Free will and criminal 'justice'
People have the wrong idea about punishments, it's about social control, it's not about fairness.
If your child get killed via murder no punishment is going to bring your child back so you will never see real justice. Punishment can serve multiple purposes
- deter people from doing actions you dislike.
- rehabilitate people
- prevent criminals from continue doing things you view as bad.
- personal gain (such as having someone reduced to being your slave with no rights).
- mob satisfaction (such as people cheering as someone is publicly caned).
- societal good (such as forced medical experiments for science).
None of these require that you could have made another decision (such as not killing).
Let's say we have a pedophile that will rape children compulsively (he cannot control himself) does that mean we shouldn't sentence him? of course not.
Ideally a dangerous individual should be locked up before he is able to harm others. Requiring formal conviction of a crime does add some legal certainty but even then they can probably find some crime to pin on the individual.
People with mental illness are arrested and sent to prison in disproportionate numbers. The police often arrest these individuals for petty crimes such as jaywalking or wandering behavior as a preventive law and order measure.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK537064/
Here is a case of law enforcement going out of their way to lock people up because they are viewed as mentally ill, people viewed as mentally ill can also be subjected to forced injections "Community Treatment Order" even if they were not convicted of any crime.
Personally i think people overestimate the ability to medically treat criminality, you can mostly impair the individual (castration, forced SRS, lobotomy, etc) to make him less dangerous. There are some promising result regarding chemical castration to treat pedophilia but that will cause severe health issues unless the missing testosterone is replaced with estrogen.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2764552
Does free will even matter?
Individual: probability of crime X.
A: 0.1%
B: 1%
C: 10%
D: 100%
In this case D couldn't have done anything other than the crime and this actually indicate he is a dangerous individual that needs to be locked up. A would be far less likely to re-offend.
ErwinFurwinPurrwin wrote:
Therapeutic incarceration has got much lower recidivism rates than the traditional punitive kind in Scandinavia. I forget specifically which country or countries at the moment, but regardless of the free will VS determinism debate, it's hard to argue with the results of treating people as if they were simply products of their nature and nurture rather than just judging them to be inherently "bad" people who just somehow arbitrarily, spontaneously (?) decided to be a burden on society. Long story short, put the debate on the back burner and focus on what gets the best results.
timbgray wrote:
Yes, moral responsibility is redundant. You are responsible for your actions regardless of whether you could have done otherwise in the sense that you open yourself to rehabilitation or even isolation if your actions harm or are likely to harm others. Now what constitutes appropriate consequences is another question entirely.
