> If the universe is deterministic, how can punitive justice be justified?
Determinism doesn't necessarily mean that organisms always act in the same way. They act in the same way given the exact configuration of them and the world.
Obviously, justice changes the configuration of an organism (fines, prison, ...).
To me it boils down to the question whether justice decreases the likelihood to commit crimes again. Given that our systems of justice have evolved over a long time, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt.
> If you agree that the process that led to an action was deterministic, then it's entirely unreasonable to use punishments as vengeance, for example.
I disagree, punishment could still be justified if it were effective at deterring or altering future behavior, particularly if it were more effective than any other alternative. You can make a straightforward utilitarian calculation for this, for example.
In any case, the matter of justice is separate from the question of free will. Once you have free will, you still require further assumptions to argue for punitive or restorative justice.
> I would argue that is because the conception of morality you are using happens to be compatible with the resulting morals that I believe arise from determinism here.
Indeed, we are coincidentally in agreement from a values perspective since my argument with respect to determinism could remain unchanged even if I e.g. favored a retributive system of justice.
> Given their lack of responsibility and control of their being, how do you design a society that treats them fairly
Any possible conception of fairness exists entirely with respect to the material circumstances of reality in the moment, the ethereal weight of determinism is not detectable on the scales of justice.
To put it another way, if we lived in a universe capable of libertarian free will, it would not follow logically that we should then amplify the needless suffering of criminals.
Imagine two criminals living in such a universe, both having committed identical crimes under identical circumstances, but only one is capable of libertarian free will... what changes? The deterministic criminal didn't choose to want to commit the crime, but he still wanted to commit the crime by following the same reasoning that the free criminal willed himself into, in every observable aspect of reality their motivations are equally damning. This is further compounded by the fact that both victims are equally harmed regardless of which criminal committed the crime. From the victim's perspective, two equally harmful acts should merit the same consequences, one victim does not suffer less because the crime was committed deterministiclly.
>The questions of what we optimize for are also highly impacted by free will/determinism.
> if you genuinely believe the notion that we have free will is nonsense (and I do), then the logical extension is to be very uncomfortable with the notion of e.g. prison used for vengeance or anything at all other than to the bare minimal extent required to protect others
Not really. You can view it as a game theoretic situation. Will the use of prison likely produce a good outcome or a bad outcome? Whether or not the criminal was deterministically required to commit the crime, the structure of punishments will (perhaps deterministically) affect the incidents and severity of future crimes.
Just because the creature in Black and White may have made decisions deterministically doesn't mean I won't punish it if it behaves in an inappropriate way. If anything, believing the agents are deterministic would make me even more keen to punish in situations where it will change behaviour usefully.
> What makes you think retribution is the principal component of justice? That seems very wrong to me.
It seems right to me. In my opinion, justice comes from the concept of reciprocity. In other words, if someone does bad, it is just that bad is done to them (retribution). The reverse is also true: it is just that good things occur to people who do good deeds.
> Justice is a deep concept - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice/ is an overview, and it's not short - but on plain sight, I'd say that the fact that it is the public, through the medium of government, that enforces justice, it should do so with a utilitarian view.
It's wrong to write as if this is a closed question. There are plenty of philosophers who aren't utilitarians and who see justice grounded elsewhere than "whatever I think will be good for society".
> But does this highlight a problem with a deterministic world view, or does it highlight a problem with the distinction between manslaughter and murder?
That is a really interesting point. I'm not convinced, but you've given me a ton to think about.
> Either the universe is fully deterministic and free will and agency do not exist, and we should be much kinder to people who e.g. commit crimes (they were forced to do it by their brain state, after all)...
I don't think that's consistent, as the same reasoning applies to the people (i.e. the 'we' in your statement) who will, in some way or perhaps not at all, censure the perpetrator of said crime.
In other words, if full determinism removes agency from the perpetrator, then it also removes it from everyone else.
> It seems like, punishment would need to be interpreted purely as societal cost. So you tally up the wreckage from the car accident example above, say $25,000 and 2 lives.
I don't think so. I think determinism makes "punishment" as a concept, completely nonsensical--you can't punish someone for something they didn't choose to do. I think determinism pushes the focus to rehabilitation rather than punishment, which for many types of crimes (i.e. drug use, computer hacking, nonviolent robbery) is clearly more effective in preventing recidivism (and I'd argue that for crimes where it's not effective, that we haven't really explored rehabilititation because of the widespread belief in free will).
> I don't really see how we can have both manslaughter and murder, without free will. What extra thing did the angry guy do? He didn't make a choice, because (for the sake of argument) he has no free will. What is the characteristic that makes what he did worse? The cost to society is the same.
Agreed. But does this highlight a problem with a deterministic world view, or does it highlight a problem with the distinction between manslaughter and murder?
> In general, I think all forms of justice in the west are based on free will being true. If some form of determinism is true, then "punishment" doesn't make sense.
Isn't that backwards? Believing that someone is inherently bad is effectively equal to them having no free will and their fate being determined. You can swap out "born with an evil soul" for "genetic predisposition and early environmental factors".
If you really did replace the judicial system with one based on the view that free will does not exist, would the solution to habitual criminals be to simply separate them from the rest of society for life since they have no ability to determine their own actions? If instead you think they can be externally influenced by rehabilitation then how is this different from having a compassionate view of criminal behaviour that could include free will? Having free will doesn't mean that a person will always make the correct choice or even the moral choice, we're limited and imperfect after all.
> With no notion of free will, how do we distinguish between manslaughter and murder?
I'd argue that the distinction is not indicative of a phenomenon that exists.
I think a much better model would be predictive and preventive rather than punitive--the level assignment to rehabilitation should be based on the probability and severity of recidivism, rather than the level of punishment being based on the severity of the crime.
> Some people are skittish about the idea of punsihment. But it's abhorrent to our sense of justice that one suffer no consequences after committing a crime.
I suspect this is the majority view, but it’s not universal. I’m pointing this out not to argue with you directly so much as to point out that this may be more _your_ sense of justice than a general rule of human nature.
> if punishment doesn't work, we can stop wasting time on it and expend our energy on more constructive responses
You assume we can choose which direction to go towards. With no free will, we have as much choice in expending our energy as offenders had in committing offenses. It's absurd to state 'we can' or 'we should' while assuming a fully deterministic world.
> Going further, we're all slaves to determinisic or stochastic physics playing out in our brains and environment, and our agency is just a useful fiction.
>The justice system should be premised on pragmatic concepts of deterrence, rehabilitation, protecting society, etc, and not on fantasy notions that person A had more agency than person B.
Without a concept of agency it is pointless to talk about “justice”. At the very least, by advocating a notion of justice, you are saying that members of society as a whole have agency to implement that concept of justice.
If we all have no agency, how is a feeling that we should immediately execute all criminals unjust?
> If they have no free will, there is absolutely no justification for punishing them.
This presumes a very specific sets of views on morality. One might argue that it makes whatever reaction you feel like justified, because it was not a choice. Certainly if we can't punish you for hitting someone, we can't punish the person you hit if they hit back.
Others would argue that while it would remove the moral justification for retribution, free will or not does not need to affect the moral argument for punishment as a means to reduce the chance of reoffending or even general effects on the rest of the population.
Free will only affects whether or not you had any immediate control over what you did, not on the effects it had on society, nor to what extent you pose a future risk or whether failure to punish you affects the future risks to society from others, all of which are factors in peoples views on the extent to which punishment is moral.
> There are a lot of people who will not commit crime only because they fear the consequences.
Fear sounds like an implicit assertion of choice, but i think you mean something more subtle.
Let my try to put it another way. People are complex systems that can be influenced. Water tends to flow downhill, we can set up troughs to control the flow of water. The flow is complex, and some water will splash out, but generally the water does follows the system. Likewise, we can set up legal troughs to guide people to the behavior we want. (I know argument by analogy is crappy, i'm just hoping we can agree on this point, and i think we do.) There's a whole other argument about why we would set up those legal rules, but i'd like to set that aside for a moment (if it's a big deal, or fundamental in some way, i'd like to hear your side. I'm not sure i can meaningfully engage that point)
It seems like, punishment would need to be interpreted purely as societal cost. So you tally up the wreckage from the car accident example above, say $25,000 and 2 lives.
I don't really see how we can have both manslaughter and murder, without free will. What extra thing did the angry guy do? He didn't make a choice, because (for the sake of argument) he has no free will. What is the characteristic that makes what he did worse? The cost to society is the same.
> Myself, I do not even know what the will is, or what it could possibly be free from. The influence of the universe?
My personal interpretation (which is probably wrong, but something i'm willing to go back and forth on to come to consensus) Free will the mind having a choice in taking action, rather than the body just doing whatever, and the mind rationalizing it after the fact. Perhaps every action we take is just like a heartbeat. I have no control over that. Perhaps when i hold my breath, i'm not actually choosing to hold my breath, but the complex system that is my body holds it's breath and my mind is claims that it was responsible for that holding of breath. Or typing this comment, or whatever. I don't think there's any way i can know. It feels like my mind is in control, but my mind gets all of its information from (and the software runs on!) my body. my mind seems to control the hardware, but maybe i'm just rationalizing after the fact.
> If A harms B, then your argument is that B has no right to retaliate it
Yes and no. Yes, because no judgment allowed means no punishment allowed. But: the correct answer to A's action would be a sanction against A, in the sense that it would prevent A from harming again in the future. The wrong answers are: judgment, retaliation, punishment, revenge.
> In other words, the world should just go on as it is
It will. And it's also exactly what's happening here.
> What is important, I think, like many other things, is the 'appearance' of having free will. Because without that, all life looses it's meaning.
Not to worry, we'll always have this appearance, because causes and effects work on every macro and micro level. No system of sensors will ever be able to measure all variable, no model will ever be able to include all variables and no computer will ever be powerful enough to model everything. So, the magic remains.
> we have not been locking people up for punishment for quite some time
Whether or not this is true seems kind of beside the point.
All I'm saying as that, for an arbitrary reader, a consequence of determinism is that the morals of "desert" are meaningfully impacted—whether that convinces them against retribution, or buttresses their existing notions against it.
>Even if you assume that everybody is guilty I'd still make the argument that people can genuinely change and that no matter what you do you will not be bringing anybody back that's already dead.
That may be (and I agree with it), but I'm critiquing PG's argument (in particular his assertion that it's obvious), not his conclusion.
>The extreme example of that is a society that simply kills everybody that is convicted of a crime, after all, why not, it makes society better, right? Or does it?
You need different punishments for different crimes, or someone who commits a small crime has no more deterrence against big crimes. I'm not sure what point you're making with this.
Determinism doesn't necessarily mean that organisms always act in the same way. They act in the same way given the exact configuration of them and the world.
Obviously, justice changes the configuration of an organism (fines, prison, ...). To me it boils down to the question whether justice decreases the likelihood to commit crimes again. Given that our systems of justice have evolved over a long time, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt.
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