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@949havoc
Another perspective on free will vs. determinism: Justice and Personal responsibility.Justice is the maintenance or administration of what is conforming to a standard of correctness, especially by the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims or the assignment of merited rewards or punishments.Since it is the actions of individuals that must be adjudicated in a legal charge of malfeasance, each individual’s actions are reviewed for merit of the charge[s]. As such, each person is individually, personally responsible for their actions.
I roughly agree although there are always influencing factors that need to be accounted for to carry out the appropriate sentence. Sometimes those influencing factors are people with power dangling something over your head. It may be a bribe, it may be blackmail. Someones life may be at risk. Would you cut a deal if it was possible to catch a larger fish?
It is an interrupt of logic to presume otherwise; that some other entity or force is responsible for the actions of an individual, regardless of the severity of threat imposed by any other entity or force to have that individual act in a specified manner. Were it not so, justice, itself, is impossible to mete out properly and justly.
There’s a whole lot of nuance you’re missing. I didn’t even need to argue from a deterministic perspective with the arguments you’ve presented so far.
Determinism would have it so; that an external force, and not the individual, themself, is ultimately responsible for their actions. To wit, were it a reality that the universe exerts a force on the brain chemistry of a person such that a person is denied the agency of choice, or even that the “choice” they make is not consciously determined and acted upon, but is the result of chemical alterations that individual did not personally and consciously effect, then justice cannot be properly exercised. The person is utterly absolved of personal responsibility, and mayhem is the ultimate result, not order.
Determinism doesn’t put the individual below the influence of the universe. Humans are the universe. Humans are the universe being self-aware.
We learn. What does rehabilitation aim to achieve? It’s probably not what you envision justice to be. Justice to you is revenge and the dehumanisation of inmates. Am I wrong? What does that do to them and to societies they’ll live in once they’re released? I admit some people are near impossible to rehabilitate due to their psychopathy or other conditions they might have. That should be taken into account.
If a person is not responsible for their choices, they are beings of complete entitlement, regardless of their actions, let alone their thoughts. Such a person is no better, nor worse, than anyone else else, and all lives lives of complete lack of personal accomplishment, for none are solely responsible, ever, for their thoughts, let alone their actions. Where there is no personal achievement for good, there is no reward, and where there is no personal lack of evil, they cannot be punished for it. Thus all live lives of purposelessness, and they are, as Santayana postulated, no better than savages of ignorance.
Why wouldn’t people be responsible for their choices and actions in a deterministic world view? Like I perviously said, we are self-aware and we learn.
But for vulnerable people such as the mentally-handicapped, should we tend to give them the same sentence as someone functioning? Again, you lack nuance with your slippery slope arguments.