exactly what capital punishment prevents.
If the recent evidence of deterrence is shown to be correct, then opponents of capital punishment will face an uphill struggle on moral grounds.
If this argument is correct, it has broad implications, some of which may not be welcomed by advocates of capital punishment. Government engages in countless omissions, many of which threaten people's health and safety; consider the failure to reduce highway fatalities, to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, to prevent domestic violence, to impose further controls on private uses of guns, even to redistribute wealth to those who most need it. Suppose that it is not sensible, in these and other contexts, to characterize government omissions as such, or suppose that even if the characterization is sensible, it lacks moral relevance. If so, then government might well be compelled, on one or another ground, to take steps to protect people against statistical risks, even if those steps impose costs and harms; much will depend on what the facts show.
Any objection to capital punishment, we believe, must rely on something other than abstract injunctions against the taking of life. If the recent evidence of deterrence is shown to be correct, then opponents of capital punishment will face an uphill struggle on moral grounds. If each execution is saving many lives, the harms of capital punishment would have to be very great to justify its abolition, far greater than most critics have heretofore alleged. There is always residual uncertainty in social science and legal policy, and we have attempted to describe, rather than to defend, recent findings here. But if those findings are ultimately shown to be right, capital punishment has a strong claim to being, not merely morally permissible, but morally obligatory, above all from the standpoint of those who wish to protect life.
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