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.
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.