{"id":803,"date":"2010-07-15T00:16:05","date_gmt":"2010-07-15T04:16:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=803"},"modified":"2010-07-15T00:16:05","modified_gmt":"2010-07-15T04:16:05","slug":"crime-and-punishment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=803","title":{"rendered":"Crime and Punishment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Incidentally, I read Crime and Punishment in my 20s and didn&#8217;t like it much. When I told that to a Russian guy, he assured me that I must have read a bad translation. A year ago I read a different translation and didn&#8217;t like it much. So there you go.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s weird to start a post with &#8220;Incidentally,&#8221; but that&#8217;s what happened!<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I heard a radio story today about psychopaths. It seems that there&#8217;s good evidence that their brains are actually physically different from non-psychopaths.<\/p>\n<p>(The assumption was that they were born that way.)<\/p>\n<p>So the question on the radio was: <em>Since it&#8217;s not their fault, should they be exempt from the death penalty?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This question reminded me of another one I recently read: <em>If there&#8217;s no free will, should we punish people?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Which reminded me of yet another question I recently read: <em>If genetics made me do it, should I be punished, or should my punishment be lessened?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Hmm.<\/p>\n<p>To me, the middle question is nonsensical. If there&#8217;s no free will, then we don&#8217;t have the free will to decide whether to punish people. So yeah, go ahead and punish them because why not?<\/p>\n<p>The last question seems pretty simple to me, too.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Jail keeps you away from me. If genetics makes you eat people&#8217;s hearts, then regardless of whose fault it is, I&#8217;d rather you were locked up. ESPECIALLY so, since there&#8217;s less chance of reform.<\/li>\n<li>Genetic probability generally works within a range. Where you land on that range can be, in part, determined by the environment. I may be genetically likely to eat people&#8217;s hearts, but I&#8217;m also genetically likely to alter my diet if the environment is hostile to heart-eaters.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The first question is a tricky one, because I&#8217;m not sure why we have the death penalty. I usually hear these reasons:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Satisfaction of justice\/revenge, whether societal or specific to the victim<\/li>\n<li>Punishment<\/li>\n<li>Deterrence<\/li>\n<li>Financial cost reduction<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Given those items (and without discussing whether there should be a death penalty at all), I don&#8217;t see why your brain being different matters much.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s also an issue of implications here. As one guy on the radio said: What about depressed people? What about alcoholics? Their brains are different, too?<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, why don&#8217;t we execute people with extremely low IQs? What&#8217;s going on there? I think I agree with that, but I also think I disagree with letting psychopaths off the hook.<\/p>\n<p>Can you help?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Incidentally, I read Crime and Punishment in my 20s and didn&#8217;t like it much. When I told that to a Russian guy, he assured me that I must have read a bad translation. A year ago I read a different translation and didn&#8217;t like it much. So there you go. It&#8217;s weird to start a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}