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So you think it is value added to society for a person to be able to murder someone? I understand it fine. It's objectively wrong. Imposing a punishment is PR

So you think it is value added to society for a person to be able to murder someone? I understand it fine. It's objectively wrong. Imposing a punishment is PRIMARILY a preventative action. The threat of being thrown in jail or even executed is not to retroactively deal with the situation, but to give people an incentive to not murder. If it didn't discourage murder, then people would find a different way to dissuade people from murdering. How is it tyranny to curb a person's ability to murder? Or you trying to argue that allowing people to murder others is a net gain for society?

pdonis 6y ago
> So you think it is value added to society for a person to be able to murder someone? I have never claimed any such thing. > Imposing a punishment is PRIMARILY a preventative action. Punishing murderer A can certainly deter potential murderer B. But punishing murderer A obviously can't change the fact that murderer A committed a murder. And it might not deter potential murderer C, who either thinks they can escape punishment or has what they think is such a good reason to murder that they don't care about the punishment. So if your goal is to prevent all murders, punishment doesn't achieve that goal. If your goal is simply to decrease the number of murders, then punishment can do that, yes. But you seem to be taking the position that just decreasing the number is not enough; that only preventing all murders is acceptable. > How is it tyranny to curb a person's ability to murder? It's not tyranny to put a murderer on trial and imprison them if they are found guilty. (This assumes that the trial is fair, which in our society is often not the case. But I don't want to go off on another tangent.) It is tyranny to force a person who has not murdered anyone to go through some kind of brain surgery which is claimed to remove their propensity to murder. Which is what you appear to be proposing.
- Layke1123 6y ago
  Then if you could change a person and make them incapable of murder, would you not do it? If you could prevent murder, why aren't you morally compelled to? If you chose to let it happen, that means you approve of it. My position is that reducing murder as much as you can is the correct position, to include making that number zero, just like stopping all rape is better than just reducing the number of rapes. Is it OK for a parent to have their child circumcised? Or have their ears pierced? If thats OK, I don't see why removing your ability to murder someone is seen as so drastic. Would you not elect to have your ability to murder removed?
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > if you could change a person and make them incapable of murder, would you not do it? I should have commented earlier in this discussion that you are presuming an awful lot of certainty about something where I don't think any such level of certainty is even possible. How could you possibly be so confident that some brain procedure would really, truly make a person incapable of murder? And would do so without impairing their capacities in any other respect? I can't even put myself in the position of imagining being in that kind of state of knowledge. So I'm not sure I can even respond to questions about what I would or wouldn't do in such a state. Furthermore, my comments in this discussion about tyranny are based on historical knowledge about past societies where people have held beliefs like the ones you describe--where they really, truly, honestly believed, with certainty or even with what they thought was a high enough probability, that forcing other people to do something, or forcing some kind of treatment on them, would achieve some obviously desirable social goal. And in every single case in history that I know of, those people were wrong. Not just sort of wrong, not just a little bit off--terribly, horribly wrong; lots and lots of people dying wrong. So when you describe a scenario in which you say you know, with certainty, or even with high probability (you threw out a figure of 90 percent in another part of this thread--I'll respond more specifically to that there), that you could change a person and make them incapable of murder, by some sort of brain surgery or some secret ray that they can't perceive, or by any means other than convincing that person, through discussion and argument, that murder is wrong, I simply don't believe that's actually possible. So I don't factor such impossibilities into my thinking about what I should or shouldn't do. > Is it OK for a parent to have their child circumcised? Or have their ears pierced? Personally, no, I would not force either of those things on a child without their consent. Circumcision is an edge case because there was a time when circumcision was widely believed to be desirable for health reasons, but that belief is now thought to be false. If a parent sincerely believed it was necessary for health reasons, I would not say they were wrong to have a child circumcised. But such beliefs should be checked very carefully--more carefully than, from what I can gather, people checked the belief about circumcision during the time when that belief was widespread. > Would you not elect to have your ability to murder removed? As above, I am unable to even consider this as a real possibility.
    - 6y ago

pdonis 6y ago

> So you think it is value added to society for a person to be able to murder someone? I have never claimed any such thing. > Imposing a punishment is PRIMARILY a preventative action. Punishing murderer A can certainly deter potential murderer B. But punishing murderer A obviously can't change the fact that murderer A committed a murder. And it might not deter potential murderer C, who either thinks they can escape punishment or has what they think is such a good reason to murder that they don't care about the punishment. So if your goal is to prevent all murders, punishment doesn't achieve that goal. If your goal is simply to decrease the number of murders, then punishment can do that, yes. But you seem to be taking the position that just decreasing the number is not enough; that only preventing all murders is acceptable. > How is it tyranny to curb a person's ability to murder? It's not tyranny to put a murderer on trial and imprison them if they are found guilty. (This assumes that the trial is fair, which in our society is often not the case. But I don't want to go off on another tangent.) It is tyranny to force a person who has not murdered anyone to go through some kind of brain surgery which is claimed to remove their propensity to murder. Which is what you appear to be proposing.

Layke1123 6y ago
Then if you could change a person and make them incapable of murder, would you not do it? If you could prevent murder, why aren't you morally compelled to? If you chose to let it happen, that means you approve of it. My position is that reducing murder as much as you can is the correct position, to include making that number zero, just like stopping all rape is better than just reducing the number of rapes. Is it OK for a parent to have their child circumcised? Or have their ears pierced? If thats OK, I don't see why removing your ability to murder someone is seen as so drastic. Would you not elect to have your ability to murder removed?
- pdonis 6y ago
  > if you could change a person and make them incapable of murder, would you not do it? I should have commented earlier in this discussion that you are presuming an awful lot of certainty about something where I don't think any such level of certainty is even possible. How could you possibly be so confident that some brain procedure would really, truly make a person incapable of murder? And would do so without impairing their capacities in any other respect? I can't even put myself in the position of imagining being in that kind of state of knowledge. So I'm not sure I can even respond to questions about what I would or wouldn't do in such a state. Furthermore, my comments in this discussion about tyranny are based on historical knowledge about past societies where people have held beliefs like the ones you describe--where they really, truly, honestly believed, with certainty or even with what they thought was a high enough probability, that forcing other people to do something, or forcing some kind of treatment on them, would achieve some obviously desirable social goal. And in every single case in history that I know of, those people were wrong. Not just sort of wrong, not just a little bit off--terribly, horribly wrong; lots and lots of people dying wrong. So when you describe a scenario in which you say you know, with certainty, or even with high probability (you threw out a figure of 90 percent in another part of this thread--I'll respond more specifically to that there), that you could change a person and make them incapable of murder, by some sort of brain surgery or some secret ray that they can't perceive, or by any means other than convincing that person, through discussion and argument, that murder is wrong, I simply don't believe that's actually possible. So I don't factor such impossibilities into my thinking about what I should or shouldn't do. > Is it OK for a parent to have their child circumcised? Or have their ears pierced? Personally, no, I would not force either of those things on a child without their consent. Circumcision is an edge case because there was a time when circumcision was widely believed to be desirable for health reasons, but that belief is now thought to be false. If a parent sincerely believed it was necessary for health reasons, I would not say they were wrong to have a child circumcised. But such beliefs should be checked very carefully--more carefully than, from what I can gather, people checked the belief about circumcision during the time when that belief was widespread. > Would you not elect to have your ability to murder removed? As above, I am unable to even consider this as a real possibility.
  - 6y ago