You’re in denial. Dopers, it’s time for an intervention.
My brother in law is a rural CRNA in North Dakota who often subs in Montana. Works solo.
How is it evil, obscene, or inexcusable if she had no choice, and was simply reacting in an inevitable manner to forces completely beyond her control? That makes her a helpless victim, no? (Assuming I am reading you and Moirai correctly: that due to her addiction, there was no other possible outcome on that day than for her to steal drugs intended for her patient.)
If “she couldn’t help it because she was an addict” is not a form of excuse, what is it?
An opinion. But one that would seem to be supported by our legal system. If no one is accountable for their own actions while addicted, you could never prosecute them for anything.
You couldn’t, as **Vinyl Turnip **has also observed, even get mad at them. Because, according to you, they have literally no control over their actions. You should feel nothing but sympathy for them. Your reaction to this nurse should be that they should not sanction her in any way, or even be the least bit angry at her. Because she didn’t make a choice between her own suffering and the patient’s: her addiction *forced *her to help herself by hurting him.
How do you explain addicts who *don’t *do terrible things to support their addictions? Shouldn’t all of them be constantly committing crimes?
This gets into ethical philosophy, and questions of determinism/free will. (IOW, quite the hijack, and one for which I don’t have time right now.)
But determinism needn’t undermine moral or legal culpability. Guilt and punishment are not meted out by human beings upon others because these persons chose to do something wrong, but rather merely because they did. Think about that carefully. It addresses your concerns.
This is the same concern that Vinyl Turnip just raised, and my response is the same:
Determinist philosophies need not undermine moral or legal responsibility for wrongdoing. Not at all.
You and VT are operating under the assumption that we punish people because of what they rationally chose to do (ie, that we’re punishing them because of the choice itself). We do not. We as a society punish them mostly because of what they actually did, whatever the cause. Even if the nurse couldn’t possibly help herself, she still has to face the consequences of her actions, if for no other reason than a deterrent to others (who might have more choice), and to prevent her from repeating the action.
Many addicts–myself included–see the progression of the disease and seek treatment before they commit really horrible deeds (although I did many awful things, I never stole meds from a surgery patient or robbed anyone or prostituted myself, or anything). This doesn’t change anything. It just means that the progression of the disease was arrested before they could do anything really bad. But left untreated, full-blown addiction–by definition–results in impaired behavior control.
“Explainable” is not the same as “excusable.” An addict’s actions can be *explained *by her addiction even while the addiction is not an *excuse *for them.
Actually, our legal system treats crimes very differently depending on things like motive and intent. Compare premeditated murder versus shooting someone who is trying to kill you. In both cases, what you did (kill) was the same, yet you will be punished for one but not the other.
1.) You *chose *to get treatment. Even if your theory of addiction taking away all choice at a certain level of progression is correct, then the nurse failed previously by not *choosing *treatment when she still could.
- ) If someone is so diseased that they literally cannot tell right from wrong, then they are insane and need to be forcibly segregated from society and put into treatment until their addiction is broken and they are competent to function independently again.
3.) If, however, they still knew what they were doing was wrong and *chose *to do it anyway, then they are culpable for it. A hard choice is still a choice. I cannot, ever, imagine needing something so badly that I would cause this kind of pain to another person to get it. And I hope to shit that if I did, people wouldn’t be sitting around and making excuses for me.
That’s because your latter example (“justifiable homicide”) is not a crime. We’re talking about crimes (things that warrant punishment under our judicial system). Justifiable homicide does not.
But you do have something of a point, anyway: We do indeed acknowledge the motive and volitional context of some crimes. But only to a point. Nota bene that you will still be criminally punished for involuntary manslaughter. So my point remains: To a large extent, we punish actions, regardless of volitional control. Which, given the neurochemical nature of addiction, is as it should be.
Yes, this is correct. But this is not the same as being able to choose not to take that patient’s drugs. I interpreted your initial comment about there “always being a choice” as about that specific moment in her addiction, that specific action. I would agree that there is almost always choice early in the addiction, as to whether or not to seek treatment. But again: By the time she chose to steal pain meds from a surgery patient, that was long past.
Oh, they can tell right from wrong. They just don’t care. The need for the drug outweighs literally ALL other considerations. This is why addicts end up homeless, in prison, or six feet under.
I tend to agree. But as I said immediately above, this isn’t exactly the case. (The truth is rather worse, IMHO–they recognize right and wrong, and do the wrong thing anyway! :eek:) This is part of the justification for punishment; even if they couldn’t help it, they did at least know what they were doing.
I would say they are culpable for it, anyway. Whether they knew, whether they could control it, or not.
I would agree that it’s still a “choice”, in the loosest sense of the word. (But again, this gets into some deep philosophical and psychological ground.)
I’m sorry if you feel like I’m making excuses for this nurse. I am not. I believe she should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and never be allowed to practice any kind of medicine, again. All I am doing is arguing very abstractly, very academically, that there is very little rational choice involved in actions such as hers. What she did is still evil, and she’s still responsible for it. I see no contradiction in believing that a) at that moment she was essentially helpless against her addiction, and b) that she should be fully punished anyway.
I’m glad you can’t imagine ever being in a situation where you would do something like she did. I hope you never do. Addiction is the closest thing to the Devil, that I believe in. 
Correction to one of my statements above. I said,
Generally, they do care. They just can’t help themselves, and do the bad things anyway. Addicts generally HATE themselves. They HATE their condition. They even also HATE their “drug of choice”.
When I did awful stuff to score, I wanted to put a bullet in my own brain, so badly did I hate myself for what I was doing. I still struggle with that, a lot.
As tempting as it is for people on the outside to think of that EVIL, EVIL WOMAN! (and we do tend to view addicts as inherently evil people, rather than simply being severely ill), I assure you, no one hates her right now more than she hates herself.
Addiction is a living hell.
(But she should still be punished.)
If you don’t see a contradiction between “she didn’t have a choice” and “she’s still responsible,” then you’re fucking retarded. The *only *way responsibility can exist is with choice. If you cannot choose, then you cannot be responsible. If she could not make the choice to give the drug to the patient instead of herself, then she no more deserves to be punished than a force of nature.
Essentially, you’re claiming that the addiction has hijacked her brain. She literally cannot do anything but give herself the drug. So, let’s imagine that we have a technology that lets you take control of someone’s actions. Someone uses it to make another person rob a bank. Would the “robber” be prosecuted, even though they were not in control of their own actions? Would you be mad at the “robber”? I highly doubt that the answer to either question is “yes.”
I say again: a hard choice is still a choice. Addiction can give you a strong reason to behave in certain ways. But it can’t turn you into a zombie. Every second that you keep using whatever you’re addicted to instead of getting treatment is a choice. And especially, deciding to give yourself pleasure at the expense of causing intense pain to someone else is a choice.
Many addicts are homeless, or in prison, or dead. Many are not. Many–and I would guess most–that *are *homeless, or in prison, or dead still *did not *make choices that involved feeding their addiction by directly causing horrible pain to someone else.
People make terrible choices. Having that choice come as the result of an addiction doesn’t suddenly make it okay.
TL;DR: You can’t have it both ways. Either she can’t make a choice and therefore isn’t responsible (but is still dangerous and should be prevented from doing harm to herself or others), or she can make a choice and she is responsible (in which case she should be punished in addition to being treated).
Whoa, whoa! Where’s the anger coming from? This is the Pit, I know, but I thought this was just a fairly neutral discussion. 
I didn’t mean to get you riled up. I’m just expressing and trying to defend my viewpoint.
All of this that you’ve posted is an argument that is actually based on just a philosophical assumption. Not all philosophers agree on this.*
*(One of the best books on this question that I ever read was called How Free Are You? The Determinism Problem. Don’t remember the author right now. But he explains in more detail than I can, how our ideas of “responsibility” are skewed towards a rather unjustified assumption of free will, and how deterministic philosophies do not actually undermine social and legal responsibilities. This “preservation of responsibility” has to do in part with a philosophical concept called “agency”, which I can’t really get into right now. But it’s basically a justification of punishment of a person for his/her bad actions because s/he is the “agent” of those actions. Rather like the elimination of pests because they carry disease: it’s not their “fault”, but their behavior is harmful and has to be addressed. I’ll find some explicatory cites, if you wish.)
This is not at all a realistic scenario, so it has no bearing on the actual issue at hand. I’m talking about actual, real-life conditions, and the medical and philosophical knowledge that we bring to bear on them.
I never said it turns you into a “zombie”. I just said it severely limits your ability to make morally rational choices. Zombies don’t regret their actions. Addicts do. All the time.
I agree. But again: We’re not talking about the long-term choice not to get treatment; we’re talking about the specific, immediate action of stealing drugs. Significant difference.
Yes. I’ve already happily conceded that not every person with a substance abuse problem gets to the point of full-blown addiction. And even then, there are degrees of behavioral, cognitive, and judgement impairment. But in my experience, a person who steals drugs from a surgery patient is not in any kind of control of her life. See below.**
Please tell me when did I ever say that this woman’s choice was “okay”?
I thought I made myself very clear: The action was NOT OK–not remotely!–and she SHOULD be punished for it.
**Let me ask you this, SfG: Do you really believe that a nurse–a NURSE!–would, in full possession of her cognitive and moral faculties, make a decision to steal pain meds and cause great suffering to a patient?
If you agree that she was NOT in full control of her moral/mental faculties, then you actually agree with my interpretation. She was impaired.
If you believe that she WAS in full control of those faculties, then she is simply psychotic and should be locked away for the rest of her life, and addiction doesn’t even enter the picture. This would be a crime of psychopathy, not a drug crime.
If you think about those two options, I think my position might seem a little easier to swallow.
I suppose the disagreement comes because none of us can see into the woman’s head, and thus we don’t actually know whether she made a choice or not. You are apparently comfortable believing that she no longer had free will in any meaningful sense, and thus that her actions that day were essentially preordained (albeit the result of earlier choices). Like SFG, I’m skeptical of this interpretation.
I understand why it exists, though. If I were an addict or the loved one of an addict who had done horrible things, however, it would likely be exactly what I wanted to hear. I did those things, but it wasn’t actually me doing them. I think that in many cases, addiction (or even simply alcohol or drug use) merely reveals some very unpleasant things about what we’re personally capable of, that we don’t want to face. “I had no choice” is a way to cope with some of those darker truths.
On preview, I would say there is a whole lot of excluded middle between “full control of one’s faculties” and “impaired (to the extent that one has no control whatsoever over one’s actions).” If not, we waste a shitload of money on “don’t drink and drive” PSAs, because driving under the influence isn’t a choice.
Actually, VT, for what it’s worth, I became a philosophical determinist before I ever became an addict. So that informs my experiences, not the other way round. (I understand and respect your skepticism. This is a very complex issue, and the tendency to view things in terms of “free will” is very very strong. Almost instinctive.)
Further, existing medical research–and the corresponding definitions of “addiction” of all of the institutions I cited above–confirm that this is not just wishful thinking on the part of addicts or their families. There is a very real, empirically observable impairment of moral judgement involved with addiction. This is not in dispute.
There is indeed a lot of excluded middle between the two choices I gave SfG in that last rhetorical question. But not enough to render the fundamental question falsely dichotomistic. Consider this: If there was indeed moral/cognitive impairment involved in this nurse’s decision, how much impairment was there? Apparently enough that she was willing to risk her job, her freedom, and the well-being of another human whom she was sworn to serve. I’d say that’s pretty badly impaired, wouldn’t you?
Choosing to drive a vehicle is not an addictive behavior, so this reference isn’t relevant to the topic at hand.
Besides, we might convince someone in the early stages of alcohol addiction–before they are significantly, consistently impaired–to seek treatment before they get so far as to drive drunk. Addiction is a progressive condition, so there’s no reason to say that all attempts to discourage alcoholism and its related behaviors are “wasted”. (No pun intended, LOL!)
Hey, me too, bro! Although I got mine as an adult and it wasn’t nearly as hellish as your experience.
I was in the recovery room feeling crappy after my (nice, simple, laparoscopic-with-just-three-tiny-scars) appendectomy, and my wife and grandmother were visiting, and I kept mentioning how much my stomach area hurt, and they were nodding sympathetically and looking for a nurse, but the only nurse on duty was busy because an elderly woman with dementia kept pooping in her recovery bed down the hall, so he kept having to go in and clean her up. He told them he’d be in as soon as he could to get me some additional painkillers.
So I kept complaining about how much pain I was in, and about how incredibly thirsty I was getting, and my wife and grandma got me a little paper cup of water even though I wasn’t supposed to have any. After 15-20 minutes of this, my wife and grandma started commenting on how pale I was getting, and I said I had to go to the bathroom so they helped me up. I took a step toward the bathroom and discontinuity I was back on the bed – apparently I passed out immediately after taking that first step, and only the fact that my wife and grandma were already standing by my sides and holding me saved me from smacking my head on the ground.
So my grandma went and told the nurse that something was way wrong, and he came back and looked at me and said “Good GOD, you’re white as a sheet!” and he pressed on my belly and said “And your belly is completely rigid!”, and he pressed the pulse monitor button and took a quick blood pressure reading, and said “And your blood pressure is 40 over 20. Wow. Well, obviously he’s bleeding internally, we better get him back into surgery.”
A new surgeon (who was a kind and competent woman instead of a brusque middle-aged man like my first surgeon had been, but oddly enough she had the same last name as him even though they were completely unrelated, which confused me no end when this totally different Dr. Johnson showed up) rushed me back to the OR, and along the way the water I had been surreptitiously given kept gushing up out of my throat and out of my mouth even though I didn’t feel like I was vomiting, and the nurse said something about how the pressure of the blood around my stomach was pushing out any liquids in my stomach.
I don’t remember the surgery itself, except that I begged them not to catheterize me, but they said they had to, but they’d wait until I was fully under before doing it. When I woke up in the recovery room, I was later informed that they’d miscalculated because when they started putting in the catheter, I woke up and “fought like the dickens,” and they had to give me a lot more anesthesia before finishing up.
Anyway, now I have the virtually-invisible laparoscopy scars, and the huge ragged numb-all-around scar running from my belly button to the top of the pubic bone, where she opened me up to fix the bleeding.
Hooray for double appendectomy scar bearers! High five, Monty!
There’s no anger: simply a statement of fact. You are fucking retarded if you simultaneously believe that someone had no choice for an action and yet is still both responsible and culpable for it.
The discussion of whether or not we have free will is moot, because society necessitates the assumption that it exists.
We eliminate pests that carry disease, though there is no fault, because they are not human. When a human is a danger to others through no fault of its own (e.g., disease or criminal insanity), we simply segregate it from the population without further punishment and then attempt to treat it.
If you believe that this nurse is merely an agent, you should feel nothing but sympathy for her, and you should argue that she should be considered criminally insane and put into a treatment facility until her addiction is broken and she is no longer a danger to herself and others. (Which, if she truly had no choice about the matter, is absolutely the course of action that I would also argue for.)
So am I. You’re simply claiming a ridiculous level of non-responsibility for addicts.
Thus proving that they do, in fact, have the capacity to make the choice. A hard choice, or a “severely limited one,” is still a choice.
I see. The only true [del]Scotsman[/del] addict is one that does horrible things to support their addiction. Anyone who makes a choice not to directly harm others in order to support their addiction by that very choice proves that their addiction isn’t as bad as it could be/they haven’t yet hit “rock bottom.”
That’s just my point. You’re a mass of deeply stupid contradictions.
Yes. Because some people are just selfish. Was it a decision she would have made if she hadn’t been addicted? Of course not. But the addiction put her in a position where she was able to reveal herself as the kind of person who, when pressed with a difficult choice, goes with the option that gives herself pleasure while causing another person excruciating pain.
Stealing medication from a patient who’s about to undergo surgery isn’t an addictive behavior, either. Both scenarios are a consideration of what people do as a result of their addictions (driving while intoxicated, stealing drugs).
Naturally.
I’m really trying not to take that personally. Trying.
You disagree with me. I get that. But I’ve already sketched out for you that your disagreement with me is based only on a certain set of philosophical assumptions (assumptions for which, btw, you haven’t BEGUN to offer any justification). If you want to continue to call me “fucking retarded” simply because your opinions differ on this issue from mine, then I’m not interested in continuing this discussion. You’re just being antagonistic.
How, exactly? How is the assumption of free will necessary for our legal system? Please be specific, without resorting to circularity.
(If you say, “The assumption is necessary because without responsibility, there can be no guilt,” then you have to provide an argument to justify that (foundational) conjoined clause. You haven’t done this yet, and I think you will find it QUITE thorny.)
The assumption of free will is utterly superfluous to a criminal justice system. In a fully and strictly deterministic worldview, for example, the judge has no more “free will” not to sentence the accused, than the accused had, not to commit the crime. Think about that.
But that’s strict determinism. Even assuming something less than that (eg, a worldview that is only deterministic vis-a-vis addiction and its neurological underpinnings), we are still justified in carrying out social and legal sanction against an addict offender because:
a) It will serve as a deterrent to others, who might be in a position of having more choice (eg, the choice to get early treatment); and
b) It will prevent the offender from re-offending, at least for a while.
In neither of these cases is it necessary to assume “free will” for the accused.
The “pest” thing was just a loose analogy. My point remains: Whether we are talking about contagion or crime, intent is largely irrelevant. It is the mere presence of the contagion or crime itself, the mere phenomenon, that requires a response.
And no, we don’t just “attempt to treat” the addict “without further punishment” if for no other reason than deterrence, which I have repeatedly already mentioned. One of the reasons I myself sought early treatment is that I didn’t want to go to prison for things that I would ultimately have no control over, were my condition to progress. So I’m living proof of the utility of criminal punishment as a deterrent, even absent volitional control of the offender in cases of late-stage addictive behaviors. “Free will” is utterly unnecessary for criminal responsibility.
I DO feel nothing but sympathy for her. For her.
I distinguish between the woman, and her crime. (Do you? :dubious:) Her crime was hideous and repulsive and wicked. But she is an addict.
Wow, you are so wrapped up in your philosophical assumptions that you just CAN’T hear me, can you.
Let me make this painfully clear, for the umpteenth time:
I AM NOT SAYING SHE IS “NOT RESPONSIBLE”. SHE IS.
Where you’re getting vexed is in assuming that criminal responsibility necessarily entails free will. I know you believe this to be the case (and at a very deep level, most people want it to be the case), but I’d be interested in seeing you exposit justifications for it. I have already offered several illustrations and arguments to support my view that it is superfluous to our criminal justice system.
As I indicated earlier, the clinical diagnosis of “addiction” involves an observable level of impaired judgement. So yes, in this case, it is indeed more problematic to call someone an addict who actually is in full control of their actions. No no-true-Scotsman fallacy here; we’re talking about a clinical diagnosis, and the technical requirements for meeting it.
And you are a mass of deep, thoughtlessly held biases and assumptions, the most directly relevant of which are adversely prejudicial to the compassionate treatment of addicts in our society. But I don’t expect to be able to change your mind through argumentation, because I don’t think you arrived at those biases through reason, in the first place.
Wow. What a horrific view of humanity you have there. To think that any ol’ person–maybe even the NURSES at your local hospital!–would do such a thing as simply a result of a “difficult choice”… What a bleak indictment of our species.
You have the luxury of never having been addicted. I envy you that. But I can’t let myself be angry at you for your black-and-white, clear-cut judgementalism here, because you really don’t understand. At all. You don’t want to, because challenging these deep, foundational assumptions is an uncomfortable thing.
So in your mind, “addictive behaviors” are fully distinct and different from “what people do as a result of their addictions.” Got it. :rolleyes:
Seriously, this last statement of yours is so incoherent and ignorant I don’t even know where to being. You clearly have no grasp on what “addictive behaviors” are, or how they are defined.
Then your point remains wrong. Crimes require both an actus reus, or act/ommission contrary to law, as well as a mens rea, or required state of mind.