Do you think it would be morally justified to magically alter someone’s mind for the better in these two scenarios?
Assume you’re the one doing the altering in each scenario.
1: An extremely racist person (as you define it) has their racism instantly and completely removed.
2: A born psychopath that kills people for his pleasure (think someone like Bundy, Rader, Ramirez, etc.) has his psychopathy and desire to kill instantly and completely removed. His mind becomes whatever it would have been if he wasn’t a murderous psychopath.
As a related question, do you think altering the person’s mind in the two scenarios above would be akin to killing the person they originally were?
In #2, absolutely. We don’t need psychopaths going around.
In #1 I’d say “yes”, too. Even if it might be toying with someone’s mind, I don’t see the harm in it.
As for “killing the person they originally were,” well, that’s rather semantic. It would destroy a significant part of who they were, but as it would be destroying a fundamental negative part of them that is harmful for the world around them, then I think it would be justified.
Perhaps what you propose is not much different from, e.g. taking schizophrenia drugs. They dumb you down, but if you don’t take them you can be dangerous to society. I actually once shared with an apartment with a schizophrenic who was on these drugs to keep him safe. The drugs caused him to have no initiative in life, but he could be very friendly. He could be annoying at times (he reminded me a lot of Randy Quaid) but at least appeared to be safe in general (the worst he did was fall asleep on the toilet or enter my room at night once or twice instead of his, and then realize his mistake). Hopefully whatever he was taking kept him from having an attack and doing something more dangerous, given that he was at large and not in a mental institution.
This is a complex question, and while I guess I do believe that some non-consensual behavior control can be appropriate, both of these feel off as presented.
I am maybe less opposed to #2, but if given the choice between a society that regularly put extremely and repetitively violent people to death vs altered their personality against their wishes, I am somehow drawn toward the former more than the latter. Or ideally give them the choice between the two.
Where both of these get sticky is whether or not it’s just thoughts, or if it translates into actions. I mean, if someone’s a crazy psychopath mass murderer in their own mind, then that’s fine, as long as it doesn’t actually translate into actual murders. Same with racism. Ultimately you should be free to think what you like; it’s actions that matter.
I’m not seeing the urgency of #1. Ultimately, he’s the asshole in today’s society, and if there are consequences to be suffered for extreme racism, then he should suffer them. Magically making him non-racist takes away the responsibility.
#2 is different I suppose. It’s the classic “mad dog that needs to be put down” scenario, except that the options are (I assume?) let him be as a psychopath, alter his mind, or have him executed in some way. I’d vote yes, because at least this way, he’s not just being killed outright and can be a productive member of society now.
As to whether they “kill” the person, I don’t know. I feel like if it’s some sort of physiological problem, then it would be akin to curing a disease, but if it’s just fucked up thinking, then yeah, you’re irrevocably changing what it is to be them. For the better, I’d say, but you’re still fundamentally changing them.
Another question to consider is whether it’s some sort of judicial punishment, or if it’s just you, the magic-wielder doing it in an extra-judicial fashion.
Doc Savage did this in his upstate crime hospital.
I question the morality here. I mean the idea is interesting- but who decides?
Remember the American experiments and laws on Eugenics? They thought it was a good and moral idea also.
The most significant era of eugenic sterilization was between 1907 and 1963, when over 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized under eugenic legislation in the United States.[101] Beginning around 1930, there was a steady increase in the percentage of women sterilized, and in a few states only young women were sterilized. A 1937 Fortune magazine poll found that 2/3 of respondents supported eugenic sterilization of “mental defectives”, 63% supported sterilization of criminals, and only 15% opposed both.[102][103] From 1930 to the 1960s, sterilizations were performed on many more institutionalized women than men.[104] By 1961, 61 percent of the 62,162 total eugenic sterilizations in the United States were performed on women.
I mean, maybe- if I was the “decider” and the psychopath was a danger to my family or myself, then, that would be a possible moral decision to make.
It would be akin to killing the person. It’s an unforgivable overreach to reprogram a person without their consent. I say this as a person who has been on the receiving end of shitty homophobic and sissyphobic attitudes. As always, your mileage may vary about what you personally have been through.
No. Absolute no. Do NOT reprogram people. It’s the ultimate in coercion. No.
I figure once a person has reached the point of murdering other people (presumably without their consent) they have placed themselves beyond the protection of consent. If a person is killing people without their consent, I would be willing to remove his desire to kill without his consent.
Nope. That’s not a responsibility I’m competent to assume let alone have any desire to take on. I ain’t applying for any switch-pulling jobs at the penitentiary, either, magic powers or not.
There’s a lot of people that would benefit from a mental reset. But it would be a BAD precedent. What happens later when some MAGAat gets that ability and starts changing women into Stepford wives or making non-white people subservient and deferential to WASPs? Better to just try to influence people in the old-fashioned way.
That’s a slippery slope fallacy we could apply to incarcertaion as well. Any established custom or process we create to take away the rights of other human beings can potentially be abused, misused, or have negative unintended consequences. Although I’m with @AHunter3 in regards to altering someone’s mind, I’m not entirely clear how it’s any worse than locking someone in a small cell for 40+ years.
There’s a line that sums up my attitude from the old novel Mindkiller from a well-meaning mind controller, who is trying to reassure the man he’s speaking to.
“Don’t worry, I only used it if I couldn’t just kill them instead.”
As for whether it counts as killing, in these scenarios the racist person probably ends up still technically themselves, just disoriented and suicidal. Or turns even more racist as a conscious attempt to rebel against their violation.
The psychopath however has had the foundations of their personality destroyed and replaced with an artificial personality, and is definitely dead. The result is basically a meat robot created by whoever programmed the replacement mind. Arguably more moral than the first scenario since it amounts to an execution with extra steps, but the nature of the artificial personality matters a lot since it could be anything the programmer wants. A slave, a torturer, a deep-cover spy, a fanatic soldier or assassin, etc.
People have the right to be racist. People don’t have the right to murder others. I’d be good with using it in the second scenario, assuming the person was actually murdering people and didn’t just have the desire to do so. (If they just had the desire, but refrained because they were afraid of getting caught and punished, I’d say our existing tools for dealing with murder were working adequately and there is no need to mess with anyone’s free will. But we mess with murderers’ free will all the time, by imprisoning and sometimes executing them, and if we’re generally agreed that that isn’t unethical, I don’t see how restraining them through magical mind-control powers is any worse.)
I actually would apply it to incarceration as well. I think of it somewhat hierarchically. IF society deems it necessary that I not have the freedom to walk around because it views me as having abused that privilege (i.e., I’m a threat, I’ve done bad and socially disruptive things), then it can lock me up BUT has to give me the option of death instead. Nobody should be forced to live in captivity if they’d rather die than be caged.
And IF society deems it necessary that I not have the freedom to walk around with my mind unmodified, because it deems my thought processes so dangerously unpredictable, then it can decide to medicate me against my will BUT it has to give me the option of being caged instead, if I’d rather my mind remain unmodified, and of course see the previous paragraph.