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Typical Pubbie posted:If I murder people because my brain is physically wired in such a way that I have an irresistible desire to rob people of their very existence then you have my permission to lock me away forever, ok? That isn't psychopathy, the issue with psychopathic murderers is not that they cannot resist the temptation to kill people, but that they don't have an innate, airy fairy connection to the rest of humanity that makes them naturally averse to the idea. It is entirely possible for someone to be quite psychopathic or sociopathic and still be perfectly productive and helpful to society at large, so long as they believe that it is in their ultimate best interests to do so. Also as with most forms of destructive crime, locking people up and throwing away the key or just killing them, does not help prevent future criminals from emerging.
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Mar 20, 2015 01:04
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Toasticle posted:I'd not be surprised at all to find most of the CEOs and Wall Street/bankers are sociopaths, they just gently caress people within the law. I saw a presentation by a chap who came to that exact conclusion, he tested people for common sociopathic/psychopathic traits, and found them to be very prevalent among successful businessmen and high paying/demanding professions like doctors and lawyers.
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Mar 20, 2015 01:54
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Arglebargle III posted:What is the value of a human life? From whence does it derive, and to whom does it accrue? A sum of all existing and potential experiences and capabilities of the life in question. Experience gives a life value by making it unique, and capability gives it value by making it useful.
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Mar 20, 2015 10:52
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Arglebargle III posted:It's sort of depressing that you guys are flailing like this when there has been a lot of well-respected work on the question. I'm arguing against the inherent and necessarily >0 value of human life and I'm the only one who has actually referenced scholarly attempts to find the value of a human life. That's not flailing, that's my answer.
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Mar 20, 2015 20:31
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Scrub-Niggurath posted:I genuinely do not understand their stance however. If human life having some sort of inherent value is a principle agreed upon by a vast majority of the world, then doesn't that give it inherent value by definition? Only if the existence of God being believed by a majority of people in the world makes the existence of God objectively true.
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Mar 20, 2015 23:44
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Arglebargle III posted:No, this is flailing and it's pathetic. I'm really disappointed that when asked to defend the value of human life, this is what you come up with. Defend it from what? That's how I assign value to life, it comes from the things it can do, the things that make it manifestly valuable to others. Things acquire value through utility, and that can be found in many ways. A thing that is unique is valuable because it can provide a unique experience, and individual humans are functionally very unique, you are unlikely to meet two people sufficiently similar to nullify that value. Each one is something that you will not be able to find again, and represents an irreplaceable, and potentially important part of your life. This further ignores the fact that almost every human can do something that another will find value in. Most can work, some can provide rare and valuable services such as healthcare or ingenuity, and some can provide nominally less rare but hardly less valuable companionship, conversation, and enjoyment. There is plenty of value to be found in human life simply from observation, what more do you require?
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Mar 21, 2015 04:46
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Arglebargle III posted:This is a start. C for effort I guess. So you've finally mentioned utility and proposed that the value of human life derives from social utility. Now that we've finally arrived at this point, we could start discussing the harm that "monsters, ax murders, and pedophiles." cause at least in terms of loss of value, though we still have the thorny issue of the costs of human life to approach. Assess that on a case by case basis? Use your best judgement and try to secure an outcome which minimizes further damage and meets with the greatest possible satisfaction of all parties involved, while further serving the greater social utility by attempting reform where possible? I really don't get what you're trying to argue. You seem to be just complaining about everything without presenting a point of your own.
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Mar 21, 2015 18:31
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Scrub-Niggurath posted:The difference is that "value" is a meaningless concept outside of a social viewpoint. If people by and large do not personally value something, it has little to no value. Which is in opposition to the notion of inherent value, which is the idea that a thing has absolute value, assigned to it by some universal force or truth, which cannot be nullified by circumstances or the actions of others. A thing having inherent value and a thing being very commonly valued by many people aren't the same thing, Gold is held to be near-universally valuable but there are problems trying to base an economy off the idea of it being inherently valuable. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Mar 21, 2015 |
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Mar 21, 2015 23:32
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Rakosi posted:Hmmm, so my previous quip that this whole conversation seemed "spergy" was right on the money I suppose. I don't get how you feel appeals to emotion are worthless when it is impossible to discuss a topic as emotionally dark as murder if you want to reach any other conclusion than that which a computer could do just as well. One might argue that the entire point of ethics is to avoid appealing to emotion in situations where it manifestly does not produce a good outcome.
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Mar 22, 2015 08:35
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Agreed, the preferable response to someone asking you if you want vengeance, is to ask them whether they think it would help.
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Mar 22, 2015 17:26
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wateroverfire posted:I think it's hopelessly naive to imagine that everyone who has done terrible things is merely sick (some are, and that's different) and wants to be, or even can be, rehabilitated. It can be argued that they were shaped by their circumstances but at the end of the day, shaped they were, and they became people who chose to do the things that they did. But beyond that - being restored to the community requires that a person atone for the wrong they've committed. How would you suggest that occur without a degree of suffering? Escalation doesn't seem necessary as a condition for retribution being one goal of a system of justice. It's one of the goals of our system right this moment and has been since we had such a system and we haven't descended into torturing prisoners to death, botched executions notwithstanding. But rehabilitation isn't enough. Alternatively, it may be considered healthier to recognize that for a great many wrongs, there is absolutely nothing one can do to atone for them, or to meaningfully give back what was taken. To demand a measure of misery from the one responsible is not going to give you back what you have lost, it is arbitrary, you don't need it and asking for it will do you no good. You aren't required to forgive, but whether or not you can let go is entirely a product of your own psyche. Cultivate a sanitary mind, which can deal with trauma independently, and without making up or indulging justifications for your animal desire to hurt things that make you angry.
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Mar 23, 2015 07:42
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wateroverfire posted:It's worth considering that your ancestors are mostly people who didn't think letting poo poo slide was the healthier way to go, when they could do something about it, and as a result of that they secured a world now guarded for you by other people who are most definitely not willing to let poo poo slide in which you can serenely philosophize about cultivating a sanitary mind. My ancestors thought a lot of stupid things, and my peers continue to think many of them. Appealing to tradition is a very lax argument. wateroverfire posted:"She paid the price for her actions, then turned her life around" would be better closure. The idea is that to be reintegrated into the community after a transgression requires atonement, which requires suffering. That suffering doesn't have to be jail, or execution, or etc. Ideally it would be genuine remorse. In feeling that, and in making restitution, the transgressor would essentially become a different person and could be accepted into the community free of their transgression. You're talking as if suffering has a cause > effect relationship to acceptance, when it does not. Whether someone is accepted back into a community has nothing to do with whether they suffer or not and everything to do with whether the people in the community feel like accepting them. Suffering does not bring acceptance, and absence of suffering does not preclude it. Accept anyway, you have no physical need for suffering, and any mental need for it you may possess should be considered a character flaw. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 08:02 on Mar 23, 2015 |
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Mar 23, 2015 07:59
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wateroverfire posted:It's an appeal to widen your perspective. You have the privilege of honing your moral purity because other people are very specifically willing to be bloody minded on your behalf. We live in a state of nature you don't have to experience because others have done it for you, and are doing it for you right now. I oppose neither death nor incarceration as a means of crime prevention, but I will still argue that anyone who thinks that that they are good things, because they can't think of a better option, is a long way gone from a position of genuine care for human happiness. The way we deal with crime is not good, it is abhorrent, it is merely somewhat less abhorrent than not dealing with it. There is nothing laudable or commendable about it, and it is not just. And it is absolutely not an excuse to wallow in the idea that making people suffer is actually good and necessary. You are capable of better than that, and an unwillingness to pursue better than that is contemptible. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 08:27 on Mar 23, 2015 |
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Mar 23, 2015 08:25
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Are you required to believe that what you are doing is good in order to do it? Can you not do something you know to be evil simply because it is the lesser evil? If you showed me a compelling need to execute someone I would kill them myself, but that doesn't make the action good, it makes it necessary, and begs for a better solution. What bothers me is not that you imprison or kill people, but that you've somehow come around to the idea that doing that is a good thing. That making people suffer somehow improves the world, that suffering is the object of justice, not a side effect of attempts to produce it. Locking people in shithole prisons just so that they can suffer is not justice, it doesn't repay the wrongs they've done, it doesn't inspire them to do less wrong in the future, and it doesn't deter them from doing wrong in the first place. Crime is not an entirely rational decision, so expecting criminals to be rational actors is foolish, and your response to rational deterrents not working very well should not be to increase the amount of pain inflicted. Incarceration can keep someone from committing crimes for the duration of the sentence, if done correctly. It has utility in that respect, but just throwing a bunch of criminals together for years at a time and letting them do whatever isn't a sensible way to do that. You lock someone up because you need time to figure out why they did what they did, and what, if anything, they need in order to stop them doing it again. A large dose of pain is not likely to be the prescription for any problem. You teach nothing with mindless pain.
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Mar 23, 2015 19:50
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Wild Horses posted:That sounds fine and all and then you realise its actually rapists we are talking about. No matter of morality talk is gonna change that they're human garbage. Even then there is little profit to the rest of us to be found in tormenting them. Strapping their balls to a car battery won't enrich my life any. I could understand the death penalty for repeat, violent, and currently unreformable offenders, but not because it's a good thing, simply because it seems a little more merciful and (theoretically) cost effective than life imprisonment. The desired goal should be the prevention of people getting to that stage which is not helped by the current criminal justice system.
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Mar 27, 2015 00:49
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Depends if you're arguing that because of necessity or because you like the idea of doing unpleasant things to people you feel deserve it.
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Mar 27, 2015 01:52
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wateroverfire posted:It's a theme that occurs in a broad range of cultures from primative hunter-gatherer to the modern SJW tumblerites. I literally cannot think of any examples of a culture that doesn't incorporate it somehow. Can you? IDK dude why do you think it's NOT necessary besides asserting that "we could totally not do it, or something, amirite?" Well, we could totally not do it. If your only argument for why we should do it is that we always have, that's not a very good argument. To ask the question more precisely, can you explain the mechanical benefit of doing it? What effect does it have if we do it, and why is that effect beneficial?
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Mar 27, 2015 23:19
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