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Post #81
Our justice systems around the world sometimes do fail at doing so, have for a long time, and sometimes even by judge's approval.
There are certain precautions too that a criminal and/or accomplices can take in order to make the system fail in their case. And probably always will be, seeing as how we humans have this ability to counter and crack pretty much anything.
That has a lot to do with justice, or about what is justice, imo anyway, and not just the death penalty, which can't be the whole point of this thread, or is it really? The title is "Justice" after all.
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From a philosophical point of view, justice tends to be what is universally acclaimed as "just" and "right." Theft is a prime example of the very antithesis of this statement (we universally acclaim theft as "unjust" and "wrong"). Think of two children, each one playing with a unique toy. The first child is more than content with his possessions and simply wishes to play in peace...
...The same cannot be said for the second child, who, upon glimpsing at his colleague's toy, decides to have both toys for himself, and rips it from the grasp of the first child. The first child, after realizing what has happened, begins to burst into tears, as he knows he has been wronged.
Theft is regarded as a crime in almost every society because it is not only for the pure benefit, and the total loss of the criminal and victim, respectively, but also because we build an understanding of how unjust it is before we can even speak or walk, which is why a moral compass is, unquestionably, the most important thing you can ever mentally possess.
tl:dr Justice exists, and there are fundamental concepts of it that EVERYONE understands, or should understand. From there, things get sketchy and unclear.
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Also, about morality one can say "everyone understands, or should understand, that rape and senseless murder are wrong. From there, thing get sketchy and unclear." The very purpose of this kind of thread - I think - is dealing with this kind of things once they get sketchy and unclear.
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Here I disagree: rehabilitation is of course preferable, but both it and imprisonment are inefficient. While I would rather people who are destructive to society be re-educated to become contributing members of society (not quite so extreme a case as Clockwork Orange), the process is even now experimental at best, and far from efficient. The human mind, though valuable, is a risky investment.
Since using "uncurable" cases for medical and scientific experimentation so as to better understand them is widely seen as cruel and unacceptable by the public (and scientific communities), execution is an effective alternative for permanent removal from society. Of course in this country, it can afford to be made much more efficient than it is today, but as with any function of government it needs to be policed and engineered against abuse. But that's another topic.
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Are you saying that because the justice system is not efficient enough for you, then it will always be that way?
Wouldn't that contradict your original point? If it's an institution that fails to protect the populace, then why should we allow them to kill people?
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No, but I'll just leave this debate be. Never did I say the system is not efficient enough for ME, it's just not efficient enough to be called "true justice" i.e. my point where a criminal is allowed the chance to convince others he did not do a crime even if he did.
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The problem with this is you're assuming he's a criminal without substantial evidence. If the government assumed that anybody was a criminal until he "convinced others he did not do a crime" we end up with big problems.
Innocent until guilty.
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It's hard to actually define what's right and what's wrong from a moral standpoint (example: rape is horrible and wrong, that's what I think and what all of you surely think. But let's just say there is a situationwhere raping someone saves the life of someone else.) I know it's a incredibly implausible situation, but would rape still be wrong? Or, maybe, kill one to save one thousands? Or murder a dictator to avoid a terrible war? Is murder always wrong? Or theft? Or rape?
Justice should not base on morals: theyare sketchy and unclear. That's why we don't exact revenge on inmates, or judges listen to what the victims want before emitting the verdict.
We don't punish murder because it's wrong: we punish murder because it's harmful to society as a whole. As it is theft. Or rape.
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Innocent until proven guilty. *
Yes of course, but what I'm saying is that this whole legal system is sometimes there to give guilty-as-fuck persons the chance to save themselves.. That is depending on the severity of the case, and the criminal's ability to do that, any outside help he might get, etc.
But then again it's the only legal system we've got, and it catches a lot of "bad guys" so none us can complain.
It's just that the law and the system sometimes works for the outlaw's favor. For the sake of an open argument, we can assume scenarios like these and there's no problem with that imo.
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You really aren't getting what I'm saying.
In the eyes of law, they shouldn't be seen as outlaws or guilty-as-fuck persons until they can see they are. You're saying that the law benefits those who know they commit crimes, but if we went the other way, we'd be assuming everyone's guilty. People shouldn't have to prove they didn't do a crime. It's up to the prosecutors to show the evidence, and if they can't, then they should do more research.
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I never understood justice sometimes, particularly theft.
How is it that you have to pay back the person who you took X from more than what it would have cost? For example, why is it that in pirating for example getting caught pirating something $10 equates to you having to repay them $250,000? Am I missing something here?
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It's like beating a dog on the nose for shitting on the floor so they won't do it again, in text.
More so it's a tool for people or corporations to get way more back than they are owed, like with those crazy piracy cases.
Edited:
Or for a third party like the state that hasn't even been directly robbed.
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I believe the idea is that it's not necessarily fair for somebody to steal $10 and have a chance of getting away with it, and paying $10 if they're caught. It's fair, in my opinion, to punish them more severely for that crime, as it says "we don't tolerate this" and because they may have done it previously. If the punishment is the same as doing it lawfully, reasonably there would be no reason to do it lawfully, as there's not a risk.
Piracy charges are ridiculous though, so I'm not defending that.
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I think everyone would agree with the whole $10 does not equal $250,000 thing. In reality, that isn't justice at all, it's just corporations having a hand in the pocket of justice.
But let's say $200 fine for stealing something that is $10. The $200 fine is because you violated a fundamental rule in society that we all abide to, not really because of the lost money from the $10 piece of stolen whatever.
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I'm struck by the consistent appeal to rehabilitation as a better alternative to permenant removal from society while the rehabilitation must involve coercion just the same as life imprisonment or capital punishment. How does one go about rehabilitating a serial murderer with a death wish? It seems to me cruel and unusual to place him in a small cell for the rest of his life, and similarly inhumane to manipulate him and his mind in the hopes that he might be able to return to society. Also, what is the meter stick for rehabilitation? When is an individual rehabilitated form a heinous crime? And if the individual should return to society only to regress into his old ways, who is to be held responsible for the multiplication of his negative impact on society and it's members? Clearly HE can't be held responsible, he's undoubtedly mentally incapable of pertaining to societal values, and furthermore he appears to be "unfixable". So we are back where we started: lock him up for the rest of his life like an animal in cage, again try to "fix" him and risk reintroducing him into society (again) to put innocent individuals in harms way of a proven murderer (again), or decide that the loss of his life (however tragic it may or may not be) is the lesser of a number of evils.
I apologize if I have presumed too much of the science(?) of "rehabilitation" in my naivety. Please "re-educate" me while I go out and kill some people, safe in the knowledge that I won't be punished, but instead rewarded with either a lifetime of comfort or some pretentious manipulation before being sent back on my way.
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With all this talk of rehabilitation and re-education as an alternative to the inefficent lifetime imprisonment of humans, or the "inhumane" execution thereof, I'm surprised nobody's brought up the whole "Clockwork Orange" thing. Is it humane to train someone like an animal to where they can't make the decision to do bad things? I personally advocate an imaginary method of re-education where the option isn't so much taken away from them by mental programming, but they're instead convinced to make the decision to do good themselves. But with such a route either inexistant or strictly experimental in current society, would it be better to train people like animals, imprison them for life, or execute them when they pose an extreme danger to society?
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You're assuming a lot about peoples' stances on rehabilitation. I never advocated "training" people to not be criminals, but rather show them that they do not have to be and provide better options and alternatives for them. Perhaps they were raised in such a way that they knew no different? Show them that there is a different path that is both legal and moral.
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I feel as if Justice is not correct nowadays. We have come from decades of different forms of justice, or punishment. Crimes comitted nowadays isn't easily compared to the punishment. The three strikes law is also something that needs to be reworked. Three strikes law sticks with you for years, and even if you haven't done anything bad in years, you still get fucked over and sent for 10 years in prison. No matter how bad the crime was.
The justice system needs to be reworked, we need to get good punishments for crimes. People who commit the same crime get a different sentence, which is really weird.
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And what is the recourse for those who do not wish to change? This isn't so much rhetoric as my genuine interest in your thoughts concerning truely evil persons. When a heinous crime is committed, I don't first think of the tragic life of a criminal which must have led him to that point, I think of how tragic it is that an innocent member of society in the victim was removed without from it without cause. If an individual got his hands on a nuclear weapon and willfully detonated it in <insert large metropolitan center here>, and then admitted to the crime and stated that he would do it again if given the opportunity, would you still be consider reintroducing him into society? Or would it be too morally objectionable to kill the man who would kill every last human on the planet if he just had the resources? I can't consider it, it's an alien concept to me. If you have some specific plan for rehabilitation and how simply presenting a deranged individual with socially acceptable options will redeem him, please respond with it. If not, I see no alternative to harsh punishment for harsh crimes, whatever society deems those to be.
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To me, justice had always been a very amorphous and strange subject to get a firm grasp of. For instance, in America there is the death penalty. With that in mind, who says when a man should live or die? Or rather, if a criminal cannot be contained, should he be killed? When does imprisonment become ineffective or not enough? It is such a grey area in society because since everybody thinks differently, someone has got to choose on behalf of those who are not able to. If a man is murdered by another man, the victim does not choose the sentence. The judge does. The lawyers do. The jury does. We split the matter of choice into so many different parts that it is almost impossible for bias. At the same time, however, there is always bias due to the way our minds work and how vastly they differ from one to the next. The justice system is one of those things in life that cannot be perfect because it requires us, as human beings, to be perfect as well. As we all know, nobody is perfect nor do they have the capacity for perfection. For now, we merely adjust and tweak the system until a majority of the people are content to the point of apathy or satisfaction.
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I think the argument for a death penalty on the grounds of unrepentant insanity is utterly inane, and in fact even more a demonstration of the inhumanity of capital punishment. Individuals who kill unrepentantly are likely suffering from intense psychological disorders, medical conditions, which need to be diagnosed and treated; not relegated to the unusually cruel treatment of asylum in prison.
By far the average victims of capital punishment are either individuals who could safely exist in a prison setting, or even individuals falsely or harshly over-accused who will be killed before their guilt can be ascertained. It simply isn't worth the trouble to commit such an already heinous action.
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Treatment is costly and not certain in its effectiveness. Using these individuals for medicinal experimentation is considered cruel and inethical, and research on the topic is slow in coming. Capital punishment then becomes the efficient route to take. And the resources that would've been used up treating people could then be put to work verifying their guilt or reasonable threat to society, thereby limiting the number of innocent executions.
Of course, ideally we'd be able not only to rehabilitate people who are detremental to society, but do so preventatively, thus creating a utopian society where the root of the problem, the nature of the individual, is being altered rather than the symptoms being treated. But then the question arises, what traits should be removed or prohibited due to their impact on society?
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I've said nothing of medicinal experimentation, I speak of proven anti-psychotic medicines and therapy to help diagnose these individuals psychological conditions that may lead to their murder. We have the means and the necessity to be humane to all citizens, why should the mentally disturbed be considered criminal for actions not under their own control?
Any financial arguments I refuse to even address, as taking monetary value over the value of a life is simply unthinkable.
The fact is society does need to be fixed by the roots, and one of the most heavily overburdened roots of our society is the way we handle prisons. With so many millions imprisoned we are clearly not approaching policies correctly, and our haste to kill prisoners in lieu of solving violent crimes are in essence barbaric disdain for civilized justice.
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So if I kill for money, does that make me any better than the government saving money by killing me? Also, have you ever thought that there is a reason that we have millions of people in prison? Maybe it's because, oh, I don't know... there's bad people out there. We shouldn't have to be civilized if the people we have in our prisons aren't. Having done something out of your control does not completely excuse the action. You still did it. You can't just fix being mentally disturbed with therapy and a few pills. While it is entirely possible depending on the severity of the murderer's mindset, sometimes it just wouldn't work.
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you guys need to read some hobbes and rousseau,
if you subscribe to it, there is a social contract between the people and the commonwealth of society,
outside of society, we have total liberty, such as in post-apoc movies like mad max, you can kill and take anything, but you also can only own what you can protect. For society to work, we must giveup some of our liberties, (ie the right to persue justice on our own), while we gain protection from society, and the ability to claim property, laws protect the citizens, and justice is the carrying out of those laws which protect their citizens. to say justice doesn't exist is to say there is no society.
rousseau expands further on what a true law is, and it simply states that true laws must apply to all citizens abstractly, and not specificly address specific citizens, and instances where the laws are not carried out as they state, are corruptions of the laws, and corruption causes society to crumble eventualy
so as long as true laws are enforced, there exists justice
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I learned some stuff from Hobbes and Rousseau last year in human behavior class. Unfortunately, I don't remember a damn thing.
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Excuse me sir, but I have to disagree. Hobbes' conception of what is a human being is reductionist and it implies many false assumptions (e.g. that every human only thinks about his own benefit [that are are no families], that all humans are somewhat equal, etc.)
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In my Opinion, justice now a days is only comes in the nearest dollar payed to the right person, excluding crimes of humanity.
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This is what good parents show their kids. Or should.
So showing that to someone who is already past most of his life, is a criminal, is pissed off and angry and in prison, it wouldn't work so easily. He might become a changed man, but he would still be in prison.
And this brings us to the issue where, if a life-time prisoner (assumable was very violent) learns from his mistakes and is definitely a changed man ("rehabilitated"), then why would you want to keep him incarcerated for any longer?
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