I don’t think she is dangerous now but since she was given the death penalty prior to the Supreme Court overturning it, it should have been carried out after the death penalty was reinstated.
Then how is it unethical to jail her for life? The governor could not have made any other choice in precisely identical circumstances, right?
On top of that, free will is the only reason why there is anything in her worth saving. If she is nothing more than a defective machine, why should she not simply be disposed of?
Perhaps she would’ve been granted parole, maybe long ago, if Manson weren’t still alive?
You seem to be taking the usual approach of those who have not thought through the incoherent concept of free will carefully: it must exist, because the implications are too strange and uncomfortable if it doesn’t.
But the fact that free will is an illusion certainly does not mean that there’s no such thing as ethics, that any act is just as good as other, that nothing matters. Why would you infer that?
And your view that free will is the only thing that can give value to a person is a purely subjective value judgment, I certainly don’t share it.
If she did the exact same crime but not related to Manson or the separate Tate murders (which she was not involved in anyway) she would have never been sentenced to death, never sentenced to life, would have been out in 10 years at the very most, would have never caught the governor’s attention, etc.
Brown’s decision was purely political.
In most states I think she would have been convicted of first degree murder, sentenced to life imprisonment and never gone in front of a parole board. The only way out would be clemency–which almost never happens.
Utter nonsense. There are virtually no murders similar to the ones she committed. Her crime was predatory with no mitigating factors like passion. If she were male no one would be arguing for her release.
Yeah, those Germans had no other choice but to drive those Jews into ditches and shoot them or into gas chambers and gas them. They couldnt have refused.
Van Houten also had the choice to leave her cult or not go a-killen that night.
Van Houten’s brain was, just like all brains, a physical system, with a certain state at the time and a certain set of sensory inputs. Data processing and analysis in this configuration led to the output of her (terrible) decision to act in the way she did. In given circumstances, some brains make good decisions and other brains make bad decisions.
If you think that she could have done otherwise in precisely identical circumstances - i.e. with her brain in a precisely identical configuraition and all environmental inputs precisely identical - explain the basis for this?
Do you think that brains contain something magical or non-physical that do not follow the same physical principles as everything else that we encounter in the universe?
Again, I’m not excusing her action, or saying that the fact that free will is nonsensical and illusory means anything goes. And the fact that Nazis committed atrocities adds nothing at all the consideration of whether free will is something real or something illusory.
Caril Ann Fugate, partner of Charles Starkweather, was similar, and she was released. No incident, still alive in her 70s, unlike her family who she helped her boyfriend murder (including her baby sister). Starkweather was put to death. I think when Manson dies she and the other women will be released to some form of geriatric institution, but not until. (Tex will die in prison.)
I have a hard time calling any member of the Manson family a victim of injustice, but I do believe Brown’s decision is driven by notoriety and image rather than justice (in the legal sense), and that is as wrong as it is unsurprising.
Quantum indeterminacy?
Quantum processes could indeed lead to different outcomes - but only by adding random indeterminacy. So far as I’m aware, nobody thinks QM rescues free will, because nobody thinks rolling a dice and following the outcome is free will.
So we have some combination of classically deterministic processes and QM randomness. Nothing in that can account for the spooky idea that an agent “could have done otherwise” in precisely identical circumstances.
Even if you believe in some kind of dualism - a non-physical “mind” or “soul” (whatever that means) that contains “agency” and sits outside of the physical universe - you still need to specify the process by which that soul interacts with the physical universe. Does the soul do things for reasons, or randomly? If for reasons, following cause and effect, that still doesn’t help. How could the soul have done otherwise given precisely identical reasons to make choices, unless the soul is simply acting randomly.
Free will (as commonly understood, the spooky idea that one “could have done otherwise” in precisely identical circumstances") is simply incoherent. There’s no burden of proof here - if you reflect carefully on what it means, it’s nonsense.
There are notable efforts to rescue free will - Dan Dennett for example - but the honest account of that is that Dan simply redefines free will to make the term mean something coherent. But Dan’s redefinition of free will is simply not what most people popularly understand it to be. I think all philosophers agree that the common idea of “spooky” free will is incoherent; but almost everyone else still believes in it.
You have no way of knowing if it is “dice.”
I don’t find free will “spooky.”
In any case, the philosophical debate over how real, and how free, will might be… is all irrelevant, unless you can explain what material difference it should make, in attitudes toward one’s own choices, or in public policy.
The interesting part of this is that the non-existence of free will has almost no implications whatsoever, in my opinion. It’s certainly not grounds for “fatalism”, deciding that it’s not worth trying, that’s just not a logical consequence at all. Our brains evolved with this illusion of “conscious deliberation”, a sense of apparent free will, and presumably that process helps us to make better decisions. So there’s no implication whatsoever that a realization of the fact that free will is illusory means that we should try to fight the illusion in our everyday decision-making. No more so than understanding that the visual system works (to a large extent) by our brains creating illusions of various kinds means that we should us our eyes differently.
However, there is one really important implication: the criminal justice system. That’s why I brough it up in the Van Outen discussion.
It still makes perfect sense to punish people for deterrence, in order to influence the decision-making of others in the future. But it’s ethically indefensible to punish people just to hurt them for its own sake, i.e. for revenge; except in the sense that an appearance of acting for revenge is in itself a deterrent.
Phrenology for the 21st century.
A striking feature of some of the most important scientific progress in the 20th & 21st centuries is that human intuition about the way the universe works is completely wrong.
Would it stimulate a more careful examination of your intuitive assumptions about consciousness & “free will” if there were good neuroscientific evidence that we make decisions before we are consciously aware of them?
But if your argument is true, then we have to punish them - we can’t choose not to.
The cerebrum can overrule the amygdala. LVH could have easily ignored the urge to stick the knife into Mrs LaBianca but she chose not to.
This is simply a homunculus argument, “it’s turtles all the way down”. Wherever the decisions are ultimately made, whether in the cerebrum or even by an immaterial mind/soul, the decisions are either made for reasons, following cause and effect, or randomly. What other possibilities are there?
The environmental conditions (the reasons, the data input) that existed at the time were conditions that led Van Houten’s brain, in the configuration that it was at the time, to make the decision that she did. Unless random indeterminisitc (QM) factors were significant, no other decision is ever possible from that brain in that precise configuration given those precise data inputs.
So what does “free will” mean? Nothing, it’s logically an incoherent concept.
Our decision to punish is based on the evidence that Van Houten’s brain is a brain that makes bad decisions. By “bad decisions”, I don’t mean some spooky sense that the exact same brain could possibly have done otherwise, but just that this brain’s data processing algorithms evidently produced highly undesirable outputs from a given set of inputs.
We should punish Van Houten for deterrence - simply because the way we treat her will be one of the data inputs that influence other brains’ outputs in the future.
But to punish her just to hurt her, i.e. for “revenge”, is indefensible. It’s no more ethically defensible than torturing a cat to get revenge for the fact that the cat tortured a mouse.
Van Houten was more or less ordered to stab Rosemary LaBianca by the other Manson creepazoids, apparently to make her equally culpable and/or to prove she was one of the gang. I don’t have a cite but I believe Mrs. LaBianca was already dead by the time Van Houten stabbed her.
That woman has been screwed around by the system in way that’s nothing less than shameful. The parole boards through the years kept telling her she needed to this or that in order to prove herself and make herself parole-able, and time after time they’d find some new reason once she’d done what they told her would make her acceptable for parole. Finally it got to the point where they’d come full circle and were telling her to do stuff they’d already told her to do years before and which she’d already completed.
But she never lost her cool, never blew up or showed any anger, and always went to work with a good attitude to try to accomplish whatever it was they threw at her this time. To me the way she’s handled the constant bullshit from parole boards and the exemplary way she’s lived in prison demonstrate far beyond a reasonable doubt that she not only wouldn’t be a danger to society but probably a hard working contributor to it.
I’m as law and order as the next guy, but given that I don’t believe she actually killed Rosemary LaBianca and that she’s been jerked around time and time again by a correction system (and now a governor) that really has no intention of releasing her, I think that to continue to torture her with hope of future parole provided she did X, Y or Z, is shameful. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself were I a party to the abuses that poor woman has been subjected to.