You may think you chose to read this, but Stanford scientist Robert Sapolsky would disagree. He says virtually all human behavior is beyond our conscious control.
Definitely not onboard with letting criminals off the hook for bad deeds. If your “brain script” leads you to kill, you just need to be removed from society. Sorry.
Yea the article wasn’t particularly thoughtful. As you say, justice can simply preventative without being punitive. But on balance, aiming for rehabilitation can still make some sense even without compassionate anti-blame arguments. There are limits to how much we want to keep people out of society and it costs money, so prisoners will return to society at some point.
So what’s the best approach for preventing harm? If a blame-worthiness approach premised on free will is fundamentally false, or at least not correct enough, then ideas about punishment and deterrence would likely be ineffective compared to more rehabilitation based approaches.
Yea the article wasn’t particularly thoughtful. As you say, justice can simply preventative without being punitive. But on balance, aiming for rehabilitation can still make some sense even without compassionate anti-blame arguments. There are limits to how much we want to keep people out of society and it costs money, so prisoners will return to society at some point.
So what’s the best approach for preventing harm? If a blame-worthiness approach premised on free will is fundamentally false, or at least not correct enough, then ideas about punishment and deterrence would likely be ineffective compared to more rehabilitation based approaches.