Gurdur

While your post is not addressed to me, pardon me if I answer it, since it's a nice clear exposition of the consequences of the determinist stance, and you ask that all-important question.

If and only if psychological determinism is completely true in the non-trivial sense, then it would make no sense to distinguish between criminal insanity and non-insane crime ---- meaning that all sanctions against crime would be "medicalized", i.e. all psychiatric hospitals and no prisons.

The attempts towards this have been routinely stymied mainly by five factors:

1) The level of knowledge regarding causation and mental processes

2) What to other people seems very clear evidence of free-will and moral culpability

3) The difficulties in "treatment" of the criminally insane - when do you allow a patient loose ?
What are you allowed to do to the patient in the pursuit of "treatment / rehabilitation " ?
(remember the days when non-voluntary frontal lobotomies were all the rage in the 1930's in the USA ?)

4) The incoherencies and contradictions within the various determinist camps regarding theory and practice

5) and finally, the outcry and revulsion surrounding many cases where inappropriate medicalization of crime has been attempted - apart from the frontal lobotomies cited above in the USA, there is also the question of non-voluntary sterilzations in the USA and elsewhere in the first half of the 20th century and even later, the enforced psychiatric "treatment" (actually what amounted to torture, often) of political dissidents in the Eastern European Communist countries (and the very occasional case in Western countries)

So what determines moral responsibility ?
This is a huge field in the medico-legal area of continual and ongoing research and debate, and really one should start off from all the literature there.
I'll give this question a go myself, though:

What determines moral responsibility is:
<ol type="1">[*]The assumption of (limited) free will[*]Being of medically sound mind[*]including being in the possession of the facility of grammatical language production and comprehension, and other communication as appropriate[*]And being over the age of reason (typically, over the age of around 8 upwards to over 21)[*]not being under duress[/list=a]

[ August 23, 2002: Message edited by: Gurdur ]</p>

Ierrellus

Kip,

Determinism and free will are a false dichotomy. Start from there.

Ierrellus
PAX

Clutch

Let me recommend some helpful reading:

Daniel Dennett, "I Could Not Have Done Otherwise--So What?" Journal of Philosophy (October 1984), 81(10):553-565

Kent Stevens

The general position of people on crime is maybe just biased rather that outright wrong. There are the occasional serial murderer such as Ted Bundy that poses a continuous threat to society and they should be at least locked away. But focusing on someone like Ted Bundy takes away from a more typical murder case.

If you have seen Minority Report the movie stars out with a more typical attempted murder scenario than with a serial murderer. Minority Report has someone attempting to commit murder because of marital infidelity. The attempted murder is not so premeditated but done on the spur of the moment. It could have been called a crime of passion.

In my country at least there are calls by many people to get tough on crime, to increase sentencing periods. Though this seems partly misguided in that tougher sentences will not have much more effect. If more resoureces were spent on things like detection and apprehension this would have more detterent value.

I do not agree with a person from what in my country is called the "Sensible sentencing trust". These people want to put prisoners in jail and throw away the key. I think these people are in part misguided rather than wrong. I am more interested in getting a solution that can be backed up scientifically than releasing my own feelings of retribution. Punishment has a role but we should emphasise more the part that detection and apprehension has to play.

I disagree with Gurdur over free will. But much else of the evidence for criminal prevention that Gurdur presents I agree with. I do not want to get into too much mutual quibbling about it. For example, we usually may not hold children legally responsible for their actions, but we in some way say that they were aware of what they did was wrong.

Kip

I have written the quite simple argument several times here already, but allow me to elaborate on my logic. My argument is founded upon a contradiction. This contradiction is the contradiction between our attitudes towards humans and machines. According to determinism, humans *are* mechanical. And yet, if a computer does something "wrong" we do not blame the computer (although sometimes we may instinctly blame the computer we recognize that such blame is misplaced). We do, however, blame the person. And yet the difference between a robot and a human appears to be one of quantity (number) and not quality (kind), and if we could only "turn the dials" of complexity robots would become quite human without losing or gaining anything that would compromise the argument.

When discussing moral responsibility, I keep asking for a list of attributes necessary for moral responsibility because I suspect that any list of attributes will eventually either be shown to too broad, and apply to systems that, under scrutiny, it should not apply to, or too narrow, and not apply to systems that it should.

Unfortunately, I cannot find any consensus or strong contender for this list of attributes. Compatibilists cite determinism, and yet to libertarians, determinism is exactly what negates moral responsibility. How do we resolve this fundamental disagreement.

Compatibilists have cited determinism and choice as the two essential attributes. But I have attempted to show how these, such as Tronvillain, are equivocating the word "choice" and "options", especially considering the distinction between conceivable options and truly possible options. I suspect that the "missing" attribute compatibalists and libertarians would wish to require for moral responsibility is intelligence and consciousness. That would distinguish human systems from other systems, such as the weather. It is not at all clear, however, why that distinction is relevant.

Considering the lack of consensus, I have some fundamental questions to ask:

1. My foundation of argument is the assumption that we only hold a person morally responsible for his action if he or she had the ability to possibly commit an action other than the action committed.

This is a popular, intuitive idea. We only hold a person responsible for murder if he or she could have not committed murder. We do not blame robots for murder, we blame their programmers. And yet not everyone appears to agree with this idea. Perhaps our intuition has once again misled us? Could we blame someone for murder even if he or she was determined, even destined, to murder? Do we blame someone for murder *only* if that person was determined to murder?

My second question is:

Moral responsibility appears to be largely misplaced or even illusory and yet the illusion is quite convincing, much like the sensation of being free. Are "free will" and "blame" human constructs or "memes" that have been successful because they are adaptive? Does free will have an evolutionary explanation?

tronvillain

Kip:
What are you talking about? We were discussing what people generally mean when they say "I could have done otherwise" and it is my assertion that they do not mean that if the tape was wound back exactly over and over that they would actually make a different choice. When we say "I could have done otherwise" we simply mean that we had other options to choose from when we made our decision.

I deny the conclusion because the premises do not use the word "possible" in the same sense.

Bill summarized my position quite nicely, and I notice that you have thus far completely failed to respond to him:

K

Kip:

As Bill stated earlier, moral responsibility is a human construct. Unlike the robot in your example, human behavior can be influenced by things like punishment. Remember that the determinism we're talking about is based on the current state (which reflects the sum of all past experiences) and the current inputs.

Society punishes individuals for four reasons. First, it is an attempt to modify the future behavior of the individual. Second, the threat of punishment is there to factor into the decisions of idividuals that aren't yet criminals. Third, to protect the rest of society from dangerous individuals. Finally, for the most hopeless cases, the punishment is to remove the individuals from the gene pool.

If the robot in your example had a program that adapted its behavior based on its life experience,
and prison time was a strong negative reinforcement for that robot, you can bet that robots would be going to prison also (if we didn't just deactivate the offenders all together).

Steven Carr

Of course, I gave counter examples where the general public hold somebody morally example although it was not the case that they could have possibly not committed the immoral action.

I gave an example of me setting a time bomb and making no effort whatsoever to defuse it, although, unknown to me, my efforts to defuse it would have failed.

And I gave a counter example of a person where the general public would not hold them morally responsible although they would laugh at the idea that that person 'could not have done anything else'.

I gave an example of a person who in self-defence stabs his mother and shoots his sister. On the ludicrous non-compatibilist system, that person could have shot his mother and stabbed his sister. As that is 'something else', that person could have done something else, yet he would be found not guilty of murder.

So your criteria are shot to pieces and your argument that compatibilism destroys moral responsibility fails.

Steven Carr

GUDRUN

'It's an odd sort of "compatibilism" that holds choices of free will are perfectly determined - have you noticed any randomicity in your enviroment ?'

CARR
It appears to me to be the very essence of compatibilism that choices of free will are perfectly determined. Isn't that what compatibilism means - that free will is compatible with determinism?

It doesn't seem odd to me at all. Perhaps you can tell me what 'compatabilism' means if proponents of compatiblism don't think free will and determinism are compatabile. What do compatabilists think are compatible?

[ August 25, 2002: Message edited by: Steven Carr ]</p>

Kip

This was your original objection. I replied that moral responsibility requires that "people could have done otherwise at that very moment" and not only in the future. You replied that "all THAT means is that they had other options available at that moment". But, as I have already shown, you are equivocating words such as "options" and "choice". According to determinism, there is only one choice or option in the non-trivial sense, therefore there is no choice or options and consequently no moral responsibility.

Your accusation that I am equivocating the word "possible" is a naked assertion for which you provide no argument. Now I will repeat *my* argument that I am using the words equivalently and that this non-trivial sense of "possible" is the sense required for moral responsibility:

This however, is an appeal to human convention, which is NOT an authority. If you agree with this appeal, as I do, I will not dispute the claim. I would not blame someone for something that the person is destined to do. However, if you dispute that "real possibility" is necessary for moral responsibility, I demand that you establish your competing definition as the true requirements for moral responsibility.

That is why I asked you "what is sufficient for moral responsibility?" because who cares what most people believe is sufficient? Most people also believe in God! You finally you cite Bill's answer to the question:

There are many problems with this formulation.

1. This is Bill's "personal" formulation.

2. "No excuse" is a poorly defined and vague "catch-all" phrase for including or excluding behavior at your "whim".

3. Determinism, according to traditional law and common sense, *excludes* people from moral responsibility rather than includes them. Once again I mention the contradiction between our behavior toward people and robots. We do not blame bad robots, we blame their programmers. We do blame people, however, we both agree that people are essentially robotic. What distinction between people and robots justifies this contradiction? Is this distinction included within your conveniently vague "no excuse" condition?

[ August 25, 2002: Message edited by: Kip ]</p>