(May 28, 2015 at 11:07 am)Anima Wrote:(May 26, 2015 at 9:18 am)Dystopia Wrote: Determinism. I don't need to explain it, proponents of free will need to make a case for it with evidence. Everything I do has a preemptive cause, I'm conditioned since birth by biology and sociological barriers - All I do is pre-scheduled by variables that lead me to the result.
Because the only thing that can go out the window is the punitive side of the justice system - The rehabilitation procedure, the prevention and coercion needn't go away. I may not apply punitive/retributive measures to anyone, but I can still execute them if I believe they'll inevitably commit more crimes (or imprison them for life, whatever). Your argument would only apply if a justice system was based purely on bronze age divine retribution (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth) - Since it isn't (and it shouldn't be), acknowledging there is no free will does not mean we need to abolish the justice system because the purpose of justice is not to "hurt" people but to ensure peaceful living conditions for society and to give each person what's rightfully theirs.
Furthermore, why are we rehabilitating at all. The perpetrator is reacting or acting according to a predetermined set of responses. There is no person (or no person who can resist the predetermined responses), so why not just kill every offender from the offset and be done with it? The program of this meat does not fit with the program of the rest of the meat. One does not try to rehabilitate a bad apple into a good one for the sake of the bunch. One just discards said apple. More to the point we were predetermined in our action and thus bare no liability for responding to our stimuli to kill them for their infraction immediately.
Think of it as a computer program. It's a bug fix. We try to fix the code, because our code might break someday, or the code of someone we're programmed to care about's code may break. And we'd want them to be fixed as well, rather than trashed.
And you absolutely can just kill every offender. That's certainly an option. Plenty of people have throughout history, and many still do. But our current programming seems to have identified some societal consequences to that which for the most part keeps up from using that strategy at this time in most of the 1st world countries.
