[ExI] free-will, determinism, crime and punishment

[Bryan Bishop]

Out of the entire discussion I find those two paragraphs to be 
the most notable.

It seems that the "Justice" people dispense is more for the 
emotional benefits such as finally seeing the rapist sent to 
the chair or something. Sending the rapist to the chair will 
of course not fix the problems and in fact 'waste' more 
resources.*

If we were serious about preservation of our systems we would 
instead not have to worry about problems like somebody 
stealing a few items from a store. Instead we would have 
backups, redundancy, an ability to reinitialize a person now 
found dead. But since we are not there yet, since we lack the 
knowledge, it looks like some people hope for there to be 
some "Justice" to dispense.

I am reminded of http://asarya.com/ which is quoted from 
Zindell's Neverness trilogy: "An asarya ... is a person who 
can look upon all aspects of creation and say \Yes\ no matter 
how 'painful' the universe may be." The dispensed "Justice" 
seems to be a way to try to say 'No'. Ouch.

- Bryan

* We cannot actually say it will waste resources; what if the 
rapist can be recovered into a Feynman/Einstein equivalent? 
We of course do not know this, and so focusing on just this 
one particular person looks suspicious- should we not be 
helping out all sorts of people instead of just the ones that 
show up in our Justice System? 

On Saturday 18 August 2007 11:54, gts wrote:
> My hypothetical client was found guilty of premeditated
> murder. The prosecutor is seeking the death penalty because
> he believes in retribution; that is, he believes my client
> deeply and profoundly deserves to die on the grounds that
> he was a free moral agent who could have chosen to do right
> but chose instead to do wrong.
>
> However the prosecution cannot prove that conjecture. I
> insist my client did wrong simply because it was in his
> nature to do wrong. He is a dangerous man with a defective
> nature, but I'm not going to let him die on the electric
> chair for some philosophical hand-waving about what might
> have happened in some contra-universe.