Does anyone deserve to suffer?

[Juana]

Well what about people that basically just breed and breed into the same life of suffering?

[Matz]

You confuse a few things there, Matz, but in interesting ways (that almost everyone confuses). In fact, sociopaths (and sociopathic children) exhibit IMPAIRED moral reasoning. They are able to manipulate others, and can provide the socially "correct" answers when they are disciplined, but when they are actually tested, they show deficits in certain brain regions relating to empathy (and perhaps other things).

There's a clear difference between *knowing* that everyone else thinks killing kittens is wrong, and *feeling* that I shouldn't do it, or *feeling bad* about doing it. Sociopaths do not feel bad when they do things, even if there's a vague sense in which they sometimes may "know" that it's wrong.

Normal people feel bad. You'll never be able to force a sociopath to *feel* that way, no matter how much you make them suffer. In fact, they're more likely to feign suffering to manipulate you into doing what they want you to do than you are to actually make them truly suffer.

It's your view that I think causes serious problems. There is some evidence that children who exhibit sociopathic tendencies can be taught *intellectual morality* that MAY compensate for their complete and utter lack of emotional morality, but evidence of this is tentative, at best.

And after all that, it's unclear to me why anyone should think such people *deserve* to suffer, nor why it's good.

so if you were wronged by a sociopath, what would you do exactly?

[SR]

The problem with inflicting suffering on an individual is the proportional suffering it inflicts on society.

[Hype]

so if you were wronged by a sociopath, what would you do exactly?

The best policy for dealing with sociopaths is to do and say as little as possible and to stay away from them as much as possible. Giving them any material to use as fodder is the worst thing you can do. This, by the way, is true of a lot of crazy people. The biggest mistake you could make is assuming that you can reason with them/get them to see your point of view, or appeal to their sense of empathy.

If they commit a criminal act, of course I want them jailed or otherwise reprimanded -- that was never out of the question, because we don't have any other way of trying to control what people do.

By the way, statistically, there are probably at least two sociopaths who post on this board. They may not even know it. I suspect Juana could be, even though he is clearly a nice guy (being a sociopath doesn't mean you can't act nicely, it just means you can't *really* empathize the way normal people do;) I'm half joking here, but given that the guy is a business owner, and clearly ambitious, it seems plausible. We all know sociopaths. Luckily nearly all of them are non-violent.

There's even the hilarious (to me anyway) case of a neuroscientist who works on sociopathy who found out via a brian scan that he himself is a sociopath (actually psychopath, but the terms are roughly interchangeable).

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... =127888976

The criminal brain has always held a fascination for James Fallon. For nearly 20 years, the neuroscientist at the University of California-Irvine has studied the brains of psychopaths. He studies the biological basis for behavior, and one of his specialties is to try to figure out how a killer's brain differs from yours and mine.

About four years ago, Fallon made a startling discovery. It happened during a conversation with his then 88-year-old mother, Jenny, at a family barbecue.

"I said, 'Jim, why don't you find out about your father's relatives?' " Jenny Fallon recalls. "I think there were some cuckoos back there."

Fallon investigated.

"There's a whole lineage of very violent people — killers," he says.

One of his direct great-grandfathers, Thomas Cornell, was hanged in 1667 for murdering his mother. That line of Cornells produced seven other alleged murderers, including Lizzy Borden. "Cousin Lizzy," as Fallon wryly calls her, was accused (and controversially acquitted) of killing her father and stepmother with an ax in Fall River, Mass., in 1882.

A little spooked by his ancestry, Fallon set out to see whether anyone in his family possesses the brain of a serial killer. Because he has studied the brains of dozens of psychopaths, he knew precisely what to look for. To demonstrate, he opened his laptop and called up an image of a brain on his computer screen.

"Here is a brain that's not normal," he says. There are patches of yellow and red. Then he points to another section of the brain, in the front part of the brain, just behind the eyes.

"Look at that — there's almost nothing here," Fallon says.

This is the orbital cortex, the area that Fallon and other scientists believe is involved with ethical behavior, moral decision-making and impulse control.

"People with low activity [in the orbital cortex] are either free-wheeling types or sociopaths," he says.

Fallon's Scans

He's clearly oversimplifying, but Fallon says the orbital cortex puts a brake on another part of the brain called the amygdala, which is involved with aggression and appetites. But in some people, there's an imbalance — the orbital cortex isn't doing its job — perhaps because the person had a brain injury or was born that way.

"What's left? What takes over?" he asks. "The area of the brain that drives your id-type behaviors, which is rage, violence, eating, sex, drinking."

Fallon says nobody in his family has real problems with those behaviors. But he wanted to be sure. Conveniently, he had everything he needed: Previously, he had persuaded 10 of his close relatives to submit to a PET brain scan and give a blood sample as part of a project to see whether his family had a risk for developing Alzheimer's disease.

After learning his violent family history, he examined the images and compared them with the brains of psychopaths. His wife's scan was normal. His mother: normal. His siblings: normal. His children: normal.

"And I took a look at my own PET scan and saw something disturbing that I did not talk about," he says.

What he didn't want to reveal was that his orbital cortex looks inactive.

"If you look at the PET scan, I look just like one of those killers."

Fallon cautions that this is a young field. Scientists are just beginning to study this area of the brain — much less the brains of criminals. Still, he says the evidence is accumulating that some people's brains predispose them toward violence and that psychopathic tendencies may be passed down from one generation to another.

The Three Ingredients

And that brings us to the next part of Jim Fallon's family experiment. Along with brain scans, Fallon also tested each family member's DNA for genes that are associated with violence. He looked at 12 genes related to aggression and violence and zeroed in on the MAO-A gene (monoamine oxidase A). This gene, which has been the target of considerable research, is also known as the "warrior gene" because it regulates serotonin in the brain. Serotonin affects your mood — think Prozac — and many scientists believe that if you have a certain version of the warrior gene, your brain won't respond to the calming effects of serotonin.

Fallon calls up another slide on his computer. It has a list of family members' names, and next to them, the results of the genotyping. Everyone in his family has the low-aggression variant of the MAO-A gene, except for one person.

"You see that? I'm 100 percent. I have the pattern, the risky pattern," he says, then pauses. "In a sense, I'm a born killer."

Fallon's being tongue-in-cheek — sort of. He doesn't believe his fate or anyone else's is entirely determined by genes. They merely tip you in one direction or another.

And yet: "When I put the two together, it was frankly a little disturbing," Fallon says with a laugh. "You start to look at yourself and you say, 'I may be a sociopath.' I don't think I am, but this looks exactly like [the brains of] the psychopaths, the sociopaths, that I've seen before."

I asked his wife, Diane, what she thought of the result.

"I wasn't too concerned," she says, laughing. "I mean, I've known him since I was 12."

Diane probably does not need to worry, according to scientists who study this area. They believe that brain patterns and genetic makeup are not enough to make anyone a psychopath. You need a third ingredient: abuse or violence in one's childhood.

"And fortunately, he wasn't abused as a young person," Diane says, "so I've lived to be a ripe old age so far."

The New World of 'Neurolaw'

Jim Fallon says he had a terrific childhood; he was doted on by his parents and had loving relationships with his brothers and sisters and entire extended family. Significantly, he says this journey through his brain has changed the way he thinks about nature and nurture. He once believed that genes and brain function could determine everything about us. But now he thinks his childhood may have made all the difference.

"We'll never know, but the way these patterns are looking in general population, had I been abused, we might not be sitting here today," he says.

As for the psychopaths he studies, Fallon feels some compassion for these people who, he says, got "a bad roll of the dice."

"It's an unlucky day when all of these three things come together in a bad way, and I think one has to empathize with what happened to them," he says.

But what about people who rape and murder — should we feel empathy for them? Should they be allowed to argue in court that their brains made them do it? Enter the new world of "neurolaw" — in which neuroscience is used as evidence in the courtroom.

[Hype]

Well what about people that basically just breed and breed into the same life of suffering?

I'm not sure I understand the question. Do you mean that children deserve to suffer on the basis of their parents' decision to have kids in some environment where suffering is pervasive?

[Hype]

The problem with inflicting suffering on an individual is the proportional suffering it inflicts on society.

I'm curious about this... could you give an example?

[Matz]

so if you were wronged by a sociopath, what would you do exactly?

The best policy for dealing with sociopaths is to do and say as little as possible and to stay away from them as much as possible. Giving them any material to use as fodder is the worst thing you can do. This, by the way, is true of a lot of crazy people. The biggest mistake you could make is assuming that you can reason with them/get them to see your point of view, or appeal to their sense of empathy.

If they commit a criminal act, of course I want them jailed or otherwise reprimanded -- that was never out of the question, because we don't have any other way of trying to control what people do.

By the way, statistically, there are probably at least two sociopaths who post on this board. They may not even know it. I suspect Juana could be, even though he is clearly a nice guy (being a sociopath doesn't mean you can't act nicely, it just means you can't *really* empathize the way normal people do;) I'm half joking here, but given that the guy is a business owner, and clearly ambitious, it seems plausible. We all know sociopaths. Luckily nearly all of them are non-violent.

There's even the hilarious (to me anyway) case of a neuroscientist who works on sociopathy who found out via a brian scan that he himself is a sociopath (actually psychopath, but the terms are roughly interchangeable).

That's pretty funny. But I'm not sure that a brain scan is enough to diagnose someone as a sociopath though.

And i don't think that nearly all sociopaths aren't violent either, unfortunately. I think that if someone is a true sociopath and not 'just' a sociopathic person you will always see some very, very extreme behavior which could be anything from murdering people to scamming people financially and stuff. I think violence and destruction and bullying are very common trades of true sociopaths.

My mother dated a guy many years ago who was a very, very charming guy the first year they were dating and not living together. Very understanding, warm, funny, just a really great person that anyone would like.
Then they moved in together and some completely different sides of him surfaced and very scary ones that mostly involved really extreme rage, destruction and heavy drinking and blaming her for the most crazy things. He'd say stuff like 'I didn't like your tone of voice five days ago' and then flip out for two days straight and smash things and scream and stuff. Really, really psycho stuff.

It was like two different people, and this guy was and is most definitely a sociopath. Thank God she got away from him soon after that monster side appeared.

Super scary people, they look and act more normal than most normal people and then they have those crazy evil flip sides. But being 'normal' and charming is how they get what they want, like a girlfriend for instance.

and Juana doesn't strike me as a psychopath, if there are any here it's probably one of the ones you suspect the least

[Hype]

My mother dated a guy many years ago who was a very, very charming guy the first year they were dating and not living together. Very understanding, warm, funny, just a really great person that anyone would like.
Then they moved in together and some completely different sides of him surfaced and very scary ones that mostly involved really extreme rage, destruction and heavy drinking and blaming her for the most crazy things. He'd say stuff like 'I didn't like your tone of voice five days ago' and then flip out for two days straight and smash things and scream and stuff. Really, really psycho stuff.

That sounds more like bipolar disorder than sociopathy. And yeah, a brain scan IS exactly how you should diagnose sociopathy (in spite of the DSM requiring a less ... scientific... measure). It's a neurological disorder. Violent psychopathy is what happens when a sociopathic person (a person with a brain lacking function in key areas) is raised in a certain way and triggered in a certain way. There is a difference between what we call a "psycho" and someone who has psychopathy or sociopathy. Usually "psycho" implies extreme anger and violence, but this is much more associated with bipolar disorder and ASPD:

Although there are behavioral similarities, ASPD and psychopathy are not synonymous. A diagnosis of ASPD using the DSM criteria is based on behavioral patterns, whereas psychopathy measurements also include more indirect personality characteristics. The diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder covers two to three times as many prisoners as are rated as psychopaths. Most offenders scoring high on the PCL-R also pass the ASPD criteria but most of those with ASPD do not score high on the PCL-R.[3]

Sociopathy is also distinct from ASPD as well as psychopathy. Hare writes that the difference between sociopathy and psychopathy may "reflect the user's views on the origins and determinates of the disorder." The term sociopathy may be preferred by sociologists that see the causes as due to social factors. The term psychopathy may be preferred by psychologists who see the causes as due to a combination of psychological, genetic, and environmental factors.[7]

[LJF]

I believe in the the death penalty. But there could be two parties that suffer in some cases. Meaning if someone is convicted of murder and there is no doubt they did it, but they only get a life sentence there could be two people that suffer from that. One being the person that has the life sentence, who I think should get the chair, because they will live the rest of their days in jail. The other person to suffer could be the loved one of the person that was killed because they have to know that the murderer gets to live while their loved one doesn't.

Also do you suffer mentally or suffer from bodily harm?

I remember taking philsophy classes in college and haven't heard lex talionis since then. Professor A.S. what is the difference between lex & jus talionis? You are bringing me back to 1993.

[LJF]

A.S. do you use these to prep for school? It's like you are getting ready to debate something at school and you use this to get the juices flowing.

[Hype]

I believe in the the death penalty. But there could be two parties that suffer in some cases. Meaning if someone is convicted of murder and there is no doubt they did it, but they only get a life sentence there could be two people that suffer from that. One being the person that has the life sentence, who I think should get the chair, because they will live the rest of their days in jail. The other person to suffer could be the loved one of the person that was killed because they have to know that the murderer gets to live while their loved one doesn't.

Also do you suffer mentally or suffer from bodily harm?

The sense of 'suffer' I had in mind was something like 'experience [i.e., have wrought upon oneself] pain or loss [of power, control, property, etc.] that has no other purpose than to inflict itself on the sufferer'. Something like that, anyway.

I was really thinking of Derek Parfit's Chapter 39 of On What Matters (Review is here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25393-on-what-m ... s-1-and-2/ ), entitled: "Why We Cannot Deserve to Suffer". Here's one quotation that I think might help clear it up (unfortunately Parfit never defines 'suffering' in any explicit way either):

We can deserve many things, such as gratitude, praise, and the kind of blame that is merely moral dispraise. But no one could ever deserve to suffer. For similar reasons, I believe, no one could ever deserve to be less happy. When people treat us or others wrongly, we can justifiably be indignant. And we can have reasons to want these people to understand the wrongness of their acts, even though that would make them feel very badly about what they have done. But these reasons are like our reasons to want people to grieve when those whom they love have died. We cannot justifiably have ill will towards these wrong-doers, wishing things to go badly for them. Nor can we justifiably cease to have good will towards them, by ceasing to wish things to go well for them. We could at most be justified in ceasing to like these people, and trying, in morally acceptable ways, to have nothing to do with them.

This is from the end of that chapter, so it is just summarizing the conclusions Parfit reaches, not offering a full argument for what he says there. But one of the things it rests on is Kant's claim that: "if our acts were causally determined, we could never be responsible for these acts in some way that could make us deserve to suffer." Kant, unlike Parfit, thinks our [moral] acts aren't causally determined, and therefore we do deserve to suffer. Parfit rejects this (as do I). So I guess that's a major part of the argument: the only way a person could deserve to suffer is if they were not causally determined to do what they did, but they are, so they don't deserve to suffer.

I remember taking philsophy classes in college and haven't heard lex talionis since then. Professor A.S. what is the difference between lex & jus talionis? You are bringing me back to 1993.

'Lex talionis' is Latin for "law of retaliation", 'Jus talionis' would be 'the right to retaliate'. The difference between rights and laws is something like: a right is something we have in virtue of what kind of being we are and what kind of relations we stand in to others; a law is a codification or policy which aims at justice (and sometimes involves rights). The phrase "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" is the embodiment of the doctrine of 'lex talionis' because if it's embedded in a legal system, it specifies policies which permit retaliatory justice, i.e., taking away from the perpetrator what was taken away from the victim. I do not think there is a good argument for this view. Sometimes, however, we may have a right to retaliate, when attacked. This does not mean that the law should make this a method of producing justice, but rather that we can understand the reasons why we should permit people to fight back, sometimes (say, to save their own lives when there is no clear alternative).

A.S. do you use these to prep for school? It's like you are getting ready to debate something at school and you use this to get the juices flowing.

I admit, talking about this stuff with JA fans over the years has sometimes helped my brain get clearer about things, and also has helped me learn how to speak to people who are not (yet) at the same level, which is especially helpful for undergraduate tutorials. But it wasn't intentional... I created this thread because it came up organically in another thread and I figured it would hijack it.

Interesting note: it's currently 50-50 split between "Yes." and "No." in the poll.

[LJF]

It seems this ties in with the discussion on free will. Or at least what you believe is connected, right? I would say that yes someone does deserve to suffer. If one is going to be part of society and they cause harm to someone else they should have to suffer for their actions. Next for me would be is it mental suffering, jail time, lose of driving rights etc or physically suffering.

[Hype]

It seems this ties in with the discussion on free will. Or at least what you believe is connected, right? I would say that yes someone does deserve to suffer. If one is going to be part of society and they cause harm to someone else they should have to suffer for their actions. Next for me would be is it mental suffering, jail time, lose of driving rights etc or physically suffering.

You're absolutely right. The two are deeply and intuitively connected. (Parfit's Section 38, btw, is entitled: "The Freedom that Morality Requires"... I screwed up above when I called it a Chapter... the two sections I've mentioned are from a chapter titled: "Free Will and Desert", so yeah... they're definitely connected.)

The Christian intuition is that man is "fallen" because of a FREE CHOICE made by Adam and Eve (even if you believe this is a metaphor, it's a metaphor for what happens once you recognize what having knowledge implies: i.e., responsibility for yourself alone, rather than God being responsible for your well-being as it was in Eden.) The depth of this intuition is so vast that even atheists often can't get rid of it. This, by the way is EXACTLY why Nietzsche's "madman" yells at the atheists first, who laugh at him when he says that he seeks God... he then says, famously, as in Had a Dad, "God is dead." ("for we have killed him.")

But once you see the reasons not to believe that individual human beings are "kingdoms within a kingdom" as it were, i.e., that we are not loci of causal independence, this all (ironically) falls away, and the doctrine of "original sin" ceases to make any sense, and with it go the doctrines of pure and utter moral responsibility, and deserved suffering that so pervade Christianity.

Your intuition about the death penalty is a good example of this intuition. God's punishment for Adam and Eve after their mortal sin was literally a form of "living death" (suffering) that they supposedly justly deserved for disobeying a direct order. The death penalty in the Christian legal tradition seems to me to stem directly from this, even though it has its origins in pre-Jewish Babylonian law (at least, if not even further back into pre-history than that). We *feel* as though brutal crimes involving the death of the victims necessitate that the criminal deserves death, but there, as I have said, is no real good argument for it other than insisting that they deserve it (sometimes appealing to what the victims want, which is invalid for various reasons -- most importantly, what people want has nothing to do with justice).

[Juana]

Well what about people that basically just breed and breed into the same life of suffering?

I'm not sure I understand the question. Do you mean that children deserve to suffer on the basis of their parents' decision to have kids in some environment where suffering is pervasive?

No I mean about the people that do not "break the cycle" so to say

[Hype]

Well what about people that basically just breed and breed into the same life of suffering?

I'm not sure I understand the question. Do you mean that children deserve to suffer on the basis of their parents' decision to have kids in some environment where suffering is pervasive?

No I mean about the people that do not "break the cycle" so to say

You mean like children of abusive parents who, when they have kids, then go on to abuse their kids? In that case, you'd be thinking something like: well, not all people who were abused (physically, mentally, sexually, etc) by their parents DO go on to hurt their children, some of them "break the cycle", so it's clearly possible to break the cycle, so the ones who don't... maybe they deserve to suffer.

My response is that we should try to understand at least two things: (A) why/how those who do successfully break the cycle are able to do so; and conversely, (B) why the ones who don't break the cycle did not do so. Once we understand these two things, we can move forward. I do not think it helps to make some of those people suffer, and to declare that they deserve it.

[SR]

I'll check back in on this. I am finding myself torn by this thread in many different directions. For me, this topic is profoundly dynamic and meaningful.

[Matz]

My mother dated a guy many years ago who was a very, very charming guy the first year they were dating and not living together. Very understanding, warm, funny, just a really great person that anyone would like.
Then they moved in together and some completely different sides of him surfaced and very scary ones that mostly involved really extreme rage, destruction and heavy drinking and blaming her for the most crazy things. He'd say stuff like 'I didn't like your tone of voice five days ago' and then flip out for two days straight and smash things and scream and stuff. Really, really psycho stuff.

That sounds more like bipolar disorder than sociopathy. And yeah, a brain scan IS exactly how you should diagnose sociopathy (in spite of the DSM requiring a less ... scientific... measure). It's a neurological disorder. Violent psychopathy is what happens when a sociopathic person (a person with a brain lacking function in key areas) is raised in a certain way and triggered in a certain way. There is a difference between what we call a "psycho" and someone who has psychopathy or sociopathy. Usually "psycho" implies extreme anger and violence, but this is much more associated with bipolar disorder and ASPD:

First of all when I wrote he was 'psycho' I didn't mean he had a psychriatic diagnosis. I meant psycho as in psychopath, but it was stupid of me to use that word, because most people will misunderstand.

Second of all, this man was and is not a manic depressive. I think you have a pretty incorrect view of manic depressives if you think it's normal for them to act the way I described above.
This man is without a doubt a sociopath. One of the key differences between a disturbed person like a sociopath and an insane person, a manic depressive fx (one that is having a manic episode (manic depressives aren't insane at all times of their lives you know, most are perfectly healthy and well for the vast majority of time) is that a disturbed person is able to CONTROL his rage, and turn it on and off. If he needs to appear normal for an hour he's able to do it. An insane person CAN'T control their insanity. A person having a manic episode is a 100% manic all the time until they get their medicine.

And that's exactly how the guy I mentioned was able to behave. Read the book 'Without Conscience', it's an excellent book on sociopaths, it's considered the bible on that area. If you do you'll see that I'm right.

[Hype]

My mother dated a guy many years ago who was a very, very charming guy the first year they were dating and not living together. Very understanding, warm, funny, just a really great person that anyone would like.
Then they moved in together and some completely different sides of him surfaced and very scary ones that mostly involved really extreme rage, destruction and heavy drinking and blaming her for the most crazy things. He'd say stuff like 'I didn't like your tone of voice five days ago' and then flip out for two days straight and smash things and scream and stuff. Really, really psycho stuff.

That sounds more like bipolar disorder than sociopathy. And yeah, a brain scan IS exactly how you should diagnose sociopathy (in spite of the DSM requiring a less ... scientific... measure). It's a neurological disorder. Violent psychopathy is what happens when a sociopathic person (a person with a brain lacking function in key areas) is raised in a certain way and triggered in a certain way. There is a difference between what we call a "psycho" and someone who has psychopathy or sociopathy. Usually "psycho" implies extreme anger and violence, but this is much more associated with bipolar disorder and ASPD:

First of all when I wrote he was 'psycho' I didn't mean he had a psychriatic diagnosis. I meant psycho as in psychopath, but it was stupid of me to use that word, because most people will misunderstand.

Second of all, this man was and is not a manic depressive. I think you have a pretty incorrect view of manic depressives if you think it's normal for them to act the way I described above.
This man is without a doubt a sociopath. One of the key differences between a disturbed person like a sociopath and an insane person, a manic depressive fx (one that is having a manic episode (manic depressives aren't insane at all times of their lives you know, most are perfectly healthy and well for the vast majority of time) is that a disturbed person is able to CONTROL his rage, and turn it on and off. If he needs to appear normal for an hour he's able to do it. An insane person CAN'T control their insanity. A person having a manic episode is a 100% manic all the time until they get their medicine.

And that's exactly how the guy I mentioned was able to behave. Read the book 'Without Conscience', it's an excellent book on sociopaths, it's considered the bible on that area. If you do you'll see that I'm right.

I have many friends with bipolar. I'm aware of what they're like most of the time. You are right about Hare though... I've read a ton of his stuff already (a friend of mine works on psychopathy, and my dad specialized in abnormal psych years ago). Maybe the guy you mentioned was a sociopath... I don't know, I just said that based on how you described him, he sounded bipolar (swinging between flying into a rage over nothing for two days and then being "normal"...).

I'm not sure "disturbed" vs. "insane" is the right distinction, and I definitely think the issue of control is debated in the literature. If you lack empathy, you're not able to control whether you feel it or not, you just might be able to control whether you appear to be empathetic on the surface.

[LJF]

It seems this ties in with the discussion on free will. Or at least what you believe is connected, right? I would say that yes someone does deserve to suffer. If one is going to be part of society and they cause harm to someone else they should have to suffer for their actions. Next for me would be is it mental suffering, jail time, lose of driving rights etc or physically suffering.

You're absolutely right. The two are deeply and intuitively connected. (Parfit's Section 38, btw, is entitled: "The Freedom that Morality Requires"... I screwed up above when I called it a Chapter... the two sections I've mentioned are from a chapter titled: "Free Will and Desert", so yeah... they're definitely connected.)

The Christian intuition is that man is "fallen" because of a FREE CHOICE made by Adam and Eve (even if you believe this is a metaphor, it's a metaphor for what happens once you recognize what having knowledge implies: i.e., responsibility for yourself alone, rather than God being responsible for your well-being as it was in Eden.) The depth of this intuition is so vast that even atheists often can't get rid of it. This, by the way is EXACTLY why Nietzsche's "madman" yells at the atheists first, who laugh at him when he says that he seeks God... he then says, famously, as in Had a Dad, "God is dead." ("for we have killed him.")

Within society people must be held accountable for their actions. If someone harms another they must have something done to them, suffering of some sort. By what you are saying wouldn't that mean no one is accountable for what they do and therefore you can do whatever and never pay a penalty to society?

A person givens up their rights when they harm someone. To some degree an eye for an eye.

If you get caught drinking and driving, they take away your license. You suffer because you can't drive and so do the people that have to drive your dumb ass around.

If someone is convicted of murder without a doubt they did it, I believe in the death penalty. Why waste the tax payers money to feed and house that person. Society doesn't need them.

Then there is this fucking asshole in jail for murder that the court decided he can get a sex change on the tax payers dime. That is total bullshit. The tax payer paying for some piece of shit to get a sex change. I'd rather they take that money and give it to a functioning member of society that wants to get a sex change. Someone lost their lives at this man's hands and now he gets a sex change for free. That motherfucker needs to suffer. Sorry but that really gets me.

But once you see the reasons not to believe that individual human beings are "kingdoms within a kingdom" as it were, i.e., that we are not loci of causal independence, this all (ironically) falls away, and the doctrine of "original sin" ceases to make any sense, and with it go the doctrines of pure and utter moral responsibility, and deserved suffering that so pervade Christianity.

Your intuition about the death penalty is a good example of this intuition. God's punishment for Adam and Eve after their mortal sin was literally a form of "living death" (suffering) that they supposedly justly deserved for disobeying a direct order. The death penalty in the Christian legal tradition seems to me to stem directly from this, even though it has its origins in pre-Jewish Babylonian law (at least, if not even further back into pre-history than that). We *feel* as though brutal crimes involving the death of the victims necessitate that the criminal deserves death, but there, as I have said, is no real good argument for it other than insisting that they deserve it (sometimes appealing to what the victims want, which is invalid for various reasons -- most importantly, what people want has nothing to do with justice).

[LJF]

It seems this ties in with the discussion on free will. Or at least what you believe is connected, right? I would say that yes someone does deserve to suffer. If one is going to be part of society and they cause harm to someone else they should have to suffer for their actions. Next for me would be is it mental suffering, jail time, lose of driving rights etc or physically suffering.

You're absolutely right. The two are deeply and intuitively connected. (Parfit's Section 38, btw, is entitled: "The Freedom that Morality Requires"... I screwed up above when I called it a Chapter... the two sections I've mentioned are from a chapter titled: "Free Will and Desert", so yeah... they're definitely connected.)

The Christian intuition is that man is "fallen" because of a FREE CHOICE made by Adam and Eve (even if you believe this is a metaphor, it's a metaphor for what happens once you recognize what having knowledge implies: i.e., responsibility for yourself alone, rather than God being responsible for your well-being as it was in Eden.) The depth of this intuition is so vast that even atheists often can't get rid of it. This, by the way is EXACTLY why Nietzsche's "madman" yells at the atheists first, who laugh at him when he says that he seeks God... he then says, famously, as in Had a Dad, "God is dead." ("for we have killed him.")

Within society people must be held accountable for their actions. If someone harms another they must have something done to them, suffering of some sort. By what you are saying wouldn't that mean no one is accountable for what they do and therefore you can do whatever and never pay a penalty to society?

A person givens up their rights when they harm someone. To some degree an eye for an eye.

If you get caught drinking and driving, they take away your license. You suffer because you can't drive and so do the people that have to drive your dumb ass around.

If someone is convicted of murder without a doubt they did it, I believe in the death penalty. Why waste the tax payers money to feed and house that person. Society doesn't need them.

Then there is this fucking asshole in jail for murder that the court decided he can get a sex change on the tax payers dime. That is total bullshit. The tax payer paying for some piece of shit to get a sex change. I'd rather they take that money and give it to a functioning member of society that wants to get a sex change. Someone lost their lives at this man's hands and now he gets a sex change for free. That motherfucker needs to suffer. Sorry but that really gets me.

I screwed up the last post, I have issues with my ipad.

[Matz]

I'm not sure "disturbed" vs. "insane" is the right distinction, and I definitely think the issue of control is debated in the literature. If you lack empathy, you're not able to control whether you feel it or not, you just might be able to control whether you appear to be empathetic on the surface.

I'm not talking about sociopaths being empathetic or not, because we agree a 100% that they only know what that is in an intellectual sense, they never, never feel it. They can fake it because they've observed 'normal' people being empathetic, but that's it. And they'll usually only be 'empathetic' if they can end up gaining something by it

However the disturbed vs insane you can't really argue against, I don't think. A scizophrenic killer fx will usually take a knife and maybe stab the first person they see because a voice in his head told him to. Whereas a psychopathic killer, like the guy in Norway, Breivik or many many serial killers will seek out their victims, wait for the right moment and will often times get away with what they have done, at least for a while. The insane guy will get treatment and Breivik will be going to jail for at least 21 years

so to me there is a huge difference between the two groups and the sociopathic group is much, much more dangeorous than the other. If I had to choose between living with a manic depressive and a sociopath I'd definitely pick the MD one

[Hype]

Here's... what I think you meant to post:

Within society people must be held accountable for their actions. If someone harms another they must have something done to them, suffering of some sort. By what you are saying wouldn't that mean no one is accountable for what they do and therefore you can do whatever and never pay a penalty to society?

A person givens up their rights when they harm someone. To some degree an eye for an eye.

If you get caught drinking and driving, they take away your license. You suffer because you can't drive and so do the people that have to drive your dumb ass around.

If someone is convicted of murder without a doubt they did it, I believe in the death penalty. Why waste the tax payers money to feed and house that person. Society doesn't need them.

Then there is this fucking asshole in jail for murder that the court decided he can get a sex change on the tax payers dime. That is total bullshit. The tax payer paying for some piece of shit to get a sex change. I'd rather they take that money and give it to a functioning member of society that wants to get a sex change. Someone lost their lives at this man's hands and now he gets a sex change for free. That motherfucker needs to suffer. Sorry but that really gets me.

You make a lot of bald assertions. It's impossible to have a discussion if you don't offer up reasons for why you assert these things, because in order to have a discussion, we have to know what your reasons are, so that we might see if you've made a mistake in your reasoning. So, for example, you say: "Within society people must be held accountable for their actions. If someone harms another they must have something done to them, suffering of some sort."

Okay, you think that, but you don't say why... you just assert the thing we're arguing about... All I have to do to object to that is say: Why must people be held accountable for their actions? (And anyway, it's not clear what that means...), and worse, why would holding people accountable for their actions (even if you were right that we should do this) involve, when they harm someone, NECESSARILY (you say "must") causing them to suffer? You offer no justification for this, and I think it's simply false.

Then you infer this from what you thought I said: "By what you are saying wouldn't that mean no one is accountable for what they do and therefore you can do whatever and never pay a penalty to society?"

But that isn't true. I've already said that of course we must do something to prevent criminals from recidivism. It doesn't follow that we should make them suffer. What does suffering have to do with what society should be owed? What connection does the suffering of a criminal have to making society somehow better? You need to offer some kind of answer to that question here, otherwise we don't have any good reason to believe you.

This, "A person givens up their rights when they harm someone. " is simply false, both as a matter of constitutional law, and as a matter of morality. You offer no good reasons to think this is true, and in practice, criminals DO retain certain rights, and it's a good thing too (the reasons for this are many and varied, and are also fairly obvious if you read things like the Geneva Conventions or any work of political philosophy dealing with justice.)

"If someone is convicted of murder without a doubt they did it, I believe in the death penalty. Why waste the tax payers money to feed and house that person. Society doesn't need them."

This is confused for several reasons. First, economic issues should not be confused with moral issues. Second, it is false that the death penalty saves tax money. It actually costs more. Why does it cost more? Because it would be REALLY BAD to have a death penalty that didn't involve a length appeals process -- innocent people would die (and have died, even with that lengthy process). But even if the death penalty could be applied PERFECTLY and cheaply, that still wouldn't justify it, morally or on grounds of 'desert'.

A lot of what you say just sounds like standard redneck/conservative/libertarian rhetoric without any substance. I think you can say more about your thoughts though.

[Hype]

I'm not sure "disturbed" vs. "insane" is the right distinction, and I definitely think the issue of control is debated in the literature. If you lack empathy, you're not able to control whether you feel it or not, you just might be able to control whether you appear to be empathetic on the surface.

I'm not talking about sociopaths being empathetic or not, because we agree a 100% that they only know what that is in an intellectual sense, they never, never feel it. They can fake it because they've observed 'normal' people being empathetic, but that's it. And they'll usually only be 'empathetic' if they can end up gaining something by it

However the disturbed vs insane you can't really argue against, I don't think. A scizophrenic killer fx will usually take a knife and maybe stab the first person they see because a voice in his head told him to. Whereas a psychopathic killer, like the guy in Norway, Breivik or many many serial killers will seek out their victims, wait for the right moment and will often times get away with what they have done, at least for a while. The insane guy will get treatment and Breivik will be going to jail for at least 21 years

so to me there is a huge difference between the two groups and the sociopathic group is much, much more dangeorous than the other. If I had to choose between living with a manic depressive and a sociopath I'd definitely pick the MD one

Yes, me too. I'm not sure what you're objecting to in what I said. I think maybe your use of terminology is throwing me off. Also, could you please stop using "fx" as an abbreviation for "for example"! It's really irritating to parse idiosyncratic stuff like that. "E.g.," is what is normally used.

[LJF]

As for someone that has murdered someone getting the death penalty I might not have made myself clear. If someone has been convicted and without a doubt they did it, they confessed or there is video, then there should be the death penalty. No more appeals. But I agree if there is doubt no there shouldn't be the death penalty and they can try to appeal.

[Hype]

As for someone that has murdered someone getting the death penalty I might not have made myself clear. If someone has been convicted and without a doubt they did it, they confessed or there is video, then there should be the death penalty. No more appeals. But I agree if there is doubt no there shouldn't be the death penalty and they can try to appeal.

What does actually being guilty beyond doubt have to do with deserving to die/deserving to suffer? That's what I want to know (that's what the question asks). You're still just saying it.