Cause and Effect: the Ahole syndrome

Ahnimus wrote:

In my society? Not at all. You seem awfully paranoid about scientific research. If you developed a brain tumor. You wouldn't want it removed? If you had committed a murder with the tumor, you would want to be sent to jail? I'm not following your logic here. It sounds like your saying, causality doesn't matter, it's the conscious self that's entirely responsible for everything the human does? If you put a human in jail the only part of him that's going to suffer is his conscious self. At least that guy had the balls to walk into the hospital and say he'd thought about molesting children. Would you do that? Anyway, I can only laugh and sigh, because I don't get it. Causality works for starting your car or turning on your TV, or typing on your keyboard. But when it comes to people, it stops. And you plan on being a persecutor, it makes a lot of sense, because if you had my perspective, you'd fail at it. I couldn't do it. Because you know that when you put an innocent man in-front of a heated jury and you do what you do, innocent people will be sent to jail. You have to be cold and hard.

innocent? are you saying cho was innocent? klebold and harris were innocent? they both committed the acts of which they stood accused... there is nothing innocent about that. you may mean culpable, and that is debatable. for cho, maybe he wasn't. for the columbine killers, however, they were.

yes, i admire that the guy you referred to was willing to go to the hospital and admit to his desires and i would like to see a society more open to trying to help people willing to admit that something is wrong.

however, if a brain tumor i had made me kill people, then yes, i belong in jail for that killing. it doesn't happen overnight, and i should have sought help before someone had to die for my stubbornness. i wouldn't want to go, of course. but i would understand that i had to and understand that that is the price i pay for ending someone else's life. and yes, i would rather go to jail than be lobotomized for my crimes, or neutered. becos once you do it to criminals, like i said, what's to stop you from doing it to gay people to "fix" them? to artists and thinkers who are considered a little too weird? to communists and islamic people, just in case?

we are not like a car. even under your causation scheme, there is simply no way to predict future human behavior, so determinism vs. free will is a meaningless distinction. it means you can look back and guess at what might have caused someone to do something, but you cannot prove it. any number of things might have caused it. and it certainly cannot help you predict what somebody might do well enough to stop it becos you will never be able to collect every single bit of information they've ever received and figure out which ones had a significant impact upon them. it might be sound philosophically, but practically it cannot eliminate the need for jails.

i don't know what this persecutor nonsense is. perhaps you meant prosecutor and that ain't happening cos i didn't pass the background check this summer i will be defending juvenile offenders and trying to get them remedial aid programs rather than time in the detention center. can your mind grasp that contradiction?