Before epilepsy was understood to be a neurological condition, people believed it was caused by the moon, or by phlegm in the brain. They condemned seizures as evidence of witchcraft or demonic possession, and killed or castrated sufferers to prevent them from passing tainted blood to a new generation.
Do we though? If you capture a Terminator robot from the future and reprogram it to be helpful, protective, and good, do you still think we should punish it too for all the people it killed? An eye for an eye and all that?
Assuming that you said no…
What do we gain as a society by focusing on punishing people instead of reprogramming them? And what does that say about us?
If you do think that even after reprogramming we should punish it too, what do we gain from that?
It’s more from an individual point of view. It’s a common psychopathic tendency to blame your actions on others, which is not a helpful or healthy way of dealing with them. I’m not thinking in terms of punishment as much as acknowledgement of the problem.