There are many reasons to oppose the death penalty, some more convincing than others. It involves the state in an act of killing (an argument that, by itself, I don’t find all that convincing); it does not act as a deterrent to others (more convincing); it actually costs more, because of the appeal process, than a sentence of life in prison without parole; it’s disproportionately given to blacks in the U.S. and so is racist; it sometimes it doesn’t work well and prisoners die under horrible circumstances; sometimes innocent people are executed, and there’s no way to right that wrong; and if your aim is simply to use execution to improve society, there might be better ways.
But one argument is rarely used, and it’s the one I want to discuss briefly today. It is this: determinists like me agree that no criminal had any choice about what he/she did, and therefore excusing people from death because they were “cognitively impaired,” “didn’t know right from wrong,” or had other extenuating circumstances, is no more valid than excusing people “because they have a brain that obeys the laws of physics.” In other words, if you exculpate one person from execution on any grounds of cognitive impairment, then you must exculpate all of them, for nobody has a choice to kill. In some sense all criminals are cognitively impaired, for, like the rest of us, their actions were determined completely by their genes and environment, and at no point, were the tape of life rewound, could they have behaved otherwise. (This, of course, does not mean that such people should be let off scot-free—far from it!)
But there is no good reason to execute people for retribution, or on the grounds that they made a free choice to kill in sound mind. Those motives imply that we have real libertarian choices. But if you have no such choices, while you might be responsible for a crime, you are not morally responsible. Under any reasonable scheme, moral responsibility implies the ability to have done otherwise.
While compatibilists—who argue that actions are determined but we nevertheless still have free will on other grounds—sometimes still retain the notion of moral responsibility, I don’t see how those people can favor the death penalty, either. They may be compatibilists, but their determinism is incompatible with execution. And I don’t know if any of them do favor execution.
Yet “moral responsibility,” and the implication that killers could have chosen to do otherwise, is one of the most important reasons given for putting people to death in the U.S. Here’s an example.
At this moment, a jury in Boston is weighing imposing a federal death penalty on 21-year-old Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev after he was convicted on all 30 criminal counts. The federal death penalty was reinstated in 1988, and since then three people have been executed (including Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh), while 44 have been given the penalty and are languishing on death row. But, as the Boston Globe notes, Tsarnaev’s circumstances are special since the bombing is seen as a terrorist act, a public one, and a gory one. He may well be sentenced to death, and actually executed. Attorney General Eric Holder made the decision to request the death penalty, and he’s supported by several of the maimed victims or relatives of those who died. If the jury rules unanimously for death, it’s curtains for Tsarnaev; otherwise he goes to jail for life, without the possibility of parole.
Defense attorneys are arguing that Tsarnaev did not act independently, but was under the sway of his older brother Tamerlan. This is what they must argue to avoid execution, and I’m firmly on their side. But their argument could go further: Tsarnaev was acting under the influence of his genes and his environment, of which Tamerlan was a part, and he had no choice other than to plant the bombs. Most readers here are determinists and agree, but such an argument is highly unlikely to fly with a jury. (That’s one reason why philosophers should spend more time talking about the implications of determinism and less time playing a semantic game by confecting definitions of free will.) All criminals have the same extenuating circumstance: they had no choice. In what sense, then, are murderers “morally” responsible for what they did?
To see how the notion of pure libertarian free will is used by prosecutors asking for execution, here’s an excerpt from yesterday’s New York Times article on the Tsarnaev case. I’ve highlighted the parts that suggest Tsarnaev did have a choice about what he did:
Millions of people come from dysfunctional families, Ms. Pellegrini said, but they do not blow past normal boundary lines to become murderers, as Mr. Tsarnaev did. “The lines he was willing to cross make him fundamentally different,” she told the jury.
And he should not be able to shirk responsibility for heinous crimes that he committed by blaming someone else, she said. She quoted Shakespeare (“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves”) to convey that people choose the lives they lead.
“His destiny was determined by his actions, and he was destined and determined to be America’s worst nightmare,” she said. He “twisted the marathon into something cruel and ugly for his own purposes.”
All of this implies that Tsarnaev could have chosen otherwise, and deserves death because he didn’t. And that is why we need to make the case for determinism loudly and frequently, especially if we’re opposed to executions.
As I said, there are of course good reasons to punish people like Tsarnaev, even if one is a determinist. Punishment keeps someone who is liable to do further damage away from society (sequestration); it serves as a deterrent to others (even though execution isn’t a deterrent, being caught and imprisoned is, as we can see from what happened during the famous Montreal Police strike of 1969); and in some cases (but probably not Tsarnaev’s), it’s possible to rehabilitate offenders when they’re confined, so that they pose no danger to society when they’re released. The effects of each of these rationales can in principle be judged by science, though the “experiments” will be hard and expensive. But a good society must surely try.
What I don’t see as a valid reason for execution is vengeance or retribution, for both of those involve the notion of moral culpability—the idea that the guilty party had a choice and made the wrong one. Pandering to a mob or posse mentality demanding “an eye for an eye” tacitly accepts an emotion no longer tenable in an enlightened society. Yes, some may feel the need for vengeance, but it’s wrong to act on it. In the end, retribution always comes down to the notion that the criminal could have done otherwise.
The fault, dear Brutus, is indeed in our stars—or rather in our genes and our circumstances. Tsarnaev was simply unlucky in what his parents and his life vouchsafed him, and he wound up an odious and murderous person. For that he should be put away for life, as the possibility of rehabilitation seems slim. But let’s not pretend that he could have done anything other than place those bombs.
How about, for an argument:
” I can agree with the death penalty for certain crimes, but as an institution and people making mistakes, allowing any death penalty is bound to execute innocent people, which I obviously oppose and find morally wrong, so therefor, no death penalty is the better choice.”
Yes, that’s a good one, and I’m going to add the “execute innocents” reason to the above. Thanks!
I’ve always felt the most convincing argument against the Death Penalty is that – even if we assume “the system” to be perfect – it shows that the general purpose of justice is retribution. That is a purely childish notion, inspired by old school religion. “He hit me first, boohoo!!”
Forget about retribution, the strongest argument for it is safety: “It’s the only way to be sure“. But like all the pro arguments, it doesn’t stand up to fallibility and innocence.
Whose safety?
The strongest argument against capital punishment is that it’s bad for your soul. It brutalizes the people who approve of it.
Deterrence is, of course, immoral. Punishing one person in hopes of deterring another from committing a crime has no justification.
That’s not how deterrence works. The point is to threaten to punish criminals in hopes of deterring them from committing crimes. But if they ignore the threat and commit the crime anyway, then society has to follow through with the threatened punishment, so that other potential criminals know it’s not a bluff.
It would be immoral to punish an innocent person just to frighten people into staying in line. But punishing criminals who understood the social contract, and the risk of breaking it, is morally justifiable.
But, don’t you see?
The very fact that the criminals went ahead and did whatever they did despite the threat of deterrence is all the evidence you should need to know that deterrence just simply doesn’t work.
Indeed, we have good reason to believe that it can very easily make things worse. Make the punishment for rape severe enough, and the rapist is now going to have a very strong incentive to murder his victim after raping her. He reduces his chance of getting caught without incurring any significant additional risk if he does get caught.
That also points to another aspect of the problem of the notion of deterrence.
What if somebody weighs the pros and cons and decides that the cost of the punishment is worth it? “Sure, I’ll go to jail for a decade or two if I kill so-and-so, but that sonofabitch’ll be dead and jail isn’t so bad.” The only way to counter that sort of thing is with an ever-ratcheting over-the-top escalation of deterrence…and you’re right back to Hammurabi or Saudi Arabia, chopping off the hands of those suspected of petty thievery.
Punishment as a form of deterrence is evil, barbaric, uncivilized, counterproductive, and completely unjustifiable, even if you accept the basic premises.
b&
This is simply wrong. The fact that some criminals are undeterred does not constitute evidence that no potential criminals are deterred. In fact we have evidence that deterrence does work; I encourage you to click through on the link Jerry provided regarding the Montreal Police strike of 1969.
Punishment doesn’t have to be barbaric, but if you don’t like the word “punishment”, substitute “penalty” instead. Without penalties for non-compliance, contracts couldn’t exist. The social contract between society and its citizens is no different. If misbehavior carries no penalty, then there’s no lever by which to regulate it.
The problem with your analogy is that contracts are only considered valid when people voluntarily agree to them in advance of their enforcement and with a full and complete understanding of what they’re agreeing to. Furthermore, certain types of contracts are considered not merely unenforceable but abhorrent — especially those that commit one’s self to, for example, involuntary servitude or the other sorts of horrors we visit upon the victims of our current criminal “justice” system.
And, the contracts you refer to all offer “opt-out” clauses. How on Earth is one supposed to “opt-out” of your social contract?
Neither punishments nor penalties have any place in a civilized criminal justice system. Quarantine and rehabilitation, absolutely. Anything more than that is inexcusable.
Even fines really only can have even a theoretical place in financial crimes. Speeding fines, for example, are nonsensical. A $500 fine for somebody making minimum wage rushing to get to work to not get fired after taking the sick kid to the doctor…that could be crippling; even a $50,000 fine for Elon Musk after demonstrating a Tesla’s “insane mode” launch would be some of the most effective advertising he could buy. Even that Scandinavian country’s basing of fines on the criminal’s income doesn’t make sense; again, it could well be financially worthwhile to flaunt the law.
Either the law is worth following regardless of punishments and / or penalties or the law has no business being on the books in the first place. And a person can either be convinced of of the rationality of the law for its own sake or no amount of “justifiable” deterrence is going to be adequate.
I mean, really. If your only argument to somebody to not do something is, “If you do that, I’m gonna do something even worse to you,” what do you think that says about the justifiability for your prohibition in the first place?
b&
Another false dichotomy. There’s plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree with a law’s justification, but to comply with it anyway to avoid penalties.
Your notion of a perfectly rational body of law with which all sane citizens willingly comply is a fantasy, and a dangerous one, since it defines dissent to be irrational, and thereby justifies the involuntary “quarantine” and “rehabilitation” of dissenters. That’s the stuff of totalitarian ideology.
A free, enlightened society governs people as they actually are, warts and all, without trying to remake them into uniformly compliant citizens of Utopia.
Not at all. You’re clearly assuming that I think things like so-called “morality” have any business being legislated onto the books in the first place.
We should have laws against harming or endangering others, and that’s pretty much it. Consistent with the latter, we need things like traffic laws that, though oftentimes arbitrary, establish a consistent framework within which people can safely and peacefully coexist. And, by, “arbitrary,” I mean things like whether to drive on the left or the right side of the road. And, to a lesser extent, speed limits; it’s easy to find examples of people who would be perfectly safe driving a given stretch of road faster than the posted limit, but there’s safety to be had in everybody driving the same speed, regardless of individual abilities. The former — laws against harm — would encompass things like commercial product regulation, medical malpractice, truth in advertising, and such.
But so many of our laws, and especially so much of our penal code, goes far beyond that sort of thing.
I mean, really. What the fuck business of the government is it what sorts of substances people ingest, so long as they do so with informed consent and in a manner that doesn’t put others at risk?
And, at the other end of the spectrum, so much petty crime is the result of other societal injustices. What the fuck right does Bill Gates have to own a fifth private jet (or whatever) when there’re people who’re so desperate for even enough money to feed their kids that they have to resort to theft?
So, yeah. Fuck punishments, or “penalties,” or whatever other euphemism you want to come up with. They’re not the answer in theory…and, in practice, they’ve only ever made the problems worse. So you’ve “deterred” theft by chopping off the hands of a thief…now how is he supposed to earn enough money to feed his family? He couldn’t do it before with two hands, but now he’s supposed to magically do so with only one? Or is this “penalty” simply a way to torture him to death even more slowly?
Don’t like the example of the modern Saudi “penalty” for petty theft? Well, fine. How does the modern American equivalent of incarceration work any better? That criminal record can be every bit as financially crippling as the Saudi’s judge’s axe of righteous indignation and dismemberment.
b&
Ben, I neither said nor assumed anything about legislating morality, recreational drug use, Bill Gates, Saudi axemen, or anything else in your rant. So I guess we’re past the point of reasonable conversation. In any case I’ve already made the points I wanted to make, so I’ll let it drop.
> > A free, enlightened society governs people as they actually are, warts and > all, without trying to remake them into uniformly compliant citizens of > Utopia. >
I’m not so sure about that. What’s the difference between prison and quarantine? What’s the point of punishment if not to alter behavior? Isn’t the goal of punishment to make “uniformly compliant citizens”? Or is it merely retribution? “We’re going to get you for what you did!”
I think if you were to look at the Scandinavian model of incarceration and “reeducation” of their prisoners, you’d find it enlightening. The trick is to help people who have been marginalized or have made disruptive decisions, back into their community. Part of that is acculturating people. It is a delicate question, how to bring a person back into the fold without violating their integrity. But it’s no more totalitarian than what we do; and, I’d argue, a lot less.
The fact that *some* criminals are undeterred does not constitute evidence > that *no* potential criminals are deterred. >
That’s true but irrelevant. That’s justifying brutality through efficiency. That’s like saying slavery was okay because it worked.
There are three sources of crime: standards are unreasonable, someone got fucked over, or someone has bad wiring. I have a hard time casting personal blame anywhere there. And I don’t see where punishment alleviates any of those situations.
> > The point is to *threaten* to punish criminals in hopes of deterring them > from committing crimes. >
If only, eh?
A threat, of course, is only effective if the person being threatened believes the threat to be credible. The credibility of the threat we’re talking about here comes from previous people having suffered the same fate for their transgression or supposed transgression. What you’re saying is that part of the punishment handed out to person A is handed out to make person B think the punishment worse than the rewards. When, as is usually the case, it is discovered that the punishment has not been effective in deterring the crime, it’s often decided to increase the punishment in hopes of deterrence. That’s when we get into the arms race of punishment for deterrence’s sake. It becomes our method of combating crime/deviance: escalating violence. We divorce the punishment from the crime.
In this view, though, the only method available for fighting crime is deterrence. It assumes crime is a matter of individual decision, and that the consciousness of the individual is the appropriate area of fighting crime. We know how successful that approach has been. It doesn’t take into account the value of crime—otherwise why would people do it?—the definition of crime, or the root causes. It makes no attempt to stem the tide of crime other than by fear of reprisal.
The main point, which seems to get ignored, is that punishment, especially punishment such as capital punishment, is bad because it’s bad for the society which approves it. It brutalizes the societies that accept it, to the extent that they do. Ours is a glaring example of that brutalization. Punishment is a bedfellow of blame. It’s one thing to correct deviations, it’s another to inflict harm.
Ramen!
And, as a further point, it establishes that it is perfectly moral and just to kill people or to kidnap and enslave them, so long as you’ve got some suitably righteous excuse for doing so.
If we, as a society, are to have the death penalty for people whom, “beyond a reasonable doubt,” are deserving of death…how on Earth are we supposed to tell somebody who’s convinced that a particular somebody “needs killing” shouldn’t follow through with it?
Indeed, the death penalty for killers is the ultimate example of an indefensible double standard. If you’re going to insist that the families of Tsarnaev’s victims deserve to see him die, then, by all the gods, his family deserves to see his execution team die — and quite possibly the judge, jury, and prosecutor as well.
b&
I hate to appear unlettered, but what does “ramen” mean. Beside the noodles, bien sûr?
I’m glad you asked!
You might or might not be aware that the Flying Spaghetti Monster revealed itself unto Bobby Henderson some time back. Understandably, Bobby responded in the only imaginable way: by creating yet another new church.
Christians have an habit of shouting, “Amen!” to express agreement with somebody. It has been revealed — though I’ve no clue to whom — that that expression is not suitable for Pastafarians, as members of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster refer to themselves. (Full disclaimer: I get a kick out of their services and sacraments, but I’m more of an Unicornitarian, myself.) Instead, Pastafarians are called upon to shout, “Ramen!” whenever so moved by the Cheesy Sauce.
It is particularly appropriate that you should have asked your question when you did…for I’m eating a bowl of Fettuccine Alfredo as I type….
Cheers!
b&
I hope Baihu got some.
Yes; he gets to lick the pan. Of course!
b&
And then the pan will be clean enough to put back in the cupboard…
Much thanks.
I’d figured out the spirit from the context, but your explanation rounds it off. I am aware of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti, although knowing that spaghetti grows on trees in Switzerland makes me doubt its foundation. Unless, I suppose, they happen to be Swiss.
Some 46 years ago, I moved my family (one wife, one set of twins—fraternal) out West in a slightly converted school bus whose previous owner’s name, the Minneapolis Revival Mission, was still emblazoned on its sides. Let me tell you, that was good for discount gas and unsolicited donations. It was then I knew that, indeed, the Lord worked in mysterious ways.
I should also tell you that once in a restaurant in Corvallis, Oregon, I was served a dish the waited called, “Spaghetti alla Fredo.” Perhaps he was bagging it.
This is exactly my position. Thanks,
Life without parole is bound to incarcerate innocent people. For life. Any prison term is bound to incarcerate innocent people. Should we end the prison system?
It seems to me that to argue against this dialectic only for the death penalty is a form of special pleading based on some idea of special sanctity of human life.
I don’t believe in the sanctity of human life, and I don’t see how we can argue that society values the sanctity of human life. Therefore, I don’t have a huge problem with the death penalty in general.
Indeed, I find the most compelling argument FOR the death penalty is one that most people don’t mention – that of societal ethos: that there are some crimes so heinous that society has agreed that they will simply not be tolerated, and therefore justly prescribes death for the convicted.
Personally, I have no problems with the use of the death penalty based on societal ethos for crimes against humanity, terrorism against civilian targets, and unremorseful murder. ( The murderer of Polly Klaas comes to mind.)
Except that Richard Allen Davis is still on death row in California awaiting execution. Its 19 years and counting.
Larry Wilmore made a similar “some crimes are just too evil” argument on his show last week. The thing about that argument is that it’s inherently subjective; it always comes down to “I don’t have a problem killing that guy.”
But who do you trust to draw up the list of guys so evil they deserve to die? The DA who’s planning to run for Congress next year, and needs a couple of executions to boost his poll numbers?
We should certainly end the current prison system.
I think that in itself would qualify for the death penalty. For the DA, that is.
I can’t think of a bigger threat to the moral foundations of the justice system than someone like that.
The difference is when an error is made with the death penalty once the person is dead it can not be changed. Exonerating an executed prisoner is not overly helpful to the executed.
Anyone who looks at the US justice system with a rational eye can see there are serious problems, and numerous people have been exonerated from death row.
Prosecutors continue to be found withholding exculpatory evidence, yet they almost never face repercussions.
The US justice system is racist, and poor people almost always get longer sentences. Minorities tend to get the death penalty much more often than white people, even when the crimes and circumstances are extremely similar.
Many people say the US justice system is indeed a very broken system. Once a person is executed, they can not be brought back and told “Whoops, sorry. Little misunderstanding. I hope you don’t mind.”
If they are in prison for life, they can.
“Life without parole is bound to incarcerate innocent people. For life. Any prison term is bound to incarcerate innocent people. Should we end the prison system?”
But at least there’s the possibility to set people free, which is hard to do once you’re dead.
If this is what you consider special pleading, then so be it.
I absolutely agree.
Someone (wrongfully) sentenced to ‘life’ has always the possibility that, if new evidence comes forward, they may be exonerated. In which case compensation can be paid to them as, at least, an attempt to make amends for the wrong inflicted on them.
But if they’ve been executed, what are you going to do? The justice system is guilty of murder. I can’t think of a worse outrage against the whole concept of justice itself.
People can get out of prison. No one gets to come back from the dead (sorry Xians, it’ hard but it’s true).
This is the key point.
“there are some crimes so heinous that society has agreed that they will simply not be tolerated, and therefore justly prescribes death for the convicted”
I think this does operate in some cases.
I am generally a very strong death-penalty foe. However, in the Timothy McVeigh case, I felt OK suspending that opposition (however right or wrong I was to do so).
My wife loves the real life crime shows. One thing I’ve noticed on them is the prosecutors almost always say they believe the person is guilty, even after exculpatory evidence is found. I suppose it must be very nice to never have a doubt, but it concerns me that people with the power of life and death seem to have almost no amount of self reflection that they are human, and their office may make mistakes. Perhaps the prosecutors in the USA should pick up the tradition of the Roman Emperors, have a person hired to follow them around whispering in their ear that they too are mere mortals.
There are innocent people in jail, including some convicted of murder. Some are known to be innocent, it’s just that the law is setup to favor the prosecutor and the state. Evidence is found after a certain time, and it’s no longer admissible. The convicted misses an appeal date, and it’s just too bad for them. This is not justice.
I would point out that an innocent person convicted of murder would appear to have no remorse. So by your rules they would be executed for failing to be remorseful.
Most innocent prisoners are already caught by this problem, parole requires admission of guilt, if you did it or not. The problems start at the charging, prosecutors charge with every possible crime they can. The poor wind up having to plead to avoid life in prison, which is a real concern in the USA for even minor infractions.
I absolutely agree.
I think we should amend the law to deter over-enthusiastic prosecution: if the accused is found Not Guilty, the prosecutor is sentenced to whatever sentence the accused was faced with. It’d be only fair…
Stooping to the level of the killer is not a good argument for capital punishment. Simply because society has decided it’s all right to kill people for whatever reason, they are dragged down into the mire with them.
Currently, the bar is set at beyond a reasonable doubt, the same as for guilt/not proven. Maybe the bar should be raised to beyond any doubt before imposing the death penalty.
Then you wouldn’t be able to convict anybody of anything.
I don’t think is there is any doubt about Dzhokhar Tsanaev. I will grant that such cases are very rare.
Maybe we need more explicit use of Bayes’ Theorem in the courtroom.
Because jurors are SO gonna understand that.
😀
The reason to not impose a death sentence is for protection of society, not for the protection of the criminals; it keeps society from being brutalized.
A perfect example of, what IMHO was a poor sentence of death by a jury, was the infamous case of Scott Peterson in California. Peterson was found guilty of the murder of his wife and unborn child in a case where there was no confession, no eyewitnesses and no forensic evidence, in addition to which the medical examiner was unable to determine the cause of death. The entire prosecution case was based on consciousness of guilt based on his actions while the crime was being investigated. I don’t think that someone should be given the death penalty based of this kind of evidence.
I would absolutely agree with that.
I can think of all too many cases where the police, under pressure to ‘solve’ a crime, have just selected the most likely suspect and devoted all their efforts to ‘getting’ something on him. Not actually fabricating evidence (though that has happened occasionally), but interpreting everything they can dig up in the most prejudicial light. The cynical view would suggest they don’t really care who did it so long as they can mark the case ‘solved’.
I am of the same opinion as Martijn. I could be for the death penalty for the most heinous crimes – but the defense, prosecutor, judge, jury and witnesses are all error prone animals like me and mistakes happen.
I’ve been through nearly 2 years of biofeedback neurotherapy to treat my PTSD acquired in combat in Iraq. I honestly think that I would be just another homeless vet, self medicating with alcohol or drugs without this treatment because I was in a very bad place when I started. I had trouble remembering stuff that happened 5 minutes ago, forget about yesterday. And a whole passel of other neurological symptoms: anger, insomnia, migraines, phantom pains in my extremities, etc. Before undergoing the neurotherapy, I had tried several different medications, psychiatrists and psychologists but they didn’t help, and my symptoms got worse year after year.
Thanks to my experience with this experimental form of neurotherapy, I think that eventually we will understand the human brain and be able to provide medical treatment to convicted criminals to ensure they no longer pose a threat to society. But this brings up all kinds of ethical issues:
Do we force them to undergo the treatment after they’ve been convicted or let them opt out and stay in prison for life?
If we can detect that someone is likely to commit a violent crime, do we treat them before they do?
How will society treat someone who committed a truly heinous crime after they’ve undergone treatment and been given a clean bill of mental health?
How will society treat someone who’s likely to commit a serious crime but hasn’t yet?
I don’t have the answers, but these are things I think we should think about for when this is possible.
You left out the most important questions: how do we define “treatment” and “threat to society”?
Offenders with genuine medical or psychiatric disorders should by all means receive appropriate treatment. But as I said in a previous comment, I’m very uneasy about the idea of medicalizing criminal behavior in general, since that leads to the notion that properly medicated citizens should be incapable of such behavior.
I reject that notion. There’s no such thing as a mentally healthy human being who presents no threat whatever to society. Everyone with a functioning brain has the capacity to do harm. We can’t medicate that capacity away without damaging our autonomy and turning us into robotic servants of the state.
This is the ‘treatment’ I went through for nearly 2 years: quantitative electroencephalography (QEEG) biofeedback therapy. You can look it up online. Its been around a long time. But the hardware my neurologist is using is experimental, brand new and allows them to really zero in the specific areas of the brain they need to treat without affecting the surrounding areas. 2-3 times a week, I went to the neurologists office, they connected a few electrodes to monitor activity in my brain, and I watched TV for 20 minutes. Totally painless.
I was genuinely worried that I would be a different person after completing the therapy. Would it change my personality? Would I like different things? Would I suddenly find religion, like country music or the taste of fish? If I were to be a different person afterwards, how is that different than death? I was genuinely terrified of the death of my self identity even though I knew that my body and brain would live.
Afterwards, I am different, just not in the way I feared. I’m the same person I was before – still like the same foods, music and still an atheist. But now I’m calm. I don’t have blinding migraines 2-3 times a week anymore (haven’t had one in months). I don’t have blood and guts filled nightmares every night. I can remember what happened 5 minutes ago, yesterday and during my time in Iraq (this last one isn’t necessarily a plus).
I no longer have to fight the irresistible urge to curse out any and everyone who pisses me off. And everyone pissed me off. Or the near irresistible urge to punch them or do worse things when they really pissed me off – I choose to walk a way from a lot of situations for fear of what I might do. I got angry so easily and so often, so I walked away several times a day. There were days where I couldn’t stand the sight or sound of another person without getting angry. But not anymore.
My friends say I’m actually a better person now – I used to be a bit of an a-hole. OK, not a bit, a lot of an a-hole. But now they tell me I’m one of the kindest and most considerate people they know. The parts of the brain that make us violent aren’t the same parts of the brain that control our sense of self – our identity.
As to who should decide who is a threat to society – society already does that. That’s what we do when we form a government and create laws.
I do think we should ere on the side of caution however. Anyone who repeatedly commits violence upon others would be a good candidate for ‘treatment’. For example, a pedophile, a serial rapist or serial killer.
But someone who commits a single act of violence with extenuating circumstances doesn’t need treatment. Say someone who gets drunk in a bar, and gets into a fight. Although they may need treatment for alcoholism.
If its determined by medical professionals that someone needs ‘treatment’, I don’t think it should be forced upon them. They should be allowed the appearance of ‘choice’ and given the option for prison or ‘treatment’.
I say appearance of choice because I’m a determinist and don’t see any evidence for libertarian free will.
Very interesting, and it’s great that that seems to have worked for you. One must ask, how widely applicable is the method, and could it be used in place of punishment for crimes? The possibility of such sophisticated treatments shows how the ‘argument’ of A Clockwork Orange was weak, being based on a much blunter aversion/association regime which was about all that could be imagined in the 60s.
The purpose of the death penalty is to make primary and secondary victims feel better and give society the illusion of being safer.
Or, as I’d put it, smug self-righteousness. Agree mostly with Jerry, only adding that the death penality, in my view, feeds disregard for life.
Also, it gives ambitious prosecutors a way to enhance their “tough on crime” credentials.
Yeah. The quotes of the prosecutors exhorting the jury to kill Tsarnaev are rather sickening. They wouldn’t be out of place in Shakespeare’s time. It is shameful that this kind of mind set and rhetoric is so common within even the higher levels of our justice system even today.
To a compatibilist like myself, “moral” responsibility means “susceptible to deterrence” responsibility.
Thus, were it possible that some combination of likelihood of being caught and threat of punishment would deter them, then we are justified in punishing as a deterrent. We label this “moral” responsibility.
It is not “moral” responsibility if cognitive impairment means that threat of punishment would make no difference at all to their acts.
I don’t agree that we should hand over the concept of morals to the theists and dualists.
As a compatibilist I’m not against the death penalty on principle, though I likely am against it pragmatically.
As above, a punishment of either life in jail or execution can be justified as a deterrent. The choice between the two is then about pragmatics (effectiveness of deterrent, cost, possibility of rectifying errors, etc).
Of course that depends entirely on whether one takes a deterministic or a dualistic interpretation of “choosing” and “could have done different”.
I agree. I find it hard to take the proposition that there is no such thing as moral competence seriously.
Would you enter into a contract with a chimpanzee? What about a normal human? If the answers are different you need to ask why. The reason of course is that a normal human understands the consequences of not following the contract so you have some assurance that they will. Criminal law isn’t any different.
Sequestration is a sufficient solution for someone whose behavior can’t be predicted, like a chimpanzee. There’s no disagreement with determinists here, and no need for a concept of moral competence, which is the singular idea used to justify death over sequestration.
Would you say a pocket computer is better at calculation than a rock is? Or does determinism do away with the idea of arithmetic competence?
If you grant the existence of arithmetic competence (or any other sort of competence), why make an exception for the ability to reason about moral questions? Surely there’s a spectrum of such ability, with normal humans at one end, rocks at the other, and chimps somewhere in between. How does determinism negate that fact?
I don’t think you’re using the term in the same way that it’s used to justify the death penalty.
Of course there are ranges of competence. Of course it makes sense to remove from society someone who is deemed incompetent at deciding whether or not to murder someone.
I don’t understand how you can then go on to say “furthermore, since this is a matter of moral competence and not arithmetic competence, we should kill him instead of just sequestering him.”
I realized I made a mess of that. The point is that moral competence *is* the ability to decide to murder in a way that is acceptable to society. The whole argument is that it doesn’t make sense to say that someone murdered but is morally competent and therefore can be executed.
Neither I nor (on my reading of them) Coel or Matt is using moral competence to justify the death penalty.
The point Coel makes, with which Matt and I agree, is that determinism does not render the concepts of moral competence and moral responsibility incoherent. So to oppose the death penalty on grounds that there’s no such thing as moral responsibility is to back a losing horse. There are better reasons to oppose the death penalty and to reform the justice system, reasons that don’t entail throwing sensible notions of moral competence under the bus.
Agreed ^
I’m against the death penalty, but I find the incompatibilist reasoning about it to be substantial enough to hang my hat on; we have to turn to other reasons.
Ugh, meant to be:
I’m against the death penalty, but I DO NOT find the incompatibilist reasoning about it to be substantial enough to hang my hat on; we have to turn to other reasons.
As I’ve said previously on this site:
I think revenge for the victims’ families is the primary reason why the death penalty survives in the US.
I hope that if (Ceiling Cat forbid) someone close to me is ever murdered, I will have the moral fortitude to not want indulge in revenge against the killer and request (howl for) their death.
The long shadow of Sharia-style ‘retribution’?
Maybe Europe served as a frightening example – death penalty abolished, then life imprisonment and long terms considered inhumane too, and now it is extremely difficult to keep a European murderer locked for more than 10 years.
That’s another problem.
I am fully in support of life (real life, no parole) for murderers and potentially other crimes as well.
Erring on the side of compassion (rather than revenge) seems (to me) to be in better concert with secular values.
My main problem with the death penalty is that humans are f***-ups. And death is permanent.
A few years back, the Illinois governor stopped all executions in Illinois — because it was found that 30% of the people on death row were actually innocent.
You can be very certain that “we” have executed a large number of innocent people over the last few centuries. Imagine being held and then executed for something you didn’t do. The horror!
“I am fully in support of life (real life, no parole) for murderers and potentially other crimes as well.”
And yet people change over time, often drastically. I’m fine with life sentences, but not without possibility of parole – there should always be the chance for someone to show they have changed sufficiently to no longer be a threat.
If I might channel Sam for a moment…imagine it is later discovered that the murderer has a brain lesion that’s the cause of his uncontrollable rage. And further imagine that a surgeon successfully repairs the damage and, after a suitable evaluation period, the person, beyond a reasonable doubt, is no longer a threat to society and would be a fully-contributing and productive member if released. And, of course, we know this in part because of his sincere and deep remorse and regret over his actions while under the influence of the lesion and his passionate desire to do what he can to make up for what he did.
Would you still insist he must remain incarcerated?
I think most people would have a difficult time in justifying the continued incarceration of such a person — as they well should.
So, what difference would it make if the remedy came from something other than the surgeon’s knife?
b&
The only flaw with your lesion example, I think, is that people would very easily decide “Well, he was sick, of course it wasn’t his fault”, but wouldn’t see the parallels to a “normally” functioning brain’s activity. Say someone commits murder, yet cannot point to anything physically or mentally wrong with himself at the time (murder can be a perfectly rational act), so he is sentenced to prison, and twenty or so years down the line this person now is remorseful and thinks it was a grave mistake… this person now is, quite possibly, as altered neurologically by his experiences since as your lesion patient is by surgery.
There’s this idea that we have trouble letting go of, a sort of person-permanence concept where once you hit adulthood you are now (in your case) Ben Goren, and Ben Goren will always be Ben Goren, and so the Ben Goren of tomorrow can be justly punished for the acts of Ben Goren today… but that’s not how we work. We don’t stop changing at 18, or 30, or 60, or 90 – we change constantly until we die. After a certain amount of change, I say that no, the Ben Goren of tomorrow is not the Ben Goren of today, and no, we are not justified in punishing him simply because of yester-Goren’s acts – we need to evaluate the Ben Goren we are dealing with now, and see if that Ben Goren remains a threat or not. Who Ben Goren was then is certainly something to be considered in this evaluation, but it should be the starting point of it, not the end.
May I have your attention please? Will the real Slim Goren please stand up?
The repetition just felt right, damnit. 🙂
Er…I think you’re in vigorous agreement with me….
b&
Oh, I know we’re agreeing, I was simply trying to make perfectly clear that such things apply to the mentally healthy as well as the ill.
So, my note about life without parole included a tacit premise that no new evidence comes to light.
I am sure that there are innocent people being imprisoned in the US without the possibility of parole right now. However, if new data come to light that exonerates them, I have enough faith in the system that they will be released based on those data. As they rightly should be.
But, barring new data (and in Tsarnaev’s case, the data don’t exist — yes, I firmly think he is guilty of the crimes) life without parole is a good option for some murderers.
And in Tsarnaev’s case, it robs him of the “martyrdom” that I wouldn’t be at all surprised that he might be seeking.
And I will say that I am very unlikely to “buy” a murderer’s profession of being “changed” and no longer a threat to others.
This would take some pretty serious convincing.
Many murderers are also highly skilled manipulators of other people. This is a hallmark of sociopaths.
Dzhokhar has claimed he acted under the influence of his brother. What if his brother had implanted an actual SciFi thought-control device in Dzhokar’s brain? If that device were removed, would you still insist on keeping him locked up?
If so, how could you possibly justify such a position?
If not, how could that be consistent with insisting on incarceration if less fantastic methods of reform were to prove equally successful?
b&
Should it take serious convincing that a person has changed? You bet. But life without possibility of parole rules out the possibility completely, the which we should not do.
As a European, I’d like to ask you why you regard conditional releases of life sentences as “frightening” ? The German Constitutional Court has declared LWOP unconstitutional because it violates the dignity of Man (German Basic Law Art. I) which no person can ever lose no matter what he may have done.
BTW, in my country the average time which convicted murderers serve is about 18 years (the penalty for murder has always been 10-20 years or life).
I am also against the death penalty, but not for any of the reasons Jerry gave. I’m against it because of the flawed court system. This can be shown by examples of people who were released after decades of being in prison because they were convicted on eye witness testimony but were cleared later by DNA testing. The risk of executing an innocent person is way too high. Better to let 100 guilty men go than execute one innocent man.
I am a determinist, but I think that if it is OK to put him in prison for life, with no possibility of parole, then I see the rest of his life as having no value to society any longer but marks him as a burden.
Since his actions show that he placed no value on the lives he took or injuries he caused, then taking his life to eliminate those burdens is fine with me.
I also do not agree that the death penalty is not a deterrent. It is one more input in the complicated set of conditions that might sway someone one way or another. How could a study be done to show this? Comparing two societies that differ on the death penalty would have too many other factors.
The burden to society can be higher for execution than for life imprisonment, if you are speaking of ‘burden’ in monetary terms. The whole run-up to the execution is extremely expensive.
I have heard repeatedly (and anecdotally) that in our society the death penalty is not a deterrent for those who commit murder.
I have read repeatedly (in secondary sources) that there is plenty of evidence that death sentences for homicides function as an *antideterrent*.
Bunge (for example) cites some of that in _Social Science Under Debate_.
Death penalties are sometimes suspended or reinstated, in U.S. states and abroad. Rates of capital crimes tend not to react.
Putting the consideration of him being a burden for the society (while serving the life sentence) aside, I think this form of punishment would be harsher than the death penalty for him.
Mr. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, you can forget about the 72 virgins for the next several decades; say hello to your inmate buddies…
I think he should have to occasionally look at the autopsy photos of his victims during his life sentence – especially the young boy (had he any control over whether he attended the Boston Marathon?) and the video of him giving the finger to the surveillance camera (reported in today’s hard-copy NY Times), apparently another activity he just couldn’t help indulging in.
(I wonder if Mitt Romney had any free will ability to refrain from repeatedly interrupting Obama during their first presidential debate. I think he knew better; he just wasn’t inclined to give another human being reasonable consideration. Private corporate tyrants are accustomed to interrupting and cutting off and silencing subordinates; a hard habit to break, especially if one has a heightened sense of entitlement, not a rare occurrence here in The Land of the Fee and the Home of the Craven.)
To what effect?
If it’s with the help that this will instill in him a sense of remorse and compassion…that may well be the case, but I’d leave it up to a qualified therapist to decide if that’s effective and when and how much that should be done.
If it’s with the intent of making him suffer…first, it could have the opposite effect; witness the people who search out snuff films. And, even if it did make him suffer…just doing it to torture him is as uncalled for and inappropriate and contemptible as any other form of torture.
Of course, if a therapist considers it necessary despite the discomfort it might cause, that’s another thing — just as it’s perfectly fine for a surgeon to do great damage to a person (think, for example, of the condition the patient is in in the middle of an organ transplant) with the intent of ensuring an optimal recovery.
b&
I’ll grant your argument on the invalidity of vengeance or retribution as an argument for the death penalty. And I agree with you that the death penalty ought to be abolished. But I’m still unimpressed by your reductionist elimination of moral responsibility. It seems to shrink too much of what’s called ‘the landscape of coherence.’
Here’s an idea from philosopher Rebecca Goldstein:
Would you trade ‘responsibility’ for ‘accountability?’
Isn’t that merely a practical question? Accountability is simply a matter of who did what, no? Rebeca seems to extend it to “justification,” and I can go along with people needing to justify their actions. The questions are what to do with deviance and the purpose of deviance.
Reasons (the heart of accountability) work best when backed up by reasonING that is sound. Mr. Tsarnaev has attempted to justify his actions based on his religion, if I recall correctly. If the persons who hold the power of life and death over him disagree, too bad.
One thing that puzzles me is that I seem to be hearing conflicting stories from the defendant and his lawyers. The latter are portraying him as merely a tool of his brother, but I’m not sure that Tsarnaev agrees with that.
Yes, so long as everyone realizes that those arguments are themselves determined, and that they’re run through people’s computer programs in the brain and evaluated deterministically. That’s what it means “to change one’s mind.”
Agreed to the deterministic aspect: I just don’t see how that changes anything of substance.
I could be missing something, but on this account it seems clear that the jury will decide whatever they are pre-determined to decide. They cannot do otherwise.
So what is actually achieved by our discussion against capital punishment — however sincere (and scientifically correct) we may be? Worthwhile intellectual musing, for sure. But what practical benefit?
That’s a complicated question. You’re absolutely right that the jury is jury-rigged to vote the way they’re going to vote; and that’s a combination of judge’s instructions, jury selection process, and prevailing community norms. Discussing the questions of moral responsibility and free will might not make a difference in any given case, but the mere fact of having the discussion might eventually affect one of those factors. It can affect the moral landscape; and that’s the practical benefit.
Which of course also feeds into the rationale for retribution in the first place – in a determinist view it should modify the outcomes of others.
Given that the death penalty correlates positively with all manner of violent crimes including murder it doesn’t seem wildly effective.
This gets me to thinking, what if a prospective juror makes a statement (seemingly) calculated to get himself disqualified from jury duty? He has no personal responsibility for that, eh? He just couldn’t help himself, he had no free will in the matter.
“As I said, there are of course good reasons to punish people like Tsarnaev, even if one is a determinist. Punishment keeps someone who is liable to do further damage away from society (sequestration); it serves as a deterrent to others…”
I’m not so sure about the idea of punishing people, unless you have a different meaning of “punishment” than I do. “Punishment” feels too much like retribution. Sequestration and education, on the other hand, seem acceptable; so long as one doesn’t get into the communist idea of reeducation. Certainly, society has the right to be protected from dangerous people; and hence they should, if appropriate, be removed from the general populace. But if one is going to remove them, it behooves us to try and make use of them as fellow humans; try and integrate them into society and find constructive contributions they can make. But punishing one person as a lesson for others doesn’t seem appropriate or terribly effective.
The rationale given by the folks at the remarkably enlightened Halden Prison, in Norway, for their humane treatment of their charges is that it’s for the sake of the keepers, not of the prisoners. It’s to keep the guards and wardens humane. The reason to not kill someone else is to prevent ones self from becoming barbaric, not to save the other person. It’s a selfish motive.
“It’s to keep the guards and wardens humane.”
Very nice, thanks!
“…their humane treatment of their charges is that it’s for the sake of the keepers, not of the prisoners. It’s to keep the guards and wardens humane”
I am quite moved by that, we would not think of sending a maintenance someone into a scest pool without forms of protection and although this seems an over the top comparison, wardens deserve no less.
I had similar thoughts. If we quarantine someone with a disease, we don’t deem it a “punishment”, but rather to protect the other members of society, while (hopefully) finding treatment for the afflicted person.
I would think that similar wording would help convey the different thought process behind a justice system that took determinism into account.
I find you exposition of determinism to be lacking. Specifically, it lacks acknowledgement of perceived consequences as a determinant. Punishment is not necessarily vengeance, It is also intended as a deterrent. One of the causes of behavior, and completely compatible with physics.
Having said that, I think punishment is a terribly inefficient and ineffective deterrent. And most of the criminal justice system to be counterproductive.
But that is an empirical question that can be examined scientifically. I don’t believe top down reasoning can solve any social problem.
Problems are solved by the accumulation of small and incremental inventions.
“I find you exposition of determinism to be lacking. Specifically, it lacks acknowledgement of perceived consequences as a determinant.”
The perceived consequences affect the behavior of different people to different degrees. In other words, the degree to which the perceived risk of serving jail time, or being shot by cops while committing the crime affects an individual’s behavior is determined by this person’s emotional intelligence, social intelligence, brain structure, IQ level, hormone levels, religious beliefs, prejudices, genes, tribal impulses etc.
Did you read what I wrote? I said that it can be a deterrent, and as I’ve written repeatedly, and implied above, deterrence is fully compatible with determinism.
I think your exposition of determinism lacks acknowledgement of perceived consequences as a determinant. Punishment is not necessarily vengeance, It is also intended as a deterrent. One of the causes of behavior, and completely compatible with physics.
Having said that, I think punishment is a terribly inefficient and ineffective deterrent. And most of the criminal justice system to be counterproductive.
But that is an empirical question that can be examined scientifically. I don’t believe top down reasoning can solve any social problem.
Problems are solved by the accumulation of small and incremental inventions.
But to follow through with your determinism, you must also exculpate the executioners, exculpate the judges who levy the verdict, exculpate the legislators who determine death sentence law and exculpate voters who vote to keep it, because they are all in the same boat: they had no choice but to do what they did. This is why determinism does not favor the no-death-penalty position. It doesn’t favor the pro-death-penalty position either. It can’t really be used as an argument for or against any social policy, good or bad, because “they had no choice” applies just as much to the state actors as the criminals.
The closest you can get to determinism favoring a policy is to say that since materialism recognizes no supernatural or nonmaterial reasons for punishment, we should be wholly concerned with behavior modification and social prosperity rather than abstract notions of justice. So, you rehabilitate rather than incarcerate because the economic outcome of the former is better for society and with no metaphysics, there is no reason a criminal must ‘get what they deserve.’ Even that conclusion, however, might not be empirically right: if we empirically observe that human meat-robots function better socially when some level of economically unnecessary punishment is inflicted for wrong-doing, then that empirical observation would support the idea that some amount of punishment for its own sake is the correct response to crime.
Yes, you have to exculpate them all; but that doesn’t mean that their future behavior cannot be changed. The judge can learn. Indeed, it may be determined that he/she will learn. And it may be determined that he will learn because he read this argument. You never know.
But I think you went on to say pretty much that.
This. I have thought for some time that Dr. Coyne’s extreme determinism leads him pretty far down some rabbit holes at times. I’m a materialist, but I’d feel a lot more comfortable about accepting determinism if we understood what it means to “think” – what exactly is happening? Is the fact that thinking is an entirely material, physical process then mean that all our thoughts, when they occur, etc. are all pre-determined?
Thinking is what computers do. And yes it is programmed into them, and into us.
But thinking involves weighing alternatives based on expected outcomes. In other words, one of the determining a\factors in behavior is the expected future.
We learn how to expect futures via formal training, informal training, and by witnessing things that happen in the world.
So part of the world is law and consequences. That is a physical phenomenon, not a mystical or supernatural one.
That’s EXACTLY how computers “think” whey they play chess: they weigh alternatives with the goal of winning.
But I’m not arguing against determinism. I’m arguing that systems that learn are managed differently than systems that are simple switches.
We do not punish people because they “deserve” it. We punish people to teach them and to deter others. I’m well aware that vengeance and gratification of the desire to hurt people is a big part of the justice system, but not usually cited as an official part.)
I’m also of the opinion that punishment is ineffective and even counterproductive. I raised two good children with an astonishingly little punishment.
But I do not see criminal justice as involving a debate over free will vs determinism. I see it as involving a debate about efficacy.
Would you have different feelings about the death penalty is some massive university studies showed that one execution deterred the murder of a hundred innocent people? (I don’t think this is likely. It’s just a thought experiment.) This is not the question of whether you kill an innocent person to save a hundred others. this is whether you would kill a guilty person to save others.
I doubt ‘teaching’ has really had much to do with the design and implementation of various criminal punishments.
Many past decisions were nothing but pragmatic compromises: before towns had the infrastructure to hold people captive for a long time, they executed them or used whipping/stocks/whatever in part because they couldn’t hold them captive. If you can’t punish the way you like, honey, like the way you punish.
People justify punishing children as teaching. My training in special ed and my experience as a parent (and as a child) suggest it is 98% unnecessary and mostly counterproductive.
Whether it ever works as a deterrent is something of an open question. There are people who have no inner moral sense, and perhaps they require deterrence.
Such people may need to be isolated from society until such time as they no longer represent a threat to society. They’re likely to consider such isolation (imprisonment) as undesirable as any other form of deterrence you might think of, but doing nasty shit to them for the sake of doing nasty shit to them with the hope that’ll change their behavior isn’t called for.
Depending on how bad the person’s sociopathy, they might be able to learn to control it. The basic moral logic is straightforward; it’s mostly just variations on, “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” If they can understand that intellectually but not emotionally / instinctively, they can at least decide whether or not they’re willing to sacrifice the short-term pleasure of indulging in their urges in order to gain long-term advantages from cooperating with society. If so, we should welcome them back — and, of course, keep a close watch on them.
If not, of course, no amount of deterrence is going to matter, either. The best we can do is the same as we’d do for anybody else with a terminal infectious condition: provide the most compassionate and comfortable care possible while preventing them from causing harm to others.
b&
No, not pre-determined. Deterministic (a theory or doctrine that acts of the will, occurrences in nature, or social or psychological phenomena are causally determined by preceding events or natural laws).
They are not equivalent.
I think it’s a fine idea to spend a lot more time explaining the determinism angle but just not sure that is the selling point for stopping capital punishment.
To get public consensus is always a tough job and determinism is complicated to many. The practical considerations such as how much more expensive it is to proceed with death by the government or that vengeance and retribution is not the answer might work better. The fact that it is not a deterrent should also mean something.
Having served on a jury in a murder trial I do know that not having the death penalty involved in the process makes it much simpler and easier. This happened to be a rape/murder trial and in California a guilty verdict is automatic life without parole. This one was a pretty simple guilty case and not having to get into all that extra stuff with decisions on death or life made everything much better.
In the law, the question of accountability and sanity is really a question of whether a person can learn and understand consequences.
I do not like this system, but it is not quite as irrational as it sounds when you pit it as free will vs determinism.
The reason it persists, I think, is because no one has come up with a non-punitive way to insure public safety. Lots of people, including B.F. Skinner, have proposed cures for public ills, but like cures for AIDS and cancer, they don’t work in the wild as well as they do in the laboratory.
One of the things I have learned is that news is news because it is out of the ordinary. We get news stories when a judge or jury makes a bone-headed decision. Such decisions are — I think — out of the ordinary.
Yes, many people claim that libertarian free will means the death penalty is okay, but I’m pretty sure they are wrong.
‘“His destiny was determined by his actions, and he was destined and determined to be America’s worst nightmare,” she said. He “twisted the marathon into something cruel and ugly for his own purposes.”’ So why should we kill him, then?
Non/determinism has nothing to do with it. The death penalty, and retributive justice in general, is irrational and philosophically unjustifiable. It’s an instinct that evolved as one of the worst possible proxies for a civilized justice system.
Out of all the arguments against executing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and I may have missed it, surely the greatest is that executing him will turn him into a martyr and may lead to the radicalization of more followers or revenge attacks in his name.
Lock him up, throw away the key, the world will eventually forget about him.
Whats-his-name wants attention. Have him spend his life locked up in meaningless obscurity.
I am no philosopher so don’t ‘get’ the discussion over ‘free will’ – I would like to think if I had my finger on the trigger I wouldnt use it (luckily I’m in the UK, so is extremely unlikely – phew!)
The arguments I prefer are (in no order):
1) Too many innocents get killed (one is too many), and it is the poor (often black) who get the worst lawyers that suffer the most
2) The state is saying ‘sometimes you are allowed to kill’, this must affect its citizens attitudes to killing
3) Putting the blood onto hands that don’t want it – I wouldn’t kill, so why should I be party to my state killing someone
4) Gandhi’s eye for an eye making the whole world blind
1: probably doesn’t apply here, though in theory we don’t know for certain that it doesn’t apply.
2: removing the death penalty will not change the state’s position on ‘sometimes its okay to kill,’ because they will still say that through many other policies. Probably the two best examples: its okay to kill in self-defense, and its okay for soldiers to kill on a battlefield.
3. Here you have a strong democratic argument against the death penalty. If your state has the votes to eliminate it, by all means it will be allowed to do so.
4. Yes I agree.
I have issues with the death penalty for many of the reasons you’ve stated, including lack of protection for the truly innocent accused. To the extent I think the death penalty might be justified, those reasons have nothing to do with justice to the accused but with the ability of the society in question to do something else that is arguably more humane under the circumstances. Is solitary confinement for life in a federal prison better than death if we presume for the sake of argument that it will be for life and no mercy will ever be shown regardless of how the prisoner may change? The USA should have no problem coming up with the money to maintain a more humane rehab prison – assuming there is the societal and political will to do that – but other societies in other places and times would have less resources and the death penalty may be chosen as the only practical way to safeguard society from that particular person. Now the argument about that requires lots of details and facts related to the specific person and what that person did and whether there really is no good alternative for the society. My impression – and it’s just an impression – would be that “compatibilists” would tend to see good reasons to hold people legally responsible, just as you apparently do, whether they think there is such a thing as morality – beyond what law prescribes – or not. They would also be as likely to appreciate issues concerning the death penalty as anyone else.
If you’re basing all this on your notion of determinism and lack of free will (as best I understand it from reading some of your previous writing on the subject), however, and no one is really responsible for their actions to the extent that punishment (as opposed to rehab or security) can be justified, why do you write so forcefully about people who do anything you disagree with, e.g., creationism, adoption of a state religion, anti-semitism disguised as islamophiia or oppressedophilia? They couldn’t help themselves any more than anyone else. You could say you’re doing rehab or you could say that you cannot help responding in the way that you do because – after all – that’s determined too. Am I I missing a motive (or should I say cause) or do I have that right?
Having gone through all that, I’m not aware of any criminal law that allows for determinism as a general rule. Offhand I would say that the criminal law is based on “compatibilist” free will or a uniquely legal version of free will.
I can’t really use the concept of ‘determinism’. If we are to excuse criminals for ‘only doing what their genes told them to do’, then they would have to excuse us for putting them in prison for the rest of their lives. To me, it looks like ‘turtles all the way down’, with determinism. I don’t support the death penalty any more. I have argued from both sides, but now I prefer to not kill people. It seems unquestionably ‘nicer’.
It’s not about excusing or assigning blame, be it the criminals or the justice system/society, or anyone else.
It’s about building better, safer, and happier society—and that can be done only based on reason, not evolutionary primitive emotions of hate and retribution.
What if reason and empiricism demonstrate that humans (with their emotions and irrational behavior) form the safest and happiest societies when they are allowed to punish wrongdoers, even if that punishment were technically unnecessary?
If reciprocity and punishing social “defectors” are instinctual, part of our evolutionary adaptational package, then it may be the case that human society is more peaceful and stable when we do it compared to when we don’t do it. Well, until we evolve those instincts way…in a few thousand generations.
Well, then the punishment *is* technically necessary, and in that case, yes, we should go for it. However, that’s what we pretty much have at the moment, and it does not work too well.
The whole point of civilization and culture is to curb our primitive instincts, without having to wait thousands of generations. To do this, we should have a clear understanding between reason vs instinct talking.
To add to the latter point, I also support Sam Harris and others who are trying to popularize meditation practice—if one trains their brain this way, then the instinctual not-so-useful emotions have much less sway, again no evolution over thousands of generations necessary…
I’m glad that modern western society has largely lost its bloodthirst, but I suspect that our instincts for ‘fair play’ will always require some amount of punishment or at least not-really-voluntary public self-flagellation (figurative, not literal) by the guilty party. And its not just conservatives that feel that way: I would consider things like the Ferguson or older Rodney King riots as examples of liberals voicing their displeasure at the idea of an unpunished crime.
I do not really see why moral responsibility is about whether one had a chance to act otherwise as one did or not. Is it not , as the word itself says, about the ability to reasonably respond to the question: “why did you do this?”? Which means to understand the motives one had and to understand the consequences of ones actions.
Humans do anyway have a quite good sense of proportion about who can be held responsible for his actions and who not.
While I do fully agree that basically no one is responsible for who he is and what he does, it is our privilege as human animals to be able to o v e r t a k e responsibility for ourselves and what we do.
In many cases we may learn only afterwards about our responsibility – when we are held responsible by others and properly informed why.
It is interesting to note that the family of an 8-year-old boy slain in the bombing and a young girl who lost a leg in the bombing, are against the execution. According to CBC:
In other words, executing someone with its lengthy appeal process, etc. doesn’t just cost more $$ but more in emotional strife.
Preface: (1) I am a compatibilist, (2) I am against the death penalty.
Jerry, I understand your argument but I’m not sure I agree. As far I can tell, the idea is “don’t kill people because their actions are determine and they can’t take moral responsibility”. But if this line of reasoning is expanded, then no one should be punished or rewarded for basically anything.
Why is the death penalty the special case here? Or can this be extended to all punishment? Do we want to live in a world with no punishment at all?
Just wondering what your thoughts are.
Determinism equally justifies the opposite (hardline approach) too: “there is no reason to eliminate the death penalty, because our use of it is determinant and we don’t bear moral responsibility for doing it.”
Determinism excludes the existence of moral responsibility, it doesn’t justify any bad behavior.
It justifies all behaviors equally. The murder itself and then the incarceration in response or the execution in response. They are all deterministic.
Determinism cannot say what’s good or wrong.
It doesn’t justify or condemn any behavior at all. It’s completely agnostic about that.
It’s a statement about the nature of reality.
It’s logical conclusion is that you are just lucky or unlucky to do the things you did. You cannot really take credit or blame for your actions, but your actions and choices can still have bad or good outcomes.
The libertarian would say I murdered him because I did want it and my victim deserved it.
A compatibilist like Hume would say I murdered him because of my bad character and I was provoked by the victims bad character.
A determinist would say I and my victim where just unlucky.
I won’t speak for Jerry, but in my view yes, we do. But this is a *limiting case*. One need not try to do everything at once.
(This is a missing axis on the “political compass” – revolutionary/evolutionary.)
That’s where the Abrahamic faiths make real harm—they are incompatible, at the core, with the determinist arguments, since the God is going to judge people for their actions, which they supposedly were free to choose to do or not to do.
The deterministic arguments is a hard pill to swallow even for many non-religious people, as they go against the deeply entrenched cognitive illusion of us having a distinct self/soul that makes choices. Now for a religious person it’s simply impossible to accept the determinism/absence of free will, unless they forgo their religious beliefs first.
That’s where religion stands on the way of true compassion and morality, as they bias the justice system towards the punitive, retribution aspect, instead of concentrating on the restorative aspects.
Not quite true. Look up Calvinist pre-destination, the doctrine that God made each of us, knowing and deciding there and then whether each of us was destined for hell.
What an evil god they have…
I remember from high school the Jesuits telling us that Thomas Aquinas said much the same thing, that bad people were put here by god as examples of evil.
The ‘free will’ concept is of course not true on a theoretical level. There is no such thing, I agree. However, in practice there are so many parameters (if I may use that disgusting term) involved, that it may appear to exist. And we do *feel* like being in some degree of control. How many times we chose this, while we could -in our opinion- just as well have chosen that? I
Is my infidelity inevitable? My embezzling? My bad (or not) drinking habits? My parking in the wrong place? The size of my tip? I mean, in practice the concept of ‘free will’ is still some how *useful*.
I’ve always been opposed to the death penalty, since when emotions go high the demand for it is highest. But when emotions go high, we’re also most likely to make mistakes. Which implies executing innocents.
The best argument in favour of the death penalty, as alluded to by Anthony Paul, is that confinement without the possibility of parole may be even more inhuman than execution.
And another one, of course is that an executed sociopath cannot terrorise society anymore.
Still, weighing the pro’s and con’s, I’m still not really in favour of the death penalty.
I don’t see how your arguments for are anything close to the best but whatever makes you conclude it’s a bad idea.
To me the possibility of executing the innocent is right up there. The much higher cost is always something to consider. The legal mess that the death penalty creates is very large. How many jurist you must grind through just to find 12 people who are okay with it. And so then, are those the 12 you would have otherwise picked if you did not have to concentrate on that one thing? The death penalty is truly an old fashion idea that should go and most countries understand this.
Randy, I do not really understand your response. I clearly stated that one of the strongest arguments against the death penalty is executing innocents. And that in cases where we want to see death we are most prone to make mistakes. I think we are in complete agreement there. We see eye to eye there methinks.
However, there are some instances where the death penalty *might* have had some beneficial effect. Say, if the officers of the Confederate army had been hanged, we probably would not have had the KKK. If Saddam’s officers had been executed, we would probably not have this farcical IS (Daesh) with its horrendous executions….
Well, we can see this by asking prisoners whether they favor life without parole or execution. I suspect most would want to live.
I would greatly prefer to be executed rather than imprisoned for life in a US prison. Personally I think we should do away with the whole argument by simply offering convicts the choice. They get imprisoned upon conviction and then if at any point they request execution and then request it again one month later – to give time for reconsideration – they are executed.
But that would be voluntary euthanasia and everyone knows it is offensive to G*d to allow people to die if they want to and have good reasons to wish it. It’s only people who don’t want to die that we can righteously kill.
[/sarcasm]
Killing him would make him a martyr and he’d go to paradise and get his 72 or 75 virgins. It would glorify islam.
A greater punishment is to rot in solitary confinement for 50 or 60 years, die there and we will forget his name.
+1
Sub
“In the end, retribution always comes down to the notion that the criminal could have done otherwise.”
Agreed for the most part, the exceptions being compatibilists like Stephen Morse and Michael Moore who don’t suppose the offender could have done otherwise in the actual situation, but nevertheless stick to retributivism. Getting them to change their minds is probably impossible, but at least Dennett parts company with them, since he abjures retribution in favor of strictly consequentialist justifications for punishment (see his review of Bruce Waller’s Against Moral Responsibility). Now, if he would stop talking about giving people their “just deserts” he’d be totally in the progressive determinist camp when it comes to criminal justice reform.
I do not understand how it can be stated that Tsarnaev had no choice but to commit the massacre, because humans actions are determined and choice is an illusion, yet jurors and judges HAVE a real choice about whether to give Tsarnaev the death penalty.
Or, if they also have no choice, what is there to be discussed?
Because all of the discussions and deliberations are inputs that affect everyone involved.
That reply, so often repeated here, has never been anything but a non-sequitur to the coherency-problem posed above.
ALL our “inputs and outputs” are capable of influencing one another. But that includes bad arguments (containing inconsistencies) as well as good ones. The question posed isn’t “might the argument under question affect the behavior of someone else?” Certainly it might. The question is “Does the argument rest on an internal contradiction?”
That latter question, the one actually being asked, is left unanswered by simply pointing out that arguments can affect other people.
I oppose the death penalty for all the reasons given in your first paragraph. Determinism (or lack of it) doesn’t really enter into it for me.
However:
I really dislike this line of argument, for several reasons.
On the usual meaning of “environment”, it denies the role of cognition in human behavior. If, perversely, you define “environment” to include internal mental events (plus anything else that may affect behavior), then you’ve essentially stripped it of any useful meaning; “genes and environment” becomes no more informative than saying that actions are determined by “shoes, plus everything that’s not a shoe”.
It elides the important distinction between machines in good working order and malfunctioning machines, between people who are morally competent and therefore open to persuasion or deterrence, and those who are not.
Most chilling, it defines dissent from social norms as a form of mental illness. I would not want to live in a society in which, say, Martin Luther King’s civil disobedience earned him a straitjacket and a rubber room. I don’t believe you want that either. But it seems to me that that’s the logical endpoint of this line of thinking: that human beings are merely programmable robots, that it’s the state’s job to program them for conformity, and that non-conformists shall be reprogrammed if possible or quarantined if not possible.
In my view, a humanistic society should be based on the notion that we are self-programming robots, capable of moral reasoning, and at least partly the authors of our own characters (via the cumulative effects of our past decisions). The emphasis then should be on training us to exercise our volition thoughtfully, to help us become our best selves, rather than on characterizing our mistakes as the inevitable products of “genes and environment” which we needn’t own because it wasn’t “really” us who made them.
When speaking of crime, it’s often best to speak of deviation from norms rather than violation of mores. That allows the question of the value of deviation.
Regarding this specific subject of ‘genes and environment’ I’m curious to how determinists respond to Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl …”
“If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone. I became acquainted,” Frankl continued, “with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment–or, as the Nazi liked to say, of ‘Blood and Soil.’ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.”
The first question in my mind is *is the determinist claim true*? It seems to be, so then what? Suppose it really had those ghastly consequences suggested? Do we not talk about it? Suppress the speech of those who who hold the view? What?
Or is this a “Bill Joy” / “Donald Rumsfeld” argument where if there is even the slightest possibility of something being true (false) you shouldn’t even investigate the opposite because the results are too disastrous?
In any case, Frankl is also wrong, because the Nazi philosophers were often traditionalists of various sorts – though I suspect Heidegger, for example, would refuse to discuss the subject as “too metaphysical” or whatever term of abuse came to mind.
Which determinist claim? That there’s only one possible future, fixed forever at the moment of the Big Bang? As I understand it, that’s a minority position even among physicists; most interpretations of quantum mechanics allow for multiple possible futures, either chosen at random (Copenhagen) or running in parallel (Everett). So I’m somewhat surprised to see so many commenters here eagerly declaring their commitment to determinism. Do they know something Sean Carroll doesn’t?
Or perhaps the determinist claim you’re referring to is the idea that behavior is fully determined by “genes and environment”. But as I pointed out above, this claim is either false (if it excludes mental events) or vacuous (if it’s of the all-inclusive “shoes-plus-non-shoes” flavor).
Maybe the claim is a more modest sort of genetic determinism, that we are primarily what our genes make us, with certain ingrained tendencies that are difficult to overcome. But this claim can’t account for our detailed behavior in the moment; it can’t by itself justify the conclusion that “we couldn’t have done otherwise”.
So maybe we’re down to “the laws of physics made me do it” (even if those laws are not fully deterministic). This at least has the merit of being true in the sense that all mental events have physical causes (a position usually known as physicalism, not determinism). But if the claim is that nothing but physics matters, then you’ve just thrown out “genes and environment” along with neurons, thoughts, and intentions as irrelevantly epiphenomenal.
You can’t have it both ways. If genes have real causal power, then so do intentions, and we are in fact responsible for our own behavior, by virtue of the fact that the causal chain flows through our brains.
Yes, self-determinism!
Except one is not responsible for one’s intentions – they are not self-originated, or come from times from before one’s age of reason (whatever that is), etc.
IOW, Kane’s worry.
To paraphrase Dennett, if Jerry can reasonably be considered the author of Why Evolution Is True and Faith vs. Fact, then there’s equal justification for saying he’s the author of his intentions to write those books. Both the books and the intentions are the products of his life experience, shaped by years of reflection and decision-making on his part.
Saying that Jerry didn’t create those things is like saying that beavers don’t build dams. Creating intentions is what our brains evolved for.
Curious analogy.
You appear to be implying that either fact can be altered. What does it mean to say “he’s the author of his intentions”? What do you mean by “intentions”? Is an intention a decision that’s been made, or a desire, a willingness? And what does it mean to “be the author of”? Do you really want the word “creator”? In any event, it’s a slippery slope. One certainly doesn’t “author” one’s desires. One’s desires can be modified, but one can’t author or create them. So, are intentions desires modified by other factors?
Yet even so, as a criminal can’t be blamed for his or her act, neither can Jerry be blamed for writing said book. He didn’t have any more choice about writing that book that about having the intention to write that book. When does choice have the opportunity to slip into the equation? Do you think that intentions can be altered without altering input or equation? How would that work?
We’re too deep here for prolonged back-and-forth, so I’ll try to be brief.
I didn’t say anything about altering facts.
Words like “intention”, “author”, “choice” and so on have clear, well-established meanings. Anyone who disputes those meanings forfeits the right to accuse compatibilists of playing word games.
We have some control over our own desires. Our thoughts and decisions are part of the causal chain that builds our future selves, just as the beaver’s actions build his dam. To say that we have nothing to do with it is to smuggle in dualism by divorcing “us” from “the action of our brains”.
If Jerry’s not the author of his books, then I guess the royalties should be paid to the laws of physics.
I’m not sure if you’re pulling my leg or not. Surely, you understood what I was saying.
Well, sure, but those words say nothing about whether or not there is anything called free will, whatever that may be. Sure, the volcano caused the lava to flow down the hill, but I’m not sure it was intentional. I’m not convinced I have any choice about writing what I’m writing; and I haven’t heard anyone explain how I could have a choice. How does freedom, the concept of freedom, affect choice? Freedom has nothing to do with evaluation.
I alluded to that when I said we can modify our desires, but that process of modification is also innate and is subject to the same internal rules that our other desires are. The desire to modify a desire is also a desire, right? Has to be, no? So the control we have over our desires is illusory.
The basic problem remains that there’s no place for “freedom” to sneak into an algorithmic process.
Your task is figure out where the “free” in free will is. So far, no one has figured it out, but you may get lucky.
Jerry’s the author, but he had no choice but to write the book.
Last reply for me in this thread.
To me, the question of “where’s the freedom?” is a red herring. I don’t care whether you consider intentions and choices “free” or not. The use of the word “free” in this context is largely a historical accident, and I have no particular attachment to it.
The important point is that choosing is a real phenomenon; we have a vast repertoire of potential behaviors we’re capable of, from which we must select a particular behavior to match a given circumstance. The fact that the selection process might be deterministic is irrelevant; the choices are still ours in the dual sense that (a) choosing is what our brains are for, and (b) a different brain would make different choices.
Okay, you are a strict determinist; I’d misinterpreted what you’d written. But I’d drop the word “free,” as it taints the issue. Makes it look like you think there’s such a thing as free will.
Why not just ask Dzhokhar Tsarnaev if he prefers death or life imprisonment? That seems fair.
Consider:
Person_A : Thinks death is inhumane.
Person_B : Thinks life imprisonment is inhumane.
Both of these persons have reasonable arguments to support their claims and not necessarily based on revenge or indifferent to determinism.
(I find the death penalty aesthetically unpleasant, like a really bad movie that has no point and is a waste of time.)
They are both inhumane. One is irreversible. Add to that the corrupt “justice” system…
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2015/04/fbi_s_flawed_forensics_expert_testimony_hair_analysis_bite_marks_fingerprints.html
Every criminal should be treated as insane and if a danger to society isolated and rehabilitated until they can be reasonably declared by experts to no longer be a danger.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2015/04/22/401532715/man-who-shot-reagan-seeks-release-from-mental-hospital
Rehabilitation needs to be approached scientifically with the practical (utilitarian) aim of re-making the individuals into functioning members of society. I have no idea how this is done, but its getting better at what we presently do.
I don’t see why he should get imprisonment for live. Why not treat him like other mentally ill people and treat him for his illness until he’s cured?
In principal, I think just about everyone that is against retributive justice would agree. The issue currently is that we don’t know how to do that. There has been some research on doing so, and we should invest much more in it. But right now the success rate is dismal and our ability to accurately determine if treatment has been effective on an individual basis is even worse. Until after the fact.
If we compare countries in the western world soft or not soft on crime, we see more or less the same trends. Other factors seem more important than toughness on crime.
The fall of crime and the “zero tolerance policy” in the U.S. seems to be a coincidence and the price is much too high.
I don’t advocate shorter sentencing; it should be as long as necessary. If that means longer (but humane) incarceration, that would be fine with me.
The families he traumatized should be %100 certain he will never kill again. Letting him out on a promise he will good this time?
Typo: will BE good
It doesn’t have to be *merely* a verbal promise: this is, IMO, where psychologists are doing important work. For example, psychopaths can be taught “fake empathy”, which is *worse*, because then they sound (verbally) sympathetic, etc. but aren’t.
Never mind the reasons for not executing; there aren’t any valid reasons for executing.
Deterrence? Doesn’t work like that — and, if it did, the same reasoning would justify shooting petty thieves on sight if caught in the act.
Preventing recidivism? You can do that just as well with lifetime incarceration.
And all the other reasons boil down to some form of bloodlust.
With no valid justification for satiating the thirst for vengeance, there’s simply no excuse for state-sanctioned murder under any circumstances. The arguments against execution are superfluous.
b&
Makes sense to me.
In this case, execution makes him a martyr for islam. Confine him for life and we’ll try to forget him.
Excellent point!
Random thoughts on the death penalty:
1. While I agree that criminal behavior may develop in certain individuals more than in others due to genetic inheritance, lack of loving, caring parents and the culture one lives and learns in, this influences the 90% of knowledge stored in our unconscious mental data base that can be accessed and displayed in the
10% conscious mind. The data that’s stored may be deterministic, but conscious
decision-making can make choices.
2. Ghetto living and poverty definitely influence criminality. We could improve lives and environments of all of us by addressing these problems up front rather than later with incarcerations and deaths.
3. As is known, incarceration is not a deterrent to criminal behavior. It is well known that prisons are “colleges” for inmates to learn new, additional criminal skills. Two-thirds or more of prison inmates that are subsequently released from prison commit crimes again and, often, are returned to prison. This recidivism rate was true of California Youth Authority juvenile incarcerations in the 70s according to a course I took on the Juvenile Justice System. Every effort was made to prevent juveniles from entering juvenile prisons that increased their criminal contacts and knowledge.
4. I have been told by a prison guard (and have read) that most prisoners given a death sentence die of old age in prison.
5. It would be interesting to know the true costs of policing and the justice system to get crime off the street (which is unsuccessful) vs. the penal system to keep crime off the street (which is unsuccessful). Neither seem to work.
6. As is known, many innocent people entangled by police and the justice system end up being imprisoned and/or killed. I don’t know how to prevent this injustice but, it should not happen.
I apologize to all of you for adding my non-scientific comments to the mix. “Unconscious” and “Conscious” referents to the mind or brain
is pretty out of date. I need to read many more current materials on neuroscience.
I do appreciate the cogent information and rational conversations.
I find the “no free will” argument less persuasive than any of the others you offered at the start. And the main reason is that I don’t think whether or not someone deserves to killed, is a valid reason to kill them in the first place.
This applies to any lesser punishment as well. If the only reason you can offer for rapping someone across the knuckles is that they deserve to be rapped across the knuckles, then you don’t have a valid reason for rapping them across the knuckles.
I must admit I disagree with Jerry’s use of the word choice in …
no criminal had any choice about what he/she did
We make choices all the time … so does my excel spreadsheet, especially with a few Boolean logic functions thrown in. It is the nature of the choice we should be aware of.
“…determinists like me agree that no criminal had any choice about what he/she did..”
But then it would logically follow that we have no choice about anything, including whether there is a death penalty or not.
You seriously misunderstand determinism and libertarian free will. Just because we can’t do anything other than what we do at any moment does not mean that we cannot change society or other people’s minds. We don’t have a choice about doing that–we do it or don’t do it–but our actions, which are influenced by our genes and environment, can get rid of the death penalty. Nope, we don’t get to choose that freely as opposed to anything else, but our actions can influence it, as I hope my essay did (an essay, by the way, that I had no choice about writing).
Or do you believe that we really do have true libertarian free will, and you’re neither an incompatibilist or a compatibilist?
For determinists, isn’t change only possible in the sense of a 2-ball changing the position of the 8-ball after it is smacked by a cue-ball. It is in that sense I mean that we have no choice about whether the death penalty exists or not, the causal chain is just more complex.
The whole determinist position is odd to me. Take situation A: Someone much stronger than me grabs my hand, puts a gun into it, forces me to pull the trigger and kills someone. Situation B: I pick up a gun and kill someone. Literally, these two situations are part of a large causal chain, a chain where there was no choice. Not only should neither person go to jail, neither should be judged.
But perhaps I do “seriously misunderstand determinism”.
Prof. Coyne, I completely agree with your determinist argument against the death penalty, but I can’t help but wonder if this specific case is somewhat different.
If someone commits an act of terrorism because of their belief system (e.g. Islam), then that seems different than committing the same act because of their genes. In the latter case, it seems easy to argue that the person could not have done otherwise because it’s simply who he is, but in the former case, it makes me wonder, had he not succumbed to the teachings of Islam, would he have done it? Granted, it still probably takes a certain genetic makeup to allow oneself to commit such an act, but without Islam as a catalyst, is it right to say he never would have NOT done it?
Or is this less important than I’m making it out to be?
I think the deterministic answer is he had no choice but to succumb to Islam; a belief system is not an example of having free will to believe in said system and act in accordance to it. It’s determinism all the way down.
I understand that, but the initial exposure to Islam seems like an accident of birth or circumstance.
I understand your point, but the circumstances of birth puts everybody on the initial road so to speak. Your parent’s religion, race, social status, geography are all accidents per se. But I think determinism starts once you are born, and the path is set. I’m a reluctant determinist, because I don’t understand how being involved in an accident you didn’t cause is somehow determined. For me it gets fuzzy when “being in the wrong place at the wrong time” is somehow determined. Those airline passengers in the German suicide crash comes to mind. It’s these interconnections with other random people and/or events that I find hard to wrap my head around; what choice to I have in other’s choices?
Right, that’s sort of what I was getting at. It seems almost as if we can’t blame religion for any misdeeds if we also want to say that the person was going to do it anyway.
And yet I also get the feeling that I’m just conceiving of this in the wrong way, and it is like you said, determinism all the way down. We may be getting lost in the details.
Also, for some reason I’m posting as anonymous, but it’s still me from the original comment.
Interesting that Clarence Darrow successfully used the determinism argument in 1924 to save Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb from execution for the murder of Bobby Franks.
Darrow: “This terrible crime was inherent in his organism, and it came from some ancestor… Is any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche’s philosophy seriously and fashioned his life upon it?… It is hardly fair to hang a 19-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university….. [excerpt from wikipedia]”
Probably hard to find a jury who’d listen to such an argument today, even if the blame was being shifted to philosophy professors!
(I’m coming into this discussion late after a 400+ drive, so apologies if someone else raised this and my bleary eyes missed it!)
There’s cognitively impaired, and then there’s cognitively impaired. Even accepting, as I do, the determinist position that we are all the products of our genes and environment — that anyone who commits a crime is, perforce, operating under a kind of cognitive impairment — there are, in contradistinction, some offenders who suffer from such debilitating mental problems that they cannot appreciate the nature and consequence of their actions, cannot distinguish lawful from unlawful conduct, cannot, in essence, tell right from wrong. This is the old common-law standard for “insanity” in jurisdictions following the so-called M’Naghten Rule.
(Some US jurisdictions also traditionally recognized an “irresistible impulse”-type insanity. This is the defense that the attorney played by Jimmy Stewart tread a fine ethical line in coaching his client, Ben Gazzara, to testify about at his trial for murdering his wife’s rapist in the Otto Preminger-directed (and Duke Ellington-scored!) film “Anatomy of a Murder.”)
Thing is, most US jurisdictions no longer follow the M’Naghten Rule or recognize the irresistible-impulse defense. Most have tightened their insanity-defense standards considerably since John Hinckley’s acquittal by reason of insanity for the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. (The Hinckley case did for the insanity defense, per the metaphor coined in another context by Norman Mailer, what pantyhose did for finger-banging — to wit, made it very difficult, if not damned-near impossible, to accomplish successfully.) It is (and always was, even under the old M’Naghten standard) a desperation defense, used as a last resort when no other factual or legal defense presents itself. Discussions of it have, therefore, been rendered largely academic.
In this regard, determinism and our current justice system are so orthogonal — the concepts of “moral culpability” and its concomitant, “free will,” so far ingrained into our extant criminal-justice model, and so far incompatible with determinism — that discussion of the two is also largely academic. (The OP correctly identifies a few of the current system’s rationales for punishment by imprisonment that are consistent with determinism’s goals — incapacitation of the offender, deterrence of others, rehabilitation. But those rationales are not now used in anything like a deterministic regime — under which, I should think, an offender would be sequestered from society until rehabilitation was established, rather than for a term of years based on the offender’s culpability and the blameworthiness of his crime, as is the current case.
Under the current system, every crime requires both an actus reus and a mens rea — respectively, a voluntary act, done with a culpable state of mind (generally either willfulness, knowledge, recklessness, or negligence). Would a system based on determinism do away with notions of culpability and blameworthiness entirely, in favor of system based on pure consequentialism? Would we punish someone who innocently commits an act resulting in grave harm the same as someone who does the act with what is now considered a culpable mental state — someone who drives off the new-car lot and accidentally kills a pedestrian due to defective brakes, the same as someone who intentionally runs down the pedestrian, the same as one whose brake failure results from a negligent failure to have them repaired?
For that matter, determinism seems to call into question the whole concept of punishment by imprisonment itself. What of the offender who can show rehabilitation before being adjudicated guilty? There is still the deterrence rationale, but I (as a humanist) have difficulty with putting people to completely utilitarian purposes, especially when it mandates denying them their liberty based on vague notions of sending a message to some amorphous community of other potential offenders.
Aren’t there better ways of going about it, from a determinism viewpoint, than imprisonment anyway? Shouldn’t our efforts be directed, in the first instance, at fixing the offender’s “cognitive impairment”? What of the offender who voluntarily undergoes treatment foreclosing recidivism — the sex offender, say, who volunteers for chemical castration via Depo Provera? (Such ideas trigger recollections of the “Ludovico technique” employed by the fictional penologists in Anthony Burgess’s novel, and Stanley Kubrick’s film, A Clockwork Orange. Although I don’t think we should reject potentially efficacious remedies out-of-hand based on their inherent squick factor, much less on a movie scene that creeped us out, there are serious issues meriting serious thought and discussion raised by such scenarios. And given how deeply ingrained moral culpability is in our current concepts, little such serious thinking, and less serious discussion, has yet taken place. So far as I know, there are no bona fide proposals — certainly, none based on determinism (which little of the public now understands or accepts) beyond the preliminary “thought problem” stage — for what ought to replace our current criminal justice system, should we someday chose (using that word ill-advisedly) to abandon it.
As usual, this post, along with the many comments, which includes the concept of “determinism” is very interesting and thought provoking. However, I disagree with you on one side issue: “If we were to rerun history, the results would be the same.” I think the “results” could be different. This holds whether we are thinking macro-level (where we live) or quantum level effects. I have two reasons.
1. The proposition can’t be tested because history can’t be rerun. We should always be skeptical of propositions that can’t be tested.
2. S. Hawking has said in one of the many science TV programs he has done in recent years that a basic law of physics is that “Nothing is perfect.” He used that law to explain why, in the early universe, when atoms (mostly hydrogen and some helium) first formed they did not spread out equi-distantly from each other as the universe expanded. Just a few out of positioned atoms began to clump “encouraging” others to do the same, forming gaseous clouds and, eventually, stars, planets, etc. If history could be rerun, then this same law might cause “events” to turn out differently.
Therefore, I think the “If history could be re-run. . .” argument is a poor one to make.
Agree
I don’t think Jerry is claiming if we could rerun an action it would be identical. This is a common misconception.
Now if our idea of free will is that our actions are a result of some cosmological dice shaker, then fair enough.
But on the whole I disagree.
And if we are in the business of quoting Hawking … then this is good:
the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets…so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion
and
Quantum physics might seem to undermine the idea that nature is governed by laws, but that is not the case. Instead it leads us to accept a new form of determinism: Given the state of a system at some time, the laws of nature determine the probabilities of various futures and pasts rather than determining the future and past with certainty.
Remediating social, political, and ideological influences for detrimental behavior is more important than destroying those under its influence. Irrational actors are not born in a vacuum.
Before I start, I am opposed to the death penalty for several reasons but not the ones I discuss below.
Neither of these are actually arguments against the death penalty per se.
The first is an indication of deeper seated problems than that the death penalty is racist. If you abolished the death penalty tomorrow, you’ll find you are sending more black people than white people to prison instead. The problem is not that capital punishment is racist but that black people are disproportionately being convicted of the crimes that currently lead to capital punishment. I suspect racism is endemic to the whole justice system. Certainly, US police forces have not been covering themselves in glory over the last few months.
The second is not a problem with the principle of the death penalty, just the means by which it is implemented. Just find a more reliable and humane way way of killing people – not that all of the supporters of the death penalty will agree that is a good idea. Some of them would argue “who cares if a multiple murderer and rapist dies in a horrible way”.
On your first point, it’s not just a matter of disproportionate conviction rates. Of those convicted, blacks are sentenced to death more often than whites.
In other words, when asked “Should this convicted murderer die?”, judges and juries are more likely to say Yes if the defendant is black. That in itself seems like a pretty good reason for not asking the question.
Reminds me of the hammering I got from the pharynguloids some years back when arguing that the right to vote in a democracy should be based on meeting some standard of education rather than just age. “That’s racist!” I was told.
When in fact it’s so bleedingly obvious!
Far be it from me to give aid and comfort to that crowd, but you should recognize that, in making that argument, you’re staring into the teeth of the nasty, racist history of Jim Crow-era literacy tests.
How would you go about establishing the standard for minimum education? (Would you recognize a degree from LSU, where the college boys go in dumb & come out dumb, too, according to Randy Newman’s song Rednecks.) And if we’re requiring minimum standards of education, how about minimum income and property-ownership standards, too — to ensure that revenue-raising proposals get voted on by those with a tangible stake in the outcome?
I think these topics are all foreclosed, in any event, by the U.S. Constitution and statutes as interpreted in The Supremes’ Voting Rights and one man/one vote jurisprudence.
In any event, your underlying concerns might be better addressed were we to make voting as convenient and available as possible — at least as convenient and available as voting for an American Idol contestant — but cease the incessant appeals and encouragement for eveyone registered to vote — so that the interested and informed could self-select from the dullards and willfully ignorant.
But that doesn’t solve the problem of people voting the way their preacher tells them to. Or of vanloads of uninformed people being trucked to the polls by one party or another. It’s the Dems, I think, who thought to take people from mental institutions to the polls. (Which is not to say that some of them might still manage to be up on the latest politics; but we have to remember that in this day, only the very severely impaired are ever institutionalized.) It doesn’t address the problem of people being paid to vote one way or another. It doesn’t deal with the fact that at some polling locations today people can almost literally stand over your shoulder and watch how you’re voting.
I agree, though, that in reality it’s almost impossible to devise any screening mechanism that wouldn’t be hugely prone to abuse and corruption itself.
As someone pointed out, quoting the family who had lost a child, the long drawn out appeal process would keep the tragedy in their lives for years to come. That’s the problem. I would suspect that that family would support the death penalty if it were carried out in a timely manner, and as far as I’m concerned, the next day. Over and done with. This defendant knew what he was doing, whether he thought it right or wrong is irrelevant. What he did, given the core moral values of this and most all societies, deserves death. Also we certainly wouldn’t wouldn’t want this cockroach procreating to fulfill his evolutionary imperative.
I am firmly opposed to the death penalty myself. However, this is a truly mad argument. The idea that nobody can be held morally accountable for anything that they do is a dangerous one. Arguing that people do not have choices – that their actions are predetermined is a slippery slope. According to this line of thought, people cannot and should not be expected to make changes or attempt to make changes in their behaviour. Furthermore, is there any point in trying to improve society when things are simply fated to happen? Just an insane argument with very insidious connotations.
Secondly, in reference to a particular point you made in this article, how can punishment be a deterrent if people would have carried out their actions anyway? It is logically fallacious to suggest that imprisonment would deter somebody whose actions are already predetermined.
You clearly don’t understand determinism or this argument. Just because things are fated to happen doesn’t mean that what we see in someone’s behavior can’t be changed by intervention. That, after all, is something that affects the brain. And it’s CLEARLY true that changing behavior works. Try kicking a dog every time you meet it and see what it does to its behavior! Yes, whether or not you’re fated to kick the dog is also determined, but that doesn’t mean that efforts to change behavior don’t work
Are you religious or a dualist? Because otherwise determinism must be true on first principles, and in fact the majority of philosophers believe in it, regardless of what they see as our “free will.”
For the same reason, punishment can be a deterrent. If you see someone punished for doing something, you’re less liable to do that. We are, after all, evolved beings whose computer programs tell us to maximize our well being (and reproduction.
The only person who could write something like the above is a dualist, perhaps a religious one. Regardless, your comment is rude (“truly mad argument”, seriously? It’s an argument that evidence suggests is true, unlike your little-person-in-the-head dualism..
You are new here, but you apparently don’t know the rules about being civil. So either apologize and make your points politely from now on, or go elsewhere.