If science disproves free will, how will we reconcile holding criminals responsible for their actions?

Fail. Epic fail. Worst thing is science has bad footprints all over the world, and gradually, justice is being abolished. Meanwhilst, people are just standing there, observing people free of charge being cruelly murdered. There is nothing I can say….

@Luiveton I certainly hope we can collectively come up with a better answer than that.

If you can argue that the murderer has no free will when he committed the crime, one could argue that society has no free will when it comes time for his sentence. Free will wouldn’t be something that applies to some and not to others.

I think on a societal level, things would continue to operate the same. Even though science has proven we don’t have free will, nobody has the ability to tell the future and we’d probably play it safe and stick with what (for the most part) works. It’d be much like finding out the Earth orbits the Sun instead of the other way around. There’d be uproar, sure, there’d be denials and a little bit of infighting, but once everything settled down things would go back to normal.

If they are not responsible for their actions, then we reconcile holding criminals against their will for public safety.

Not revenge. Not punishment. Public safety.

And we make their lives bearable and somewhat enjoyable. But without freedom to leave their holding places.

I agree somewhat with @Kraigmo – or else it would be anarchy. Everytime someone killed or raped, you could justify immediately killing him in return.

It seems that logic would dictate something along the lines of; Ok, you cannot be held responsible for what you do, but I don’t have the resources to have someone watch you 24/7, therefore in the interest of public safety, since you cannot be trusted to make sound decisions and refrain from eating twinkies, in fact you stand there and insist that it is your right to eat twinkies, we have no choice but to lock you away from the unsuspecting public. Now, here’s a box of twinkies. Have at it.

We will do whatever we are destined to do.

What makes you think our jurisprudence will change because of a scientific discovery? The two are hardly linked. Discoveries are being made every day and they affect very little change in our lives.

Science will, disprove free will, or re define the meaning of it. It will be a big bang moment. The answer to the universe.

For myself, it is a no-brainer.

Convincing mankind, it is a whole other challenge.

We don’t have to worry. Because in this hypothetical situation, we don’t have the free will to make the choice about what we do about the criminals.

I just think there are way too many variables to prove it conclusively, so it’s kind of a non-starter.

But wasn’t this whole subject explored in a Tom Cruise movie ? (Minority Report) All we need to do is find some infallible ” pre-cogs” and we’re all set, right ?

Oh wait, that’s a problem in itself, isn’t it. Those infallible pre-cogs are just so dang hard to come by, aren’t they ?

Well, I guess we just have to settle for justice the usual way.

Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. Looks like Tony Barretta and his Parrot had it right all along.

:D

@RocketSquid Nice twist of the logic. We’d like to let you off because we understand you couldn’t help committing the crime, but dang, we can’t help ourselves either, so we’re locking you up.

@Kraigmo & @Trillian That seems to be a very rational response. We can understanding that insanity absolves a person of moral culpability, but also understand that a criminally insane person shouldn’t be left free to do it again.

@tinyfaery The legal system doesn’t change overnight, and that is probably as it should be. When you are dealing with people’s freedom and even their lives, slow, measured steps are the best way to change the system. But it does adapt to scientific revaluations. The use of fingerprint technology, ballistics testing, identifying drugs and poisons by spectrography and DNA matching are all examples of science impacting the legal system favorably. I am yet to be convinced that psychology is precise enough to fully claim being a science as of yet. It too has impacted the justice system, but not always in a positive way.

@ChazMaz Amen to the difficulty of selling determinism. It feels so counterintuitive.

@lifeflame Nice turn of my hypothetical on it’s head. Hooray! GA

@Buttonstc Can’t argue with Tony Barretta. :-)

I don’t understand how it could be anything but what @RocketSquid said. I don’t think its a twist of logic… its really just following this to its logical conclusion. Everything else is just people applying the no free will model to the criminal but not to the rest of society.

Just tell them that, “We really didn’t want to execute you, but since we don’t have free will, the decision was out of our hands.” : D

@CaptainHarley and @roundsquare Yes, it does follow. If one is logically true, so is the other.

Some time back there was a news story about a family of criminals.

The parents taught their children the art of theft ffom the moment they were in a stroller.

They eventually got caught, the children at the time teenagers. One of the kids got caught and everything unwound.

These kids perceived it as normal. Like going to play baseball, or go swimming. But, they went to jail. As did their parents.
The predetermined course of events still had consequences.

Where we falter as a race at this current time in our “evolution” is that we want restitution. Even if just satisfaction.

Remove the brain of a criminal, replacing it with a brain of credible and good intent.

We will still want that “body” to pay for the crime of the disposed of brain.

@ETpro, it seems like such a huge problem at first but it totally irons out, huh? I find this is the case with a lot of the assumed issues of a deterministic universe.

@RocketSquid and @Kraigmo nailed it. We can’t help but do whatever we perceive as the most sensible thing to do. That’s why criminals commit crimes and that’s why prosecutors prosecute. Both are simply doing according to what they’ve come to learn would be the best option in their circumstance. Which takes us deeper into a critique/evaluation of the justice system:

Stop blaming the soul. Blame the nurturing. Every action has a cause. That’s what determinism predicts. An individual will only act out criminally if his brain causes him to. His brain will only cause him to if it has learned how to. And lastly, it will only act on that education if it doesn’t believe there is a better alternative.

The last two truisms are inputs. The brain is a system that feeds on what it’s given. If you give someone the history of a criminal, he will be a criminal.. but if you give a criminal the history of a reformer, he will be reformed.

The challenge of reform, however, is in providing a tailor made history of reformation for each criminal. It’s tricky. If you miss a spot, the criminal may find a loop hole where continued criminal behavior seems sensible to him. It really is a matter of conviction. You have to convince a criminal that his behavior is undesirable to him. The threat of fines, community service, imprisonment, and even death have proven to be ineffective arguments for many.

@ninjacolin I suppose you can divide the list of behavioral causes grossly into nature and nurture, but I find the 6 driving forces listed in the question itself to be more informative.

Nurture = Nature in my opinion. But yea, I liked your list too.

@ninjacolin In a totally causal universe, that would be the ultimate answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, wouldn’t it? But the trouble is it does nothing to answer questions about human thought or behavior. To do that, we need to zoom in on what part/s of nature we need to observe.

They wouldn’t be responsible, but we still need to protect society from them.