That IS revenge. We like to think we’ve quit using it, because it doesn’t have the intended effect - it doesn’t do what you just claimed, it instead sets up an endless cycle of revenge. Except sometimes we do use it, as with the death penalty. It still doesn’t work. It’s stupid to continue it, but we do anyway.
Nine times out of ten (or actually closer to ten times), when a victim’s family is heard asking for justice, what they’re really asking for is revenge.
I was under the distinct impression that I was arguing that we should focus exclusively on the actual reasons that death penalties are assessed and use only those reasons to determine the relative morality of executing forgetful people. That would be the exact opposite of following a tangent into whether free will effects the objective logical morality of execution; I’m stating that objective logical reasons to execute people themselves are beside the point, since we don’t execute people for objective logical reasons in the first place.
And note that I said “relative morality” - I am not convinced that the death penalty even is morally justified, and am certainly not defending it as a practice. But if we’re presuming it is being practiced, the same logic (such as it is) should be used when determining if it should be done to forgetful people as is used when applying it to everyone else.
I meant more ‘justice’ in the sense that people might think that reality/society/order requires that misdeeds be met with punishment, for reality/society/order to remain in working order. It’s “letter of the law” type of thinking, where speeding must be met with a fine, and murder must be met with jail time or execution.
By that logic, a person who has forgotten his crime by the time its punishment is to be carried out must suffer the punishment sheerly because the punishment was mandated by law. It don’t matter if the person claims to be forgetful, or a changed man, or whichever - justice must be served.
Except it doesn’t end there at all; Ghar’s sons go after the judge, and after Urum’s brothers. If they can’t get to the judge, they’ll cause as much damage as close to him as they can.
Odd, I haven’t heard that we have a 1:1 ratio of sentences handed down to judges attacked.
There’s some reason to think that a codified system of justice has a chilling effect on retribution murders - the notion being that they know that people are getting what they deserved, because society has announced what punishments are deserved for which crimes.
Which of course segues nicely to the notion that some people might think that since the courts have ruled that he has to die, he has to die, dammit!
I agree that any meaningful discussion must rest on the premise that the death penalty is sometimes justified as a means of punishment, and I’m working with that premise. I’m not making any argument about the consequences of my beliefs about free will for the death penalty per se: in fact, I’ve said explicitly that I think they are orthogonal questions.
But I believe that the issue of free will speaks directly to the issue of mental “competence” raised in the OP, to whether a death penalty (or other punishment) that would otherwise apply should still apply when the perpetrator has amnesia or dementia. You may believe otherwise, but you can’t impose your presumption that free will is irrelevant to the specific question raised in the OP to the scope of the discussion.
And, again, we should be able to debate the moral consequences (as applicable to the OP) of the alternate premises free will / no free will without getting sidetracked into which of those premises is correct. We may not disagree on the conclusion, but we can discuss whether the conclusion is a consistent moral consequence of the premise.
But the point isn’t that we wanna knock out Thag’s eye. We just don’t want Thag knocking out nobody’s eye. How the heck are we gonna get Thag to stop poking everyone’s eye out if we don’t present him with a credible threat? Again, if Thag pokes someobody’s eye out and then goes to work the next day in the fields producing grain for the community, how does it help to hold him down and poke out his eye? It doesn’t help. Except for the fact that if we don’t have a punishment for Thag, then everyone is going to be poking everyone’s eyes out all day every day, and then nobody is out in the fields plowing, because they’re all blind.
So we threaten Thag to get him to cut that shit out. Once we actually have to punish Thag then the whole thing has failed. The point isn’t to poke out Thag’s eye, the point is to get it through his dense brow ridges that he can’t go around boinking people in the eyehole. Once he’s actually done it, it would actually be more efficient to just skip the punishment, the only problem is that if we skip the punishment then even a dense cranium like Thag eventually realizes that he can do whatever he likes, and we were just making empty threats.
Same thing with my kids. I don’t want to have to take away your goddam phone because you haven’t done your goddam homework, I just want you to do your goddam homework. But I have to actually take away the phone, because otherwise they won’t believe me when I threaten to take away the phone. Once I have to actually carry out the threat, I’ve failed both as a parent and as a human being. That’s why I almost never do such a thing, and instead rely on natural consequences. Didn’t finish your homework? Then you’ll be embarrassed in front of your teacher. Luckily that sort of thing motivates my kids, for other kids it wouldn’t work.
Anyway, for a certain type of person we have to threaten to lock them up if they do X, Y, or Z. And then they go and do X, Y and Z, and then we have to actually go through the sorry process of punishing them, but the punishment itself is now pointless.
If we presume that consequences depend on culpability, and we presume that culpability depends on free will existing, and we presume that free will depends on determinism being false, and we presume that determinism isn’t false, then we’ve just proven that consequences are never justified, no matter how bad the crime or weak the punishment, which kind of eradicates the notion that the death penalty is sometimes justified.
You think that the free will -> culpability step is debatable here.
I’m suggesting that the culpability -> consequences step is debatable.
I mean, I also disagree that determinism disproves free will, but to me that’s sort of beside the point here. Once a person has been sentenced to death, culpability may very well cease to matter; it could be the case that if they’ve been sentenced then that’s that, end of discussion, unless you actually revoke the sentence. An appeal could revoke the sentence, so we pay attention to that, but does going senile revoke the sentence? I’m thinking it doesn’t. In which case that, as they say, would be that.
Presuming that being sentenced is, in fact, the end of the discussion. But even though people allegedly find religion all the time and become “changed men”, we continue to hold these new men responsible for the crimes of their past selves. I don’t see why that should be any different when people change to become forgetful.
False. I found it even more satisfying. Their confusion added to their suffering, which then added to my satisfaction.
As for the OP, I don’t give a fuck if a murderer doesn’t remember what he did. I’ll bet money that the victim’s family still does, and I care far more about them than the murderer.
I don’t know exactly what you mean by “culpability” here. Do you mean deserving of revenge or retribution? Then I think nobody is culpable, any more than a cat is culpable for killing a bird. Free will is fiction, nothing floats mysteriously above cause and effect. Everyone is the deterministic product of their nature and their environment.
That’s why I think our justice system should not be based on retribution at all, on what the criminal “deserves”. Retribution is never morally justified, we should never hurt people just for the sake of revenge.
So presumably I diverge from your chain of reasoning at the culpability > consequences point. The justice system should not be based (as it is, at least in part) on culpability > consequences. It should be based on a much more straightforward model: actions > consequences. Punishment should only be for deterrence and sequestration.
And the appropriateness of the consequences should derive from the empirical question of whether the punishment is an effective deterrent against such actions in the future. The state of mind (“culpability”) of the perpetrator is irrelevant, since there is no possible state of mind in which anyone can “deserve” punishment. That’s why I think the issue of dementia or amnesia in the OP should not affect punishment.
There’s a nifty debate about this to be had - but probably not in this thread.
And in that final point we agree, though we vary on the reasons why the mental state of the imprisoned is irrelevant, because I see a third reason beyond deterrence and sequestration that I consider relevant and I consider it to be at least as likely to be a reason why the death penalty is applied as either of those two. I’m of course speaking of the ‘justice’ factor, which could be more broadly described as the “people expect specific consequences in response to specific actions and when those consequences don’t occur there is societal unrest.” Or put another way, it’s the non-vengeance reason why victims and observers like to see criminals punished; it’s related to the deterrence reason but not the same, because it effects the reactions of people who wouldn’t do the act anyway and thus don’t require deterrence.
I would not murder somebody, but I’m glad we punish murderers, because otherwise there’s be a lot more murders (due to lack of deterrence and sequestration) and I’d be at a higher risk of being murdered myself. So when I hear of a murderer getting caught and punished, I’m pleased - not out of vengeance, but because justice was served. And justice being served benefits us all. But I don’t bother constantly remembering the reason why justice is good; I just believe that justice itself is good, and am pleased when it prevails.
The hope for justice to prevail can also serve as a healthier substitute for a victim’s wish for vengeance, and the emotions that encourage vengeance can be co-opted to give the victim intense pleasure when justice does prevail. I don’t really consider it the same thing as a vengeance motivation, though, because people who haven’t got the personal investment to desire vengeance can feel it too.
I’m not denying the reality of this. But if you think about it, it’s no different from saying 157 years ago that slavery is justified because people want slaves, and social unrest will follow if we make slavery illegal.
The point is that I think people are simply wrong in their near-universal belief in could-have-done-otherwise free will, and in their consequent desire for retribution*. I may be in the small minority today, but I hope that in generations to come people’s beliefs, morality and expectations may change, and that’s what I’m advocating.
*You have used the word “justice” for what people expect, and called it a “non-vengeance reason”. That’s confusing, because it begs the question of what is just. I think what people currently expect is unjust. It is precisely vengeance that people expect, and that’s why it’s morally wrong.
… because they can’t get at the judge, as I already covered. So they get as close to harming the judge as they can, by attacking those who agree with the judge, or who they view as “the system”, or who represent something similar to what the judge represents, to them.
You’re talking about a fantasy in which pure revenge has somehow become good and useful simply because you’ve renamed it “justice”. What you’re talking about IS pure revenge, and has nothing whatsoever to do with justice - except for your insistence on renaming it and saying it with a mild expression on your face.
Except that it is different, because I explicitly explained how a wish for justice is derived from the very same effects you say it’s valid to base a justice system on.
Except that the definition/explanation of “justice” I provided makes no reference at all to free will, and explicitly hinges on the expectation that deterrence and sequestration will be effective - something which you explicitly say is consistent with your perspective on free will. You have no reason at all to reject “justice” as I defined it.
I reject the notion that it’s impossible to have just punishment - and so do you, because you claim that punishments that result in deterrence and sequestration can be implemented and enforced morally. If these punishments can be implemented, and the populace doesn’t throw them out and choose personal vengeance instead because they believe the punishments are insufficiently just, then it’s possible to create a moral justice system.
Which is not to say that all theoretically possible official punishments are just - some might even be cruel or unusual! And I’m not even saying that execution is ever just. But the topic in the OP sort of presumes that it sometimes is, so there you go.
I believe this is a gross misrepresentation of reality. As in, it’s absurdly wrong - judges are not commandos that fight through the hordes of relatives of everyone in every case they ever presided over each time they go to work in the morning.
In fact, the vast majority of people who are ever ordered to pay for a traffic ticket exact no vengeance for it at all.
You aren’t understanding me, and to be frank you’re not in a great position to be calling other people’s explanations of the world fantasies.
Huh? Of course I don’t think just punishment is impossible.
What I objected to was you apparently labeling “whatever the people want” as “justice” and begging the question.
My view is:
Unjust punishment = revenge/retribution
Just punishment = deterrence and sequestration
That’s probably why I didn’t just relabel it.
I’ve stated that I think that the primary motivations for death penalty charges are justice and vengeance. It could have been written “and/or” - of the people deciding the case (the jury, usually), there will be some people who…are related…to the victim…
Okay, so there probably won’t be anybody on the jury with a revenge motivation. Justice motivations might be there aplenty, though.
I suppose there might also be people there with psychotic murderous motivations - nazis on the juries for jews, for example. But I try not to think about that, and to be honest I don’t think that it’s the primary driver for death penalty determinations in general - otherwise that would mean that on a repeated basis at least six of twelve men ‘good and true’ are murderous psychopaths. That seems statistically unlikely, because some of us are still alive.
Maybe you aren’t explaining yourself as clearly as you think, because I took what you said to mean exactly the same as what DavidwithanR thought.
Are you of the opinion that everybody who believes that criminals should be punished for their crimes is filled with murderous bloodlust?
If you want to communicate your views clearly, I think you have to stop using the word “justice” like this without explaining what you mean. The whole discussion centers on the question of what is just.
“Justice motivation”. A motivation for what, exactly?