Summary
Donald Trump criticized President Biden’s decision to commute the sentences of 37 federal death row inmates, calling them “violent criminals” and wishing them to go to hell.
Trump also took the opportunity to sarcastically wish a “Merry Christmas” to Chinese troops in the Panama Canal and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Trump’s post also included references to his previous attempts to purchase Greenland and his suggestion that Wayne Gretzky run for Canadian Prime Minister.
I have two reasons why I’m against it.
Innocent people will get sentenced. There’s no way around that. Sententing an innocent person to death is among the greatest injustices I can think of so I’ll rather have someone guilty walk free. Granted that sentencing an innocent person to life in prison aint that much better but this is where the second reason comes in.
I don’t believe in free will. Punishing someone for something they did is not compatible with the way I see the word*. It’s like punishing a grizzly bear for attacking a person. If you’re danger to society you should be locked up one way or another but not as a punishment but to keep others safe. I think that even if you’re a murderer you should be treated well and we should figure out a way for them to live relatively normal lives behind the bars. They can’t help themselves. They didn’t choose to be born that way and thus shouldn’t be punished as if they could have acted otherwise.
*Risk of consequences still works as a deterrence and that “punishment” be it fine or jail time should still be carried out because otherwise it loses its credibility.In extreme cases sure, tho I feel the need to point out the context of the vats majority of criminals being conditioned into crime by their surrounding. Poverty and discrimination come to mind among others. I my opinion the best way to prevent anything is to hit it at its source, in this case making every day life more livable. Not only does that mean life must be comfortably affordable, but mental health should also be a top priority.
I don’t disagree with any of that nor do I feel like it goes against anything I just said.
Quite so, just felt it was an important caveat to add.
Doesn’t point 2 kind of justify execution too? We’re not chosing to execute that action it was pre-determined that we would execute that person from the moment the universe began.
I feel like you’re considering death penalty to be the default, but if the same logic is applied while considering lifetime in prison as the default, the result would be the opposite.
And considering that death of age looks to me more natural, I’m inclined to think no death penalty should be the default
Just because it happened doesn’t mean it wasn’t a mistake that we can learn from. In that regard, it was not justified.
Now if you are talking about taking the same action in a parallel universe, then that definitely depends on the perspective you’re modelling.
Yes if you believe in fatalism which I don’t.
So the guy being executed has no free will but the people executing him do?
Sorry, but I don’t understand the argument you’re trying to make here. You seem to be implying that no free will would mean we live in a fatalistic universe but I don’t think that is true. Fatalism doesn’t make any logical sense to me. It seems to imply action without a cause which is the exact opposite of what determinism means.
My understanding is determanism means every actions is based on perfectly predictable physical systems such that everything would go exactly the same way if the universe was reset and run again. In such a situation the people executing the guy would be no more capable of not executing him than a rock is capable of ignoring gravity.
I’m not sure if determinism necessarily means that re-running the “simulation” would always produce the exact same result. It’s conceivable that some randomness could exist, where a single elementary particle behaving one way rather than another millions of years ago could change the entire trajectory of the universe. You can always track backwards the causal chain of events but I don’t think you can do it forward. Not even if you’re Laplace’s Demon.
While I believe it’s true that people couldn’t have acted otherwise - meaning that if an event, like an execution, happened, it doesn’t make sense to say it could have been avoided - that doesn’t mean the future can’t be influenced. A person may be “pre-determined” to kill, but if you intervene and manage to convince them not to, their change of mind is still perfectly compatible with the absence of free will.
But you also are pre-determined to either help them or not?
Yeah. What ever makes me want to reason someone out of killing an another person is ultimately mysterious to even myself. I don’t know what compells me to do that and even if succesfull I can’t really take credit for it as if it’s something I alone decided to do out of my free will.
Let me guess, part of the Sam Harris cult?
That’s a bit loaded question but yes.
No it’s not. He is a confidence man repackaging a New Age interpretation of Buddhism into Atheist friendly language
His core belief, that freewill doesn’t exist is predicated upon a very generous re-interpretation of the Libet study, a study often refuted by Benjamin Libet himself who noted that what many ignore about his experiment is the existence of what he called “Free Won’t”
In which subjects showed that although the readiness potential existed, it was still possible for them to change their mind and not press the button regardless of how much readiness potential was present.
Other studies on the subject have lead to radically different results.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/free-will-is-only-an-illusion-if-you-are-too/
tl;dr for this article
They did another study that suggests meaningless decisions have readiness potiential. Such as idly scratching an itch or deciding what leg you’re going to start walking on. However readiness potential is NOT detected at all if the decision has actual weight behind it.
As tested with a study where people were asked to push a button on the left or right to determine which of two charities would get a thousand dollar donation. Readiness potential was only detected in the control group, which was told to push a button to decide which charity they personally liked better with the 1000 dollar donation being split evenly between them.
Meaning that if a decision requires any thought behind it at all, it was consciously made by a free agent.
At best Libet’s work shows that we have a subconscious mind, which is not going to be a revelation to anyone with a 2nd Grader’s understanding of Psychology.
Sorry my friend, I’m afraid you exist, your choices matter, and Sam Harris is a hack who unironically suggested a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Arabic Communities under the premise that belief in Allah was an incurable mental illness that can only lead to mass genocide and a thirst for white blood.
Basically there’s not much difference between Sam Harris and the Spirit Science guy outside of what team they play for.
So it was a loaded question.
Punishment is a behaviorist intervention. It doesn’t rely on the concept of free will. In fact, it depends on the lack of free will to make any sense at all. If there were free will, people would be able to change without punishment.
But killing someone isn’t a punishment. It’s a deterrent. It’s not designed to change behavior. It’s designed to end it.
Carrying out a punishment doesn’t make much sense as the person couldn’t have done otherwise but not carrying it out sends the signal to others that actions don’t have consequences and thus the deterrence stops working. That’s why we have to “punish” people for breaking the law. Not because it makes a difference to that specific individual but it sends a signal to others.
I absolutely agree with point 1.
I’ve never really thought about point 2. I don’t think I’m ready to say I don’t believe in free will, but I do agree that people are largely a product of their circumstances. I think in the case of a serial killer, it might not meet your definition of “free will” but it’s a person who has been methodical about the taking of life and not shown any contrition.
I would however add point 3. I don’t want to take someone’s life even if they deserve to die.
… and point 4 I just thought of… there’s not really any good reasons for capital punishment. It’s not a deterrent, and who cares about the cost of incarceration really.
Cost of an execution is more than the cost of life in prison as well.