RE: Implications of not having free will
January 7, 2015 at 7:23 pm
(This post was last modified: January 7, 2015 at 7:26 pm by Dystopia.)
(January 7, 2015 at 6:18 pm)rasetsu Wrote: Balderdash. You can still attribute guilt, just not moral desert. Then the thing which changes is only the rationale we use to justify punishing them, which is still available via the rationales of rehabilitation, deterrence, and protecting society.
It is, but the retributive function still exists and it is probably the most demanded fulfilment coming from the people's voice... I think the approach of no free will could be dangerous for another reason - We could feel compelled, trough observation of people's behaviour, to predict if they could be [or not] potential criminals and for said reason segregate them right away, some theories in the past have argued in favour of this - And it's not exactly off the table for some douches - If we could motion people's external conducts and predict the causes and effects in a relationship of causation, the solution seems apparent to my eyes... And this could lead to disasters to "rehabilitate" people - Lobotomies, incapacitation (i.e. I'm thinking about castrating potential sex offenders), preventive and effective jailtime without the existence of a, de facto criminal act.
Perhaps we've studied different schools, but when I studied criminal law, a deterministic proposition/approach was rejected in the beginning because criminal law wouldn't allow someone to be punished if the subject isn't able to determine his or hers behaviour according to the law - Fully making the choice of committing a crime, when she/he could have refused to engage in said act
Just throwing my thoughts in.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you
