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

[Robert Picone]

On 8/17/07, gts <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Vladimir,
>
> > Retribution/punishment IS a way to enforce lawful behaviour...
>
> Thanks for your comments. I'm not suggesting that punishment has no place
> in our criminal justice system. I mean only that its motivation should be
> rehabilitation and deterrence, not retribution.
>
> It strikes me that retribution is an archaic concept, inconsistent with
> modern science. But people are dying because of it. If you ask people why
> they support capital punishment, you'll hear lots of arguments about
> retribution.
>
> -gts

Retribution -is- an archaic motivation for punishment, yes, but
honestly, I don't think that matters considering it tends to
correspond fairly well with a model focused on the risks/rewards to
society.

If someone was willing to take a life to benefit themselves, then they
are considerably more likely to do it again than the average person,
and as such, releasing them into the general population at any point
in the future is a rather big risk to be weighted with whatever reward
it might produce. so lifetime imprisonment and the death penalty (if
it were done at a reasonable cost) are both reasonable.

On the other hand, for non-capital crimes, there is a sense of how
much they have wronged, and how much they have wronged tends to be
directly related to how much they thought they stood to benefit at the
time.  The amount they stood to benefit is in turn related to how
willing they initially would be to risk getting caught doing it again,
this willingness decreases with punishment.  So the retribution model
seems to be a decent way of assessing future risk to society, if I get
caught doing something that would let me live comfortably for the rest
of my life if successful, and I only lose 6 months of my life for
failing, I'm going to try it again, but if someone estimates the worth
of that amount of harm to be 10 years of my life, I would be
considerably less willing to try it again, and wouldn't be as much of
a risk to society.

The other benefit of people going along with retribution, is it
doesn't bring about bullshit punishments, someone who bought a bag of
marijuana hasn't harmed someone, and thus doesn't deserve any
nontrivial punishment under model.  On the other hand, if the focus is
deterring people from anything that is socially unacceptable, then
then punishing someone for doing a drug, peacefully is perfectly
reasonable.

An example of retribution run rampant is Texas, and I really wouldn't
feel very constrained by it there...  On the other hand, the example
of deterrence run rampant is Singapore, where you face mandatory
hanging if you're found with more than a half ounce of heroin (it
doesn't seem as if they have any magical method for determining that
it is yours).