Often it seems on this board believing people have volition or control over their actions and choices gets conflated with believing in a harsh criminal justice system that must punish people for committing crimes. I believe people have volition and control over their actions and choices.
I don’t believe people should be punished by the criminal justice system at all, I think the goal should be to protect others and where possible making victims whole. People should be kept separated from society not to punish them but to protect potential victims if they have proven to reoffend.
One commonly debated area is drug addiction, to get my bias out of the way I don’t believe drug prohibition should exist period. And obviously drugs can cause either psychological or physical addiction, I still believe addicts have volition and choose to use.
I don’t think they should be punished or looked down on for this, and of course addiction changes their incentives, but they do still have power over their actions. They could choose to just stop cold turkey, unlikely to be effective due to the withdrawal. An easier choice would be tapering down slowly, or choosing not to use more than needed. That is if they want to quit, which I see as a personal choice and not as inherently noble or right.
A worldview that holds people have no control or volition over their behavior is just absurd to me, it seems to invite a laughable sort of fatalism where no one has any control over their life or actions. Any choice you make is what you would have done anyway, corks bobbing in the river of fate.
And ever we come back to dear old Nietzsche’s “Beware of those in whom the will to punish is strong.”.
Which encompasses most liberals as well as most conservatives — if the culprit is one whose offence they find particularly abhorrent to themselves — and a smaller portion of the undecided.
Some form of punishment is inherent in any penalty, even if just the loss of liberty, and criminals won’t be deterred by no-punishment ( remorse is generally the province of the caught ), yet obviously making penalty noisome or oppressive is done just to play to democracy. It doesn’t achieve more than the basic penalty.
But generally, we shouldn’t just avoid harsh punishment for that which it causes us to be — since that lapses to self as the centre of the argument — nor for any pragmatic reasons, but simply because cruelty is wrong.
I absolutely believe in free will or volition and in that regard, without getting into details that aren’t really relevant here, I believe justice is, more or less, eye for an eye, and it should match the crime. Justice is an important virtue of a free society, but it isn’t the only one to consider. The freedoms and rights of other individuals are paramount, and other virtues such as mercy, healing and rehabilitation, protection, and others all come into play. If we only concern ourselves with justice and assign appropriately strict punishments for crimes, we can rightly say we live in a just society, but that says nothing about how free or moral we are.
I disagree here, if we have a justice system, then one aspect it needs to have is justice. Again, I don’t think it should be the only one, but it needs to be part of it. At the same time, that doesn’t mean we need to throw people in jail as a form of punishment for everything. Yeah, that’s simple, but unless they’re a risk to themselves or others, we can probably find ways to punish them that aren’t removing potentially contributing members of society and, worse, has potentially serious negative effects on the psychology of those in prison.
In that regard, yeah, if someone is a violent criminal, maybe locking them up makes sense. If someone is a burglar or a drug dealer or whatever, a closer monitoring of them on probation, community service, pay restitution, rehab and therapy, etc. are probably not only more effective, but probably a lot less expensive too. If we find that certain individuals just don’t respond to that sort of thing, then we may need to take more stringent action
It’s not that simple. Yes, people with addiction don’t suddenly lose their volition, but their thought processes just don’t work the same as someone else. If someone’s worst crime is just that they made some poor choices and got themselves addicted then, absolutely, I agree that they shouldn’t be punished, they deserve whatever help can reasonably be provided. OTOH, if that addiction leads to other poor decisions, particularly violent ones, we need to take steps to protect other people.
And addiction isn’t the only problem. I don’t know the actual statistics, but people in the criminal justice system are far more likely to have addiction and mental health issues. In many cases, it’s those issues that lead or contributed to their criminal actions and, chances are, if we could get them the help they need, they’d be far less likely to repeat those actions. Instead, it’s just easier to lock them away for a while and ignore them
As a general rule, I would agree, but with severe enough addiction or mental health issues, people are making choices, but they’re making them with a skewed perspective of the world or of the risks.
I don’t believe in free will in a philosophical sense. I think it’s an illusion. But it’s an illusion that’s very important to people’s sense of well-being. People need to believe and feel that they have free will, that they are masters of their fate. The question is, what can we do to help as many people as possible get that feeling?
Like grude, I personally have no use for the punitive aspect of the criminal justice system. Retribution means little to me, and in fact I have trouble using the word justice with a straight face. But I don’t know if we can ever really remove retribution from the system, not least because enough humans do seem to value it that, if we drained all the vengeful sting out of our judicial punishments, people might feel the need to take “justice” into their own hands.
I believe in “philosophical free will” (as opposed to “theological free will”) and also believe that punishment should be as minimal as possible. It should be calculated to provide the local maximum of deterrence and rehabilitation.
There’s a kind of Laffer Curve here. If your kid gets caught shoplifting, and you pound the living shit out of him with a tire iron…you’ve overdone it. The lesson is learned, but at a greater cost than necessary. (If you say, “Oh, well, forget it; I did the same thing at your age,” you’re under-doing it, and not teaching the lesson properly.)
I definitely believe in administering the minimal possible punishment that will achieve the required goals. Anything else would be immoral. But I’m not sure that winds up with me being lighter on punishment.
Well, at least, not until we reach the ideal where punishment is pointless and rehabilitation is the name of the game. The desire to cause inappropriate harm is a human psychological flaw–one I hope we will eventually learn how to correct.
But, until then, I’m not sure that we don’t need pretty harsh punishments for psychopaths early on, to encourage them to behave like decent people out of their own self-interest.
I do believe in free will, but I think freedom to exercise that will should be restricted to those who care about others. It’s just that I think that will eventually be everyone.
I believe in free will or volition, in the larger more complex sense that I believe I have a self and that self makes choices and decisions, but whereby that “self” is not located entirely and specifically in the individual AHunter3. Or, to express my belief in terms of what it is not, I do not think of the universe as a vast clockwork of causality in which all that exists is an array of passive particles being acted upon by the forces and collisions and whatnot of the other particles, with no intentionality in existence anywhere.
I do not believe in punishment as a modality for enforcing laws.
It’s not because I don’t believe people are responsible for their actions, it’s because I don’t believe laws created by humans should be enforced. I’m an anarchist.
I think free will is an illusion–a notion people cling to because it provides a simple explanation for why people behave as they do. We’re no different from the other members of the animal kingdom. Our pets behave according to their instincts, reflexes, imprinting, and learned behaviors. So do we.
But I think punishment is not incompatible with my belief that the notion of free will is bullshit. The fear of punishment coerces people to act a certain way. I was a “good girl” as a kid not because I willfully chose to be, but because my father’s heavy hand was an excellent deterrent against mischief and fuckuppery. If it weren’t for the fear of prison, I think more of us would be brazen enough to behave criminally.
The people who do behave criminally simply do not find the prospect of prison frightening enough. But I’m guessing a signficant proportion of them change their minds once they experience it directly.
Do I believe in harsh punishments? Well, I think punishments should match the crime. I don’t think murderers should get the same sentence as shoplifters. However, I wish the criminal justice system would focus more on rehabilitation than punishment. Yes, let’s restrict the criminal’s freedoms, so that 1) they learn the hard way why being a criminal is bad and 2)they stay out of society’s hair for a few years. But let’s also understand that the criminal had specific reasons for doing what he/she did. And those reasons have nothing to do with “willfulness”, but how they’ve been programmed. Punishment alone will be sufficient to “correct” some criminals. But probably not the majority of them.
Yes, because it’s not the harshness of a punishment that deters violators, but the certainty. Look at how serious it can be to be caught rolling through a stop sign. We’re talking about the possibility of thousands of dollars in fines, court costs, and increased insurance premiums, yet people do it routinely because they know they won’t get caught. I do it as many as a half dozen times a day. I’ve never had an accident while doing it, so no deterrent there, and I’ve never been ticketed.
You could make the penalty a $10 fine and if I got caught every time I’d stop doing it. Catch me once out of 50,000 times and a $10,000 fine won’t stop me.
Freewill, absolutely believe in it when circumstances indicate a considered action or inaction. (I’ll drool and crave if you stick a pizza in front of me–no free will there–but the choice is mine to eat it or not.)
Punishment, as in ‘calculated and arbitrary suffering imposed by someone not directly affected by the offensive act’, is not something I find valuable. Jail time, for instance.
To the extent society has the right to impose consequences for actions, I think those consequences need to be aimed at improving the situation that led to the action in the first place. Maybe that means revoking privileges (no car for people who insist on driving dangerously); maybe it means isolating certain people with a propensity for doing harm to others, and then either helping them to get it under control or finding something fulfilling for them to do that keeps them from endangering other people; maybe it means offering mental & physical rehabilitation for addicts, or just letting the addict do their drug but in a manner that ensures the well-being of others.
But that’s all really hard and there’s a lot of gray area.