Of course, they did let John Hinckley out a few years back, but he doesn’t appear to be a danger any more.
I think it depends on whether we really are talking about the morality of the action, or of the actor.
If what we are judging is the action itself, apart from any reference to who is performing the action, then the choosing doesn’t matter because the choosing is not part of the action itself.
If what we are judging is the person performing the action—something like “Does performing this action make them a bad person, relative to who they would be if they had not performed it?”—then it seems that choice matters, and may even be the only thing that matters.
Except, are we using the word “choice” in a way that implies free will? And if not, what distingushes between actions that are done “by choice” and those done “not by choice”?
That’s a big part of why I started thinking this way. It was my way of “cutting the Gordian knot” of the free will question. I’ve decided that the answer doesn’t matter. All that matters is whether something is right or wrong, with free will not entering into the equation.
Wasn’t he in prison for 35+ years?
I think most attempted murder sentences are a lot less than that. Even against a president.
Pleading crazy isn’t the easy route many think it is.
And as such, their position is fundamentally about rhetoric and politics, not morality. It’s a matter of “homosexuality is a choice” being the rhetoric they find most effective at enabling and encouraging the persecution of homosexuals. If claiming that it was a “genetic defect” or “a curse from God” worked better, they could and would switch to that because the persecution is the point. Not any sort of moral principles, theirs or anyone else’s.
The “then you go to jail to serve your sentence” depends on the jurisdiction. In some jurisdictions, there is a verdict of “guilty but mentally ill” which might allow a prison sentence after release from a psychiatric facility. In others, it’s “not guilty by reason of insanity/mental disease or defect” - and in those jurisdictions, there is never any sentence. The person is confined in a psychiatric institution until they are determined to no longer be dangerous - which may be longer than the sentence they would have been given if found guilty.
That might be your moral code , but it isn’t everybody’s. For example, I don’t think it’s immoral for a person to have a sexual relationship with someone who is married to another- I think it’s immoral for someone to have that relationship with someone they know is married to someone else. The actions are the same, but the choice is not. There are all sorts of religious rules that prohibit actions that don’t harm anyone else - and violations of those rules are considered sins if they are an act of defiance. It’s often not a sin if you violated the rule to save your life, or if you didn’t know about the rule, or if you ate a forbidden food believing it was a permitted food or if you married your second cousin believing they were your third cousin. Precisely because in those cases, you weren’t choosing to violate the rule.
Some of the complexity in these kinds of discussions depends on whether you believe in religious-based morality. If you believe in a religion, then morality is whatever your god says is moral or not. If god declares “It is immoral to use the left hand as the dominant hand”, then it’s immoral to use the left hand as your dominant hand. It doesn’t matter if the followers understand why god wants it that way or that someone is wired to be left-side dominant. In that religion, using the left hand as the dominant hand is immoral. A left-handed person who wanted to be moral would need to use the right hand as the dominant hand. If it’s hard, that’s just a burden the god has placed on the person for whatever reason god has chosen. It’s not a sin that the person is wired to be left-side dominant. The sin is actually using the left hand as the dominant hand. If someone truly believes in the religion, then they should conform to whatever moral constructs that religion imposes regardless of whether the person understands it or finds it easy to conform. And if they don’t, they should accept that they will be subject to whatever penalties god wishes to impose.
Some of those are cases of incomplete knowledge, in which case I would agree that there isn’t any moral blame. To take an extreme example, if someone else sets up a device that causes a bomb to go off when I press a button that is seemingly the button to an elevator at my place of work, I wouldn’t consider my action as immoral. The other examples you give are things that don’t hurt anyone and as such don’t come into play when making a moral judgement.
This brings up the Euthyphro dilemma: are acts moral or immoral because God/the gods say so, or does God/the gods say so because the acts are moral or immoral? Whole long discussions could be had about this, but I’ll just state that it is emphatically not true that everyone who believes in a religion holds the position that morality is a totally arbitrary decision of their god.
Yet some people have the ability to do that and others seemingly don’t? Is it really a choice? The willingness to make the wrong choice developed somehow in some people. Even some with quite privileged upbringings. I’m not going to murder anyone. That doesn’t make me a better person than a murderer, just luckier that I have no desire to, and the ability to overcome the desire if it did arise.
I don’t understand how anyone could hold that free will or choice has no bearing on a crime. For centuries, insanity pleas relied on the notion that the defendant knew what he did was wrong and had the ability to control his actions. If the answer to either is “no,” then how can we hold him accountable?
However rare this is, however difficult to establish, such unfortunates do exist.
I am reminded of a statement by the President of our state Senate, about 30 years ago: A right-wing Senator, objecting to civil rights law for LGBT people, said “we don’t want to write laws to protect people for behavior they choose!” Response: “Well, we don’t want to allow discrimination against people for the religion they choose to believe.”
That response mostly killed that discussion, because it pointed out that nearly all civil rights laws include protection for creed or religion, which is a choice.
As another Doper pointed out abovethread, one huge reason why choice is big in the debate is because most “isms” are considered bad because they’re attacking someone for something the individual has no control over. For instance, a black person never chose to be black, so racism is generally seen as a bad ideology. A woman never chose to be a woman, so sexism is considered bad. Etc. etc.
Isn’t this basically the existence of free will debate? I’m pretty sure that the “morality” of criminal justice is at least occasionally questioned by those who don’t believe in it.
Sure, except that there’s nothing wrong with being Black, or a woman, or gay, or transgender, etc. But what about those things that are wrong but which are sometimes argued to not be a choice? Should we just say “well, Bob didn’t choose to be a (pedophile, murderer, arsonist, robber, etc.) so we shouldn’t blame him”? That’s why I think the question of whether or not something was a choice isn’t very relevant in terms of morality and criminal justice.
One of those things is not like the others- “murderer” ,“arsonist” and “robber” imply actions. A murderer is someone who has committed a murder, and an arsonist is one who has committed arson. A “pedophile” has not necessarily molested a child and someone obsessed with the desire to set fires may never have done so. Bob didn’t choose to be a pedophile so we shouldn’t blame or punish him for that. If he molested a child, he almost certainly had a choice, so we can blame and punish him for that.
Okay, asking an implied question above directly: does “free will” have to exist for the concept of “choice” to have any meaning, or for it to even exist to begin with? Past free will debates here and elsewhere have dragged on so long and gotten so mind bending that I don’t know if it’s been discussed (though it seems to me to make sense that it has), but I’m really interested in how the two debates intersect, especially considering the strong feelings about free will and my personal impression that the majority of Dopers who care to debate it don’t think it exists or has meaning. Does that also mean that they don’t believe in choices either?
The semantic problem you run into here is that punishment is for behavior modification. You punish a person in order to discourage them from doing that thing again. But the kind of people you describe are going to do that thing again, unless you prevent them. So punishment is pointless, because it is not going to accomplish anything.
With these kind of people, you need to simply remove them from society, howsoever you do so, so that they cannot continue to offend. Of course, how you determine whether a person is incorrectable may be fraught. Who should get to make that assessment?
As I see it: In order to be a moral issue at all an action has to be a matter of choice. Good or bad, an action taken without choice isn’t a moral issue, just a practical one. You can’t blame someone for radiating heat and consuming oxygen, it just happens.
You need to defined “free will” first. For example, I recall one talking to my brother on the matter on free will and he said he believed in it; but he clarified that to him it meant any capability to make a choice whatsoever, and that even a computer program with an “IF/THEN” statement had free will by his standards. At the other extreme many people refuse to define it at all beyond insisting that it’s somehow neither deterministic nor random.
Yeah. If I am inextricably a part of the explanation of the choice made, it isn’t random, nor is it determined by external factors. And if I’m not inextricably a part of the explanation of the choice made, I didn’t choose.