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

[Michael M. Butler]

Beam me up. I think this sim is <counterfactual working stack
overflowing> and needs rebooting... :) Probably too many words follow.
I apologize in advance and will not post further in this thread...

/rantmode = ON

"My lack of God!"

Am I hallucinating, or is someone seriously proposing -- more than
once -- that nonlethal deterrence of criminal behavior including
punishment works and is somehow appropriate, but that capital
punishment is bad and isn't justified... ...without, apparently,
noticing that the threat of capital punishment juuuust miiight have a
deterrent effect on some people? And most particularly, that its
abolition might be problematical? I sense a lacuna in a world model.
And let's set aside the problems presented by the substrate of the
discussion.

Maybe capital punishment is "right  for the wrong reason." We do seem
to have wiring closely allied with "fairness" and "retribution" is
part of that. Below those constructs might be something as general as
"the universe makes sense and I know my place in it" or "I can relax
for now" -- luxuries in the Hobbesian wild, and part of what makes
civilizations worth some of the bother. Can the universe make sense
without the heuristic we call free will? If so, what kind of a life is
that? For whom? What about people who are just not wired in a way that
lets them act ethical in a world without retribution?

I present a practical contradictory case
   (recent history, local to me, a friend was the victim):

A guy shoots a cop who has arrived in response to a noise complaint on
a secluded residential street. The perp is outside drinking with some
buddies, he is out on parole (with only a few days left to go, btw)
and is carrying two concealed, loaded small arms and some amount of
controlled substance of undisclosed type. The cop's attention is
focused on the next person in the group while he's waiting for a
response from his dispatcher on the first person's ID being run. The
perpetrator shoots the cop once in the face, then stands over him and
puts 6 more rounds into him, then walks over to the patrol car and
puts a bullet into the car radio, and leaves the scene.

The perpetrator is seriously drunk and possibly on other drugs. The
perpetrator's nickname is "Gotti", and this suggests some amount of
semiosis related to gangsta-thug-MS culture.

Now, I have heard from libertarians (and whither libertarian
philosophy, or any philosophy, if the meat machine model is the only
correct one, pray tell?) who think more cops should get shot, because
drugs and guns should be legal, etc., etc. "Pour discourager les
autres".

And I take their point. BUT.

But the guy was on parole and it was his choice to get out of jail
early and accept the reduction of personal rights such as being
frisked. That expectation of being frisked is probably what was on his
mind, and the extrapolated likelihood of his going to jail for
multiple parole violations. His shooting a cop seven times suggests
something. But what?

The defense attorney tried to claim diminished capacity and fear,
meaning that the defendant was incapable of premeditation, so his
client should not get the death penalty.

I am unpersuaded, not least by the foreseeable consequences should the
defendant not receive the death sentence. Say I'm an angry, cop-hating
guy (or just a hypothetical borderline-personality libertarian :) ).
No worries, mate, get fucked up on drugs and when they ask you why you
shot the cop tell them you were scared. Be sure to shoot a lot, man,
you're in fear for your life, right?

Umm, no, you're in fear of going back to jail.

So the equation "X number of months of terrible inconvenience to me is
worth the act of ultimate cruelty performed upon someone, followed by
flight" is solved in favor of the people who want to claim they were
just not capable of choice and that they have the right to kill but no
one else has the right to "kill them back".

Call the cops "the blue gang" all you like. That is not the society I choose.

Oh, right, I forgot, I don't really have choice, any more than the
criminal. And the criminal in question did not choose parole, or to
carry drugs or guns while on parole, or to make too much noise and
draw attention, or to assassinate a random authority figure, etc.,
etc. And everyone who listens to gansta rap blissfully unaware that it
was tired shit before they were born...  They're all just clockwork,
right?

He just DID those things, along with every other moment in his life,
without choosing so much as how many times he wiped his ass after
going to the bathroom.

Right, that makes it all BETTER.

Sorry. Let's put it a different way: that meat machine needed to go
back to the vat. Pour discourager les autres. I deny that the
heuristics that ramify out of the notion of free will are valueless.
They continue to have value to me. Among other things, their absence
apparently would increase the number of people who treat others like
meat machines -- somewhat. Though proving that is hard.

I will continue to apply freewill heuristics in the areas where they
seem to serve. I hear that epicycles weren't half bad, in the short
run. As with both deontology and consequentialism, our tools are only
worse than all the known alternatives.

Criticism is the only known remedy for error.

I leave it to deeper thinkers to come up with a society that I'd feel
like coming back (out of cryo) to, where the notion of "free will" is
laughably outmoded. Maybe I'll fit into some mehum halfway house.

By the way, I waffled a lot about whether to post and what to say.
Does the Multiverse take the place of choices? If so, any defects in
this post should be reported to the sheaf of multiverses where I give
a flying f*** about the consequent elements of this thread :).

Thanks for your attention. :)

/rantmode = OFF

-- 
         Michael M. Butler  :  m m b u t l e r  ( a t )  g m a i l . c o m
         "I'm going to get over this some time. Might as well be now."