[ExI] Humans losing freewill

[John Clark]

On Sun, Nov 20, 2016 at 3:43 PM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:

​> ​
> In the absence of compelling data, we assume that a person meant to do
> what they did, and use that as the basis for a legal decision.
> ​ ​
> Determinism fits in here too:  we have to assume it in criminal cases,
>

​Well yes. Nobody is saying that events never have causes, just that they
don't always.
The only useful purpose for criminal law is to stop someone who hurt
somebody else from doing it again and to deter others from doing something
similar; that is to say criminal law causes people to behave in certain
ways and civilization would be impossible without it.
 ​
>
>
> ​> ​
> just like free will, even though both constructs are arguable.


​I can say nothing about "free will" because I don't know what it means.​


​> ​
> When something better comes along, we may have to change
> our way of thinking about people and re-write our entire legal system.
> But for now, we have no good alternatives.
>

​How about treating it as irrelevant if a person is a moral monster because
he had bad genes or a bad environment and instead punish him if and only if
doing so will prevent him from doing bad stuff again and or deter others.
​If you can explain why
​somebody is a monster that doesn't stop him from being a monster, and I
don't care if he's insane or not.​

John K Clark
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