I’ve started this spinoff on the thread about whether or not homosexuality is a choice to explore a different take on the topic of choice. When it comes to homosexuality, IMHO it’s probably a complex thing, and likely to have different causes in different people. Ultimately, however, it doesn’t matter because there’s nothing wrong with being homosexual, and so whether or not it’s a choice shouldn’t matter from a moral perspective. It’s no different than whether or not being left handed, tall, obese, transgender, etc., is a choice. Sure, it’s an interesting topic for researchers, but IMHO it doesn’t matter from a moral decision making perspective because those aspects of being have nothing to do with right or wrong.
Where is the debate? It’s on the flip side. When it comes to things where morality does come into play, IMHO whether or not something is a choice also shouldn’t matter. Let’s take something obviously wrong, like being a serial killer. Whether Jeffrey Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy were the way they were due to choice or some other reason (genetics, a bad childhood, bad influences in school, whatever) also doesn’t matter. What they did was wrong and they deserved to be punished. With very few exceptions, limited to certain cases of someone not realizing what they were doing, I believe choosing (or not) to do something wrong has no place in determining the morality of an action.
The question for debate is whether or not I’m wrong for thinking this way. Why should I take choice into account in my moral framework?
Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But my point is that it doesn’t matter whether it is or not. All that matters is what they did is wrong. The way society decides how to approach that shouldn’t be based on whether or not what they did was a choice, it should only matter that what they did was wrong.
Those who oppose homosexuality suggest it is a moral failing and opposed by God.
If the people with the urge to have sex with the same gender can say it is a primal urge then God made them that way.
I do not think serial killing is a primal urge but, more importantly, serial killing (or just killing) is harming others who almost certainly are not consenting to it. That’s where choice comes in. A gay couple choose to be with each other. Gacy’s victims did not choose to be murdered by him.
The choice part is a two-way street. Both need to choose and consent to what they are doing.
If Jeffrey Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy were predatory killers because they were born that way and had no choice in the matter, we — the rest of the species, as it were — are still entitled to put them down, for our own protection. But to go above and beyond that — to deliberately inflict suffering and pain upon them to punish them for being evil creatures who did evil things — would seem inappropriate if they can’t help it.
But that just kicks the proverbial can down the philosophical-ethical road. Because (in my analytical theory-driven opinion) there’s something fishy about the entire notion of “fault” and “blame” and “retribution”. All of that “let’s hurt them badly because they did bad evil things” mentality seems to be based on the notion that evil is something that folks get away with, as if it is fun and pleasurable and brings much unearned happiness to whose who illicitly engage in it. And embedded in it also is the notion that if there were no human-delivered miseries to make such things not worth the risk, hell, everyone would be running out there to indulge themselves in a little bit of serial killing!
Not to get all Freudian on your asses or anything, but that social notion of sinful evil as “something they must not be allowed to get away with” seems to make some modicum of sense only in a sexual context, or, more precisely, in the context of sex against the backdrop of a social condemnation of sex except in very restricted approved channels.
There’s no obvious reason to connect our shared notions of evil and sin with sex and sexual depravity, except that our notion of sin is in fact rather focused on sexual misbehavior. It’s a hangup of ours, probably caused by the lack of anything genuinely wrong with noncoercive sex except that some artificial and coercive social codes labeled a lot of it as wrong and sinful, so to convince everyone otherwise meant dwelling on the subject quite a bit.
Anyhow, I think your original question about “choice” and hence “blame” ties back to these arcane notions of sin and “getting away with stuff” and we’re best tossing the whole parcel into the waste disposal bin and focusing punitive actions solely on incapacitation and prevention of recidivism by people who can’t be rehabilitated, and forget doing blame, retribution, and the deliberate infliction of hurt.
Not at all. I think it is. What I’m suggesting is that those things are wrong because they hurt other people, not because they’re a choice.
Let’s say some neurologist were to come along and point to some genetic mutation, or an area of the brain that’s different in people who make that choice, or some such thing in people who do that. My response to them would be that their evidence doesn’t matter. That person still did something wrong and should be punished accordingly.
Sure, but that just means that they’re doubly wrong. They’re wrong about thinking that homosexuality is immoral. They’re also wrong in trying to make the immorality “less wrong” by assigning blame to God for having made someone that way.
Wrong is wrong, whether or not it’s a choice, pre-ordained by God (no I don’t think that’s a thing), or any other reason.
Then comparing serial killers to gay people isn’t a good comparison. A better comparison would be if, say, people believed it was sinful to have brown hair; since one’s hair color is indisputably a matter of genetics, the individual literally has no choice in the matter, and it would be silly to punish them for something they can’t control. That’s the crux of the “born this way” argument; same-sex attraction is not a choice, and sin in most flavors of Christianity requires a willing act of defiance.
It’s when you drag behaviors into it that it becomes murky.
There we get into a matter of definitions, as well as how people feel about those actions to prevent recidivism. If someone get’s a perverse pleasure in locking away a murderer, that’s on them. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t lock the murderer away. I agree, however, that in all such cases we should treat incarcerated people humanely, and I’m against torturing or purposefully inflicting pain on them as retribution.
I think that’s where they’re doubly wrong. To avoid getting into the weeds on definitions, let’s stick with the term “sin”. The way I look at it, sinning is a matter of the act that is committed. Taking into consideration whether or not something is a “willing act of defiance” has no place in my moral code. All that matters is whether or not the action in question is wrong, which is to say whether or not the action is hurtful to others.
That’s the classic “person stealing bread to feed their family” morality question as I perceive it.
Is the person who’s stealing food (typically morally wrong) actually wrong, because they’re doing so to feed their family who otherwise would starve (morally good)?
That’s why you need to factor choice in; he’s obviously got a choice to steal or not, but that choice is very dependent on how bad he needs to feed his family. I’d argue that if someone is about to suffer ill health effects from starvation, he’s in the moral right to steal to feed them to avoid those circumstances. But it’s still a choice, right?
It doesn’t make it right, but it’s a moral choice nonetheless. Ideally the bread owner (baker?) would donate that bread to avoid all this, but we’re assuming that hasn’t happened.
I was anticipating this coming up . My response to this scenario is that wrongness can be balanced out by the reason one does something. Let’s say Mary is stealing baby formula to feed a hungry infant. Let’s also say that Bob is stealing baby formula to sell on the black market to those who lack access to the regular supermarket in order to make enough money to buy a Playstation 5. In my moral calculation, the wrongness of Mary’s action is reduced because it comes along with the rightness of feeding a hungry infant, whereas in Bob’s case it isn’t.
In other words, what changes in those two scenarios is whether or not the action in question is right or wrong, not whether or not the action was a choice or coerced in some way.
Murder and manslaughter are both the unjustified killing of a human being, but the motives and intents of the killer make a world of difference in how we define the crime. There’s a big difference between a man who shoots someone in the face and a man who swerves to avoid a pothole and runs over an old lady.
The transaction between them is mutually beneficial, mutually harmful, or harmful to one and beneficial to the other.
Then we might assign weights to it. A little harm to one but a big benefit to the other (e.g. stealing to feed your family). But, if stealing, why harm me and not the next bread maker? Down the rabbit hole we go.
Which is a good reason to argue for state supported safety nets. We all, as a society, chip in to feed that family.
Again ISTM there are two choices that need to align. Your choice (general “you”) and the other person’s choice. I am not sure you can consider just a choice of one person that matters when it comes to morality since the choice will affect the society as a whole.
Can morality exist as a question if only the person choosing is affected?
Yes, but that grants consideration to the irrational basis for calling it a moral failing that it doesn’t deserve. Rather than spending time and effort trying to persuade them that “we were made that way” I would rather put my energy towards persuading citizens that religious convictions should not be used to deprive individuals of civil rights.
As for the OP, I think there are cases where certain compulsions to criminal behavior are effectively irresistible, at least without professional help, and that while such people should be prevented from indulging those behaviors, I’m not sure they always “deserve to be punished.” Specifically, incarceration without parole in the most extreme cases, but always with the help of mental health professionals to make the person better (up to some point where further attempts at such help are deemed to be useless). And never execution (it’s not clear if that is included in your prescription for punishment or not).
This is one of those areas I was referring to when I talked about scenarios where there are times people don’t realize what they are doing. IMHO that’s a mitigating factor because in those scenarios the person who committed the act in question is a lot less likely to do the same thing again, and thus less likely to be a danger to society if we don’t incarcerate them / incarcerate them for a shorter period of time.
What I was thinking about in my OP is the more typical scenario, of someone arguing that they deserve a lighter sentence because they couldn’t help what they did because “I was born this way / I grew up in a bad neighborhood / ran with the wrong crowd / etc.”. IMHO such arguments don’t carry any weight.
I was using punishment as a shorthand for serving time in prison, which presumably most people (though maybe not all) would consider a punishment. As far as the help of mental health professionals go, I’m all for it if it will help with the mental health of the offender. On the other hand, I’m opposed to using mental health treatment as a way around incarceration, by sending someone to a mental health hospital and then having them declared cured and released back into society, especially for violent offenders.
It all revolves around that "justified’ as I see it. I mean, nobody’s going to quibble too much about killing someone in self defense or defending the innocent, but the devil is in the details about what constitutes self defense or innocence.
I agree; someone’s upbringing doesn’t actually change what’s wrong and right; it just changes their perception of that. But wrong and right is independent of perception, as I understand it.
The answer for the OP is we are not animals simply acting on instinct. Our rational brain can still make choices as to whether or not to engage in homosexual sex or unalive someone. We can choose to let our shitty upbringing define us or we can choose to overcome it. That applies to most of us and those that cannot make those higher-level choices we deem have mental illness.
Because we have this higher level metacognition, your statement
is wrong since we can evaluate our reasons for taking an action before we do it.
You’ll be glad to hear it doesn’t work that way anymore (if it ever did). Insanity is not a get-out-of-jail free card. IIRC if you make that plea you go to a medical prison and there is no defined end to your sentence…you could stay there forever. Then, if you get out, you go to jail to serve your sentence.
. My response to this scenario is that wrongness can be balanced out by the reason one does something. Let’s say Mary is stealing baby formula to feed a hungry infant. Let’s also say that Bob is stealing baby formula to sell on the black market to those who lack access to the regular supermarket in order to make enough money to buy a Playstation 5. In my moral calculation, the wrongness of Mary’s action is reduced because it comes along with the rightness of feeding a hungry infant, whereas in Bob’s case it isn’t.