Go talk to some criminals and you will realize just how wrong this notion is. If you don’t want to actually talk to them, just a day in criminal court observing their behaviour.
In my experience, many criminals did not experience a privileged childhood where they enjoyed such luxuries as shelter and food on a regular basis. They don’t understand cause and effect very well, let alone abstract ideas like ‘tomorrow’.
For instance, let’s talk about a kid I knew who committed a double murder when he was 13.
This kid’s parents were suburban drug addicts who would kick him out of the house at 6 a.m. because they didn’t want him in the house while they indulged themselves.
One weekend he and two friends whose parents were also crappy people got into the stash and started using, then decided to break into a neighbour’s house and trash the place because they thought it would be funny to make a mess while the owners were on vacation.
Turned out the owners were home, and next thing you know two people are dead.
Police discover the bodies a couple days later and have no clues… until the culprits start talking about what they did at the cafeteria table.
In short: crimes are often committed by stupid people with poor impulse control.
But then sometimes criminals are actually very smart people who believe they are taking a calculated risk in doing some crime. Think about all the criminal hackers and white collar criminals out there. I’ve talked to people who work in prisons and some say they are truly smart people who have no remorse for their crimes and just wish they had not been caught.
Granted others are dumb as a rock. I knew someone who as a young man committed an armed robbery on a dare.
Yes, there are some criminals who are very smart. They’re the definite minority.
Watch a few episodes of Cops, or Alaska Highway Patrol (a show which fascinates my wife, and which I’ve dubbed “Drunk Inuits in Trouble”). As others have already stated, most criminals suffer from one or more of the following: poor decision-making skills, poor assessment of risk, poor impulse control, poor socialization, desperation, and excessive use of drugs or alcohol.
The OP operates using a Middle Ages framework of how free will works. When you update that to a modern framework, you get different results.
No one chooses to have a personality order. No one chooses to have poor impulse control. Free will is not some absolute power exercised by the universally perfect spiritual soul over the flawed corporeal body. It is an emergent property of physical brains that are different from other physical brains.
jtur88 touched on it, but the idea that smoking pot, gambling, driving too fast or using the wrong bathroom are “crimes” is asinine. Crime is murder, arson, rape, theft, battery and property damage. Things that actually harm other people. So is the OP talking about crime, that actually causes harm, or “crime”, which merely happens to be illegal? The motivations behind the two are often entirely different. The law and morality are orthogonal.
10% of the population will never steal.
10% of the population will always steal.
80% of the population might steal, and those are the ones that security protocols are aimed toward.
For that 80%, it is the combination of opportunity (How easy is it?), reward (How much will I gain?), risk (What are the chances I’ll be caught?), consequences (What will happen if I get caught?), and justification (How morally wrong do I feel this to be?) that determines whether they will commit any given theft. And different factors are given different weight by different people.
While I generally agree with the principle of decriminalizing victimless crimes, I disagree with you on placing “driving too fast” on that list. It’s a public safety issue, and speeding does lead to traffic accidents, which can and do injure and kill others.
(And I write this knowing that I’m a chronic speeder, though I’m not the jerk who’s doing 60 in a 35 zone…)
Driving recklessly or negligently puts people in danger. Exceeding the posted speed limit is not the same thing at all. Sometimes speed is a safety issue, but speed limits as currently used are revenue generators, pure and simple.
Speed does not create significant increases in the frequency of accidents however it massively increases the severity of them thus the "public health"aspect. When a speeder screws up, people who might have walked away from a collision, get carried away.
No rational realist could possibly think for a second that every wrongdoing results from conscious choice. A person’s current identity is sculpted by their past. Everyone’s past is comprised of one part nature (genetics, luck) and one part nurture (the good acts, neglect, and/or abuses of those who raised them).
What a privileged upbringing you must have had. Your genes must be out of this world. To never have been addicted to cigarettes or heroin or meth. You’ve never pounded a series of jagerbombs and regretted it in the morning, never puff-puff-passed a joint. You haven’t felt the call of the void and downed every mind-altering substance within reach to stave it off. That’s OK, there are as many ways to live on this planet as there are people inhabiting it. Just don’t make the mistake of believing you’re approaching life from some sort of ethical high ground. Not everyone is as lucky and temptation-proof as you, but most are more well-rounded and open-minded.
That word - I don’t think it means what you think it means.
You are recognising a point that most are familiar with. Historically, lawyers drew a distinction between crimes that were intuitively wrong (mala in se) and crimes that were only wrong because the legislature said they were wrong (mala prohibita).
The two have different styles of moral justification, but you cannot collectively dismiss mala prohibita crimes (as you seem to be by casting a wide net to illustrate them) as “asinine”.
Now I am sure you can come up with some mala prohibita rules that I would agree are misconceived, and I can no doubt provide examples of such laws that you would accept as necessary.
But you go on to say that law and morality are orthogonal. Allowing even for a certain dramatic hyperbole, this is silly.
Many people aren’t “honest”. It is for them that we have a system of laws that tell them what they are not allowed to do and what the punishment will be if they do those things.
First of all, we need laws to define what is considered “criminal behavior”.
Secondly, many laws, such as gun or drug laws, are passed (rightly or wrongly) with the intent to inhibit people’s ability to commit certain crimes. Or because those things have a potential to cause harm that exceeds their benefit.
[quote=“Chihuahua, post:1, topic:750535”]
People talk about how we can prevent mass shootings, for example, but I don’t see why NOT committing mass murder or terrorism is an unreasonable expectation.
Because people who commit these crimes are not “reasonable”.
This, but let me expand a bit. Not only does society itself create criminal behavior by trying to regulate victimless behavior that it disapproves of, but makes it almost impossible for poor people to live without criminal acts.
Suppose you make the minimum wage and work 40 hours a week. Lot’s of people cannot get even those jobs, but imagine you have one. What do you make? About $15,000 a year, a bit less actually. Could you live on $15,000 a year. Maybe in a cabin in Montana, but then you could not get to a job without a car and there goes that. The real crime, IMHO, is what we put people through.
That’s bullshit. Plenty of poor people manage to live without becoming criminals. Or do you believe that every poor person sells drugs and runs a fencing operation on the side to make ends meet?
Actually, few poor people live without becoming a criminal, you’re just thinking of the wrong crimes. The prevalance of low-level “poverty” offenses like driving an unregistered or uninsured car, drinking on the stoop, failing to pay municipal taxes, failing to get kids to school on time, failing to properly dispose of appliances, fishing/hunting without a license, or failure to pay traffic offenses is very high, especially among households that make less than $10,000 a year.
You’d be surprised the number of such people who end up in jail either for petty offenses or for failing to pay debts accumulated as a result of the offenses.
Obviously, that’s different from drug dealing, which was your point. But it is yet one more dimension of crime that amounts to something more than freely choosing to do wrong.
Check out crime trends and federal crime reports… for the past 8 or 9 years (probably longer than that) how often violent crimes are committed have steadily decreased and are continuing to do so.
I disagree… crime is most definitely inevitable. To assume that the population of the world is at a balance where crime is not necessary for some people to commit is an unrealistic conclusion. You could argue the balance of good and evil here, but that would bring us off topic. Though the point is very supportive. I believe mass shootings occur (ultimately) because of certain free flow of information and the constant need society has for drama. Mass shootings are not a crime of specifics, mainly because they are geared towards a large group. Many times involving people having no direct effect on the crime itself.
Also, you are arguing that because one man has a certain moral value that society as a whole should not be burdened with reality (that crime does exist and that policies involving the regulation of crimes is somehow pointless). Not sure what your question is or even if you have one, but if there is the possibility of mass crime and there is, then policy change is inevitable. The unsettling truth is that the more we grow and expand or thinking the more possibilities and problems crimes present. The question you need to ask yourself here is what is important to you. Family, friends… Work, travel… Money… all of which fall victim to crimes (some harder than others). Even criminals protect whats valuable to them.