I’ve always believed even after I came to the conclusion that libertarian free will doesn’t exist that if someone does something wrong they should be punished for it in some way even if it has no rehabilitative or deterrent effect.
Is it irrational/wrong of me to believe that even though the likes of Hitler, Ted Bundy, Josef Mengele, Osama Bin Laden etc can’t genuinely “choose” to be evil and perform horrific acts that they should still be punished for the sake of justice as opposed to doing nothing (assuming they couldn’t ever harm anyone again)?
For example if the world became a post scarcity utopia overnight where all the ills of civilization (disease, war, starvation, violence etc) either vanished or were rendered incapable of reappearing in any truly harmful way would the rational choice simply be to let all the violent criminals, war criminals, genocide perpetrators, terrorists, serial killers, dictators etc live their life in happiness with the rest of society without receiving any kind of punishment since they can never hurt anyone again so there would be no real “point” to it since they didn’t freely choose to do immoral things (though they believed they did)?
It just bothers me to the very core of my being the idea of an absolute moral monster (like someone who rapes and kills children or exterminates entire groups for being “inferior”) simply getting off scot free and never facing any consequences for their actions merely because they’re not able to commit harm again and they didn’t “choose” to be the way are and to hurt people.
Is there any rational way of reconciling these two opposing viewpoints in order to avoid cognitive dissonance?
Could the idea of punishing someone for the sake of getting justice for their victims (dead or living) or that evil acts are an imbalance that must be righted with a “payment” of some kind be a sufficient reason despite there being no free will (in the same that you’re obligated to replace something you broke even if you did it accidentally)?
No, those ideas do seem fundamentally at odds. You’ve also got a massive excluded middle there, in that murderers are never going to “get off scot free”. Even if society doesn’t have any retributive or deterrent purpose for imprisoning them, there’s still the purpose of preventing them from murdering more people.
I don’t believe in free will, but I think it’s rational to behave as if you do. And since it’s impossible to achieve this utopia there will always be reasons to punish the guilty - to prevent them causing further harm, and as a deterent for them and others.
Removing libertarian free will makes an agent more responsible for their actions, not less. It puts the entirety of the decision making into the rules-based cognitive processing - their beliefs, preferences, inclinations, and such are all entirely contained within them and are responsible for what they do.
The existence of a justice system relies on mechanistic cognitive function, where the properties of the person drive the behavior of the person. To the degree that libertarian free will disagrees with that, libertarian free will is the model that is incompatible with justice systems and morality in general.
I was referring to a hypothetical scenario where we can guarantee that a rapist/killer couldn’t hurt anyone again so they get released into normal society since the idea is that it would be wrong to imprison someone for the sole purpose of punishment because they had no choice but to be the way they are without libertarian free will.
In the absence of free will, people are reactive calculating machines - meat robots. But they’re meat robots that function based on rules and internal state. Let us for a moment make the correct assumption that I lack libertarian free will. Then hand me a knife and put a person in front of me. What determines whether I stab the person?
As a meat robot, the cogs in my brain are methodically churning forever, following their natural paths until they’re interrupted or redirected by colliding with a bit of thought or memory or sensory input that happens to be in their path. These mechanistic processes (demonstrably) act like a computer, reacting to my own physical brain state. And it’s this brain state that eventually knocks down the series of dominoes that makes my body stab the person repeatedly while imitating the Psycho soundrack, or the alternate series of dominoes that makes my body put down the knife and go play video games.
This is the process known as “choosing”. It’s when the agent (my brain cogs) looks at what it knows (my brain state) and based on that whittles down the possible set of reactions to one, and carries out that one. That is what it is to make a choice.
And it’s why justice systems make sense. There is an actual thing that did the deed. And more than that, the actual thing in question has demonstrated that it has the mental mechanisms that, under the circumstances that occurred, resulted in it reacting to the situation and its brain state to do the crime. This allows us to postulate on how likely it is that that brain will likely to have a similar problematic brain state in some situation in the future.
Libertarian free will, on the other hand, is an attempt to distance people’s actions from their own mind, beliefs, and thoughts. It very literally says that when you choose not to stab a person, that is not because you’re a non-stabby person. You could totally have stabbed that guy. You might stab somebody at any time. There is no way to know. That time you stabbed a guy before? Not indicative of your future actions, and honestly it wasn’t really you doing it - it was your free will. Better throw the free will in jail and let you go free.
Bah, I should have typed “absence of libertarian free will” here - I’m a firm believer in actual free will, aka compatiblist free will, aka you’re a meat robot that makes decisions by yourself based on what you want, as determined by your beliefs and knowledge and opinions which are all stored encoded in your meat machine brain.
What I don’t believe in is libertarian free will, which is poorly-defined deliberately vague nonsense that doesn’t even hold up to cursory analysis.
One thing I would say is punishment it itself is an evil in such absolute terms, and as practices in human society (such as the criminal justice system) it is ‘revenge’ (with some hint of rehabilitation thrown in), which is something that in itself is worthy of punishment by the sentence given to another. If a person who committed horrible acts, and was never punished for it, but somehow, magically, becomes reformed to never commit anything again, I can’t see any moral reason to punish such a person, as doing so would be an immoral act. Now one can talk about restitution, but not punishment.
In my believes God does not punish anyone, but only disciplines, the difference being that discipline is used to teach and instruct righteousness. The reason it is sometimes unpleasant, it’s what we need for us to get the point through our thick heads. But this also means someone can realize they did wrong, and correct it totally and there is no reason for God to correct them, as they realized their error. It also requires at least a semi-perfect God to accomplish that.
As for if we have free will, I believe yes, but also we are not able to survive on our own free will, so it’s just a matter of time when we have to return to God, and the ways of love, but it’s up to us how long we ‘stay out’.
Even complete automatons should be punished for the consequences of their actions, provided that punishment has some effect on either its future behavior or the future behavior of others. “Free will” has nothing to do with it.
With humans (and most social animals, as it turns out), it becomes even more important: Satisfying a sense of justice is critical and failure to do so runs a very strong risk of an extremely disproportionate lashing out.
Chimps have been recorded to remember favoritism and murder every single child of favored chimps. Bullied/abused/ostracised school children gun down their classmates.
Ignoring injustice because “they didn’t have a choice” regardless if we’re talking about a machine, a person, or anything else, doesn’t work in reality because even though it’s rare, the consequence of even a single “lashing out” will be extreme (How many dead school children is sparing a bully’s feelings worth?). These extremes are probably bastardizations of altriustic punishment but the fact remains that you can’t just brush past injustice.
I don’t know that a lack of free will means that one should not be punished for their actions. Free will and agency are not exactly the same things.
Free will is a philosophical concept more than one that can be used in any sort of legal or penal setting. An object that is entirely predictable has no free will. Humans are too complex to be predicted by anything made by humans, and so have free will for all intents and purposes.
However, in the case where all of our actions are in fact predictable based on stimulus/response, then punishment for crimes still makes sense, as part of that stimulus/response is to be able to say that punishment is a deterrent. If we had a better understanding, then we would better understand exactly what punishments and how they could be implemented best as deterrence, but it would not remove the need for them.
That said, I would ask you if you would punish someone who truly didn’t have a choice.
Say someone suffers a physical blow to the head, they have some bleeding in their brain, and while they are under this condition, they become confused and they stab a child to death.
They get to the hospital, their brain is fixed, and they have no reason that they would ever harm a child again.
Pedant note: They don’t have stupid free will. They can still have compatiblist free will.
To respond to this, review the reasons we punish people.
To stop somebody we deem likely to commit more crimes from doing so, via incarceration or execution.
To deter them from repeating their behavior by modifying the mental state used by their thought processes to determine if they want to choose to crime again.
Because we’re pissed off at them and wish to vengeance.
Reason 3 can be done on anyone or anything - it’s the motivation for kicking an unruly appliance.
Reason 1 can be done on anyone or anthying - it’s why we put down dogs and dismantle killbots.
Reason 2 relies on deterministic thought to function, and thus is entirely compatible with determinism.
Are there any other reasons I missed?
Regarding the specific guy, we don’t expect his current mental state to lead to him deterministically deciding to kill again, so reasons 1 and 2 don’t apply.
Reason 4: To make an example of the person to deter others from repeating their behavior by modifying the other people’s mental state used by the other people’s thought processes to determine if they want to do the same crime.
This can also be done when the punished thing is an inanimate object - it’s how come villains will toss a steak into the yard that their prisoners can see it being ripped apart by the wild dogs.
This is worth exploring. Punishment, as negative reinforcement, modifies behavior by instilling in the subject a desire to avoid that which yielded a negative result. When the cause is touching a red burner on the stove, the negative reinforcement is immediate, intractable and effective. Where criminal justice is involved, the subject ultimately seeks not to avoid doing wrong, per se, but to avoid getting caught.
Hence, the behavior modification aspect of “justice” (deterrence and rehabilitation) is fundamentally defective from the get-go, and revenge-seeking is of highly questionable value. Isolation appears to be the only valid effect, for as long as it can be maintained, and rarely is any effort made toward compelling the violator, when possible, to make good on the injury they have caused.
In other words, in light of the fact that “criminal justice” is itself constructed to fail in the majority of its application, the question of where free will fits into the equation is irrelevant. “Justice” is broken, and we first need to stop the damage it lays upon our society before we should spend any time on abstract philosophical musings.
If the law stops punishing wrongdoing, you’d better believe vigilantes will pick up the slack, and very much in ways that are far more destructive to society. How do you think blood feuds get started?
Blood feuds were common in societies with a weak rule of law (or where the state did not consider itself responsible for mediating this kind of dispute), where family and kinship ties were the main source of authority. An entire family was considered responsible for the actions of any of its members. Sometimes two separate branches of the same family even came to blows, or worse, over some dispute.
The practice has mostly disappeared with more centralized societies where law enforcement and criminal law take responsibility for punishing lawbreakers.
Part of Justice is assuaging the impulse for revenge. Disregarding or ignoring that impulse is equivalent to disregarding the impulse to eat. Sure, the two individuals might not immediately die as with starvation, but you’d best be assured that plenty will die who didn’t need to because of your refusal to acknowledge human nature (and, actually, this impulse appears at a minimum basal to apes, and possibly all social mammals).
Justice is required for fairness, and fairness is required for a stable society. To argue that the foundation of stable society is inherently evil only indicates a warped definition of evil.
Except, in our society, “justice” is inherently unfair. People with more money get less punishment, often for misbehavior that impacts far more people. The violent crimes like rape and murder elicit a more visceral reaction but affect only a few people directly. “Justice” is constructed to come down harder on certain people as compared to others, which makes it unjust.
Do you want to support a broken lie because it makes you feel better in the moment?