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Basically, I don't accept what you and most people accept - that humans have free will, we could have made a choice X instead of Y, etc, etc. I know its not a

Basically, I don't accept what you and most people accept - that humans have free will, we could have made a choice X instead of Y, etc, etc. I know its not a popular opinion, and I don't expect to convince you of my views in a couple sentences, but generally speaking I think the notion of punishment should always be viewed in the context of societal functioning. If we do as you suggest and punish an executive, does that actually lead to decreased occurances? If so by how much? What about the next time it occurs? Can we completely prevent another occurance? Can we decrease its probability? At what costs to the person and society? What caused it in the first place? These are all much more important questions to mold a system of punishment than our current focus which almost completely lacks any measurements and analyses and is still steeped in vague moralities derived from historical accident and our own intuitions which are perforated with biases and flaws.

geofft 9y ago
> Basically, I don't accept what you and most people accept - that humans have free will, we could have made a choice X instead of Y, etc, etc. My argument does not rely on free will at all. (If you notice, I have made the argument that the same thing would apply to AIs, and I am certainly not arguing that AIs have free will.) My argument simply relies on two assumptions: first, that the agent in question sorta-rationally responds to incentives, and second, that the agent in question believes that punishment applied to other, similar agents after certain actions also could apply to them, if they take the same action. If a human believes that they can make a better outcome themselves by doing action A instead of not doing action A, they will likely do so. Concretely, if an employee believes that they will cause a better outcome for the company and get rewarded for it personally by taking an action, with little risk, they will likely do so. This is borne out by evidence almost as plenteous as evidence that humans require food to live; it needs no controlled study. This happens all the time and essentially all productivity under capitalism requires this to hold up. If a human believes that action A brings significant risk to themselves, they will probably refrain from doing so. And the convincing threat of prison time does actually cause humans to refrain from actions. fThis is also borne out by everyday life; there are plenty of outright illegal things you can do to make your company significantly more profitable, like poisoning your competitors, that happen extremely rarely. So I don't understand why you are questioning "Does punishment as deterrent work?" from first principles, as if it is not settled. Do you disagree with the arguments above? I have to say that if you do, I feel like I am arguing with someone who disagrees that food is required for humans to live. I certainly can defend that position logically, I would just feel ridiculous doing so. Nothing about changing incentives requires free will - it is a simple if statement to say, if risk outweighs reward, refrain, else proceed. You do not need any free will to potentially act contrary to the if statement. I would think if you believe people don't have free will, it makes this argument easier. (In terms of morality, I am the sort of Christian who believes that every prisoner should be set free and that Christ has redeemed every last human, regardless of what they did, and that if every last murderer and rapist went to heaven, I would join them in singing praises because I wouldn't deserve to be there one bit more than they would. If you go just a week or two back in my comments on this site, you'll find me asking if I am morally/religiously compelled to work for the end of prisons. But I am not making a moral argument in this thread, and I hope it's clear that the argument I'm making is wildly divorced from my morality - I am trying to acknowledge that it is rational to imprison people as punishment, even as I believe that it is immoral to do so.)
- jfaucett 9y ago
  So I think we're just talking by one another and about different concepts entirely. I'm not questioning whether punishment as a deterrent works at all. Obviously it does. I guess my emphasis on the morality imperative implicitly led people to believe I was indeed questioning the notion of punishment as a deterrent. I think, given a better medium and more time, we could have cleared this up much better. At any rate now I'm actually interested in how you arrived at your prison views, since religious rationalizations puzzle me endlessly and I'm always out to see if a religous person who arrives at a good conclusion in my view has any insight to offer me in convincing other religious people to change their ideas as well.
  - geofft 9y ago
    > At any rate now I'm actually interested in how you arrived at your prison views Three things (and, note, I currently hold this position weakly and welcome further thoughts that either oppose or support it): 1. There is no story in the Bible, to my knowledge, of prison being used by people the Bible calls good. There are a few places where someone is imprisoned and God uses the situation for good - Daniel in the lion's den, Paul and Silas in the prison of Phillipi, etc. - but you never see e.g. Moses or David or anyone say to build a prison or to put someone in confinement, as far as I recall. 2. Nothing in Mosaic law (again, that I know of) talks about prison as a means for punishment / correction. You put people to death for offenses that we wouldn't consider capital today, sure. You exile them. You certainly have them pay restitution. But there's no Biblical command that a moral society should even have a prison. 3. There are plenty of passages like Isaiah 61, "to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to those who are bound," Matthew 25, "I was in prison and you came to visit me," etc. that seem to have an underlying assumption that everyone who is in prison is there unjustly. Even if they're meant to be read metaphorically, the metaphor only works right if you think of prison as unequivocally bad. There's no sense that some people deserve the experience of being in prison, or that justice requires leaving some people in prison. Therefore, I have trouble seeing a society that puts people in prison and calls it moral as in accordance with a Biblical view of morality. Of course the whole idea that Western civilization is built on "Judeo-Christian" morals is flimsy in many ways, but for prison in particular, there seems to be a particular lack of support.

geofft 9y ago

> Basically, I don't accept what you and most people accept - that humans have free will, we could have made a choice X instead of Y, etc, etc. My argument does not rely on free will at all. (If you notice, I have made the argument that the same thing would apply to AIs, and I am certainly not arguing that AIs have free will.) My argument simply relies on two assumptions: first, that the agent in question sorta-rationally responds to incentives, and second, that the agent in question believes that punishment applied to other, similar agents after certain actions also could apply to them, if they take the same action. If a human believes that they can make a better outcome themselves by doing action A instead of not doing action A, they will likely do so. Concretely, if an employee believes that they will cause a better outcome for the company and get rewarded for it personally by taking an action, with little risk, they will likely do so. This is borne out by evidence almost as plenteous as evidence that humans require food to live; it needs no controlled study. This happens all the time and essentially all productivity under capitalism requires this to hold up. If a human believes that action A brings significant risk to themselves, they will probably refrain from doing so. And the convincing threat of prison time does actually cause humans to refrain from actions. fThis is also borne out by everyday life; there are plenty of outright illegal things you can do to make your company significantly more profitable, like poisoning your competitors, that happen extremely rarely. So I don't understand why you are questioning "Does punishment as deterrent work?" from first principles, as if it is not settled. Do you disagree with the arguments above? I have to say that if you do, I feel like I am arguing with someone who disagrees that food is required for humans to live. I certainly can defend that position logically, I would just feel ridiculous doing so. Nothing about changing incentives requires free will - it is a simple if statement to say, if risk outweighs reward, refrain, else proceed. You do not need any free will to potentially act contrary to the if statement. I would think if you believe people don't have free will, it makes this argument easier. (In terms of morality, I am the sort of Christian who believes that every prisoner should be set free and that Christ has redeemed every last human, regardless of what they did, and that if every last murderer and rapist went to heaven, I would join them in singing praises because I wouldn't deserve to be there one bit more than they would. If you go just a week or two back in my comments on this site, you'll find me asking if I am morally/religiously compelled to work for the end of prisons. But I am not making a moral argument in this thread, and I hope it's clear that the argument I'm making is wildly divorced from my morality - I am trying to acknowledge that it is rational to imprison people as punishment, even as I believe that it is immoral to do so.)

jfaucett 9y ago
So I think we're just talking by one another and about different concepts entirely. I'm not questioning whether punishment as a deterrent works at all. Obviously it does. I guess my emphasis on the morality imperative implicitly led people to believe I was indeed questioning the notion of punishment as a deterrent. I think, given a better medium and more time, we could have cleared this up much better. At any rate now I'm actually interested in how you arrived at your prison views, since religious rationalizations puzzle me endlessly and I'm always out to see if a religous person who arrives at a good conclusion in my view has any insight to offer me in convincing other religious people to change their ideas as well.
- geofft 9y ago
  > At any rate now I'm actually interested in how you arrived at your prison views Three things (and, note, I currently hold this position weakly and welcome further thoughts that either oppose or support it): 1. There is no story in the Bible, to my knowledge, of prison being used by people the Bible calls good. There are a few places where someone is imprisoned and God uses the situation for good - Daniel in the lion's den, Paul and Silas in the prison of Phillipi, etc. - but you never see e.g. Moses or David or anyone say to build a prison or to put someone in confinement, as far as I recall. 2. Nothing in Mosaic law (again, that I know of) talks about prison as a means for punishment / correction. You put people to death for offenses that we wouldn't consider capital today, sure. You exile them. You certainly have them pay restitution. But there's no Biblical command that a moral society should even have a prison. 3. There are plenty of passages like Isaiah 61, "to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to those who are bound," Matthew 25, "I was in prison and you came to visit me," etc. that seem to have an underlying assumption that everyone who is in prison is there unjustly. Even if they're meant to be read metaphorically, the metaphor only works right if you think of prison as unequivocally bad. There's no sense that some people deserve the experience of being in prison, or that justice requires leaving some people in prison. Therefore, I have trouble seeing a society that puts people in prison and calls it moral as in accordance with a Biblical view of morality. Of course the whole idea that Western civilization is built on "Judeo-Christian" morals is flimsy in many ways, but for prison in particular, there seems to be a particular lack of support.