4 ms·

We either view Ongwen as an morally culpable human who is capable of making moral choices (certainly by the time he reached adulthood) and hold him responsible

We either view Ongwen as an morally culpable human who is capable of making moral choices (certainly by the time he reached adulthood) and hold him responsible for those choices, and likely lock him away for many, many years as punishment for the horrible choices he made. The other way is that we view him as so broken by his childhood trauma that he has had no moral capacity, even in his adulthood. If that is the case, he still needs to be locked away for many years, because someone with that level of brokenness is not safe human society.

wizzwizz4 6y ago
> If that is the case, he still needs to be locked away for many years, because someone with that level of brokenness is not safe human society. Or rehabilitated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_(penology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_(penology) > The effectiveness of Norway's methods is evident as they hold the lowest recidivism rate worldwide at 20% as of December 2014.
- selestify 6y ago
  There's still that 20% that fails to be rehabilitated. This seems like it would be one of those cases.
- akiselev 6y ago
  I too feel that rehabilitation, not vengeance, should be the goal of the justice system but in this case, I think it's a moot point. This is an individual with the means and clear history of organizing and wielding violent armed groups which (I hypothesize) requires a level of emotional intelligence that justice systems are not equipped to rehabilitate by design. The ones that try to rehabilitate offenders naturally err towards giving people the benefit of the doubt in order to make the process fairer for the falsely accused which is very easily exploitable, especially for the well resourced. I think this individual presents a clear cut case where public safety is more important than the individual's right to rehabilitation post-conviction, in a way that even the worst civilian criminals like serial killers do not. There is just no way to reintegrate him to like a POW of an opposing nation in war or a rebel soldier who joined a movement - he was a primary instigator in the conflict and his enemy was the system he'd be rehabilitated into.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    I don't think that your last statement is supported. Why isn't rehabilitation possible and why is it impossible that public safety can be ensured? You seem to assume that intelligent individuals are more difficult to rehabilitate but I see it is just as likely that the opposite the opposite. The burden of demonstrating public safety and rehabilitation should always be on the individual, but I don't see why that is impossible.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  It is a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue. People in Norway rarely grow up in totally deprived, violent conditions. Maybe they respond to rehabilitation efforts better, in the same way that a healthy person exhibits better wound healing than someone with diabetes 2nd type. One could make a practical experiment by dumping an assortment of, for example, Islamic State executioners into Norwegian prisons and watching how many of them return to their old habits, but Norwegians wouldn't probably want to try that.
- convolvatron 6y ago
  how much of that is due to basic social safety net? on the creek behind my workshop, thieves were running stolen copper. they would use boats to come up into businesses storage yards from the SF bay, then dump the copper in the creek. wait until they had a buy lines up and pull it up at their leisure. they were caught eventually. 5 years later and out on parole. and guess where they came first - back to the creek. no other way of making a living, no basic support. i think criminality becomes very different when its just a lifestyle choice and not the only way to provide for basic human needs. sure, focus on rehabilitation. but it doesn't matter if they throw you back on the street when you're out.
- belval 6y ago
  He is not a felon convicted for illegal possession of a weapon or drug dealing, he's a warlord that killed a lot of people brutally. Presenting rehabilitation as a possible solution here is laughable and almost insulting to the memories of his numerous victims.
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    I don't understand. Why would it be?
    - belval 6y ago
      The concept of rehabilitation makes plenty of sense when everyone agrees that we live in a society of inequalities and that everyone has various privileges which have a real impact on their financial situation. Someone that is poor might resort to stealing or even violence because the situation in which he evolves demands it to survive. I am completely on board with that and it makes sense. This man is a war criminal that that was directly and indirectly involved in murder and rapes. Worse, he actively enabled that behavior in his organization. Now in an exercise in empathy, put yourself in the shoe of someone who saw his entire family be massacred. You don't understand why theymight find it insulting to their suffering that this man is eventually allowed to walk free. To be clear you can disagree, but I really doubt that you don't understand.
f154hfds 6y ago
There's a sort of disconnect going on in our sense of justice between gaining explanatory power to describe why a person did something, and that person's culpability. We seem to think if we can understand why they behaved in such a way (for instance, they were victims themselves, they had a mental disorder, etc.) they must merit compassion. The converse is perhaps more troublesome: if we can't understand how someone could have done that thing, it is somehow more heinous. My view is that this dynamic in our collective compassion does not help us accomplish justice. It seems that to pursue justice we must believe in agency of the individual. Agency to, no matter what their circumstances, make the right choices. As soon as we begin to weigh our explanatory power over individual agency we lose justice. Am I happy this man met justice? No, it's deeply sad and points to an irrevocable brokenness in humankind. Was it deserved? Yes. It was.
- ip26 6y ago
  I think the short summary is we are coming to understand circumstances where an individual has lost their agency. In which cases the nature of justice changes. if we can't understand how someone could have done that thing... If we are not aware of a reason they did not posses agency, then we must assume they still had it.
  - hntrader 6y ago
    The big problem with this is that our recognition that there's extenuating circumstances (e.g a brain tumour in the prefrontal cortex) says more about our capacity to recognise such situations than it does about actual differences in agency between individuals. For example, we might say that a serial killer who was born into a life of wealth and advantage and has no macroscopic brain damage has more agency than the individual with a large brain tumour. But this killer is also very much a slave to their brain in the same way as the tumour individual. They were gifted with psychopathy and an inability to feel remorse, which will undoubtedly come down to concrete brain states that differ in a material respect to non-psychopaths. Just because we can't see any obvious macroscopic markers of this says more about our knowledge limitations than it does about relative levels of agency. Going further, we're all slaves to determinisic or stochastic physics playing out in our brains and environment, and our agency is just a useful fiction. The justice system should be premised on pragmatic concepts of deterrence, rehabilitation, protecting society, etc, and not on fantasy notions that person A had more agency than person B.

wizzwizz4 6y ago

> If that is the case, he still needs to be locked away for many years, because someone with that level of brokenness is not safe human society. Or rehabilitated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_(penology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_(penology) > The effectiveness of Norway's methods is evident as they hold the lowest recidivism rate worldwide at 20% as of December 2014.

selestify 6y ago
There's still that 20% that fails to be rehabilitated. This seems like it would be one of those cases.
akiselev 6y ago
I too feel that rehabilitation, not vengeance, should be the goal of the justice system but in this case, I think it's a moot point. This is an individual with the means and clear history of organizing and wielding violent armed groups which (I hypothesize) requires a level of emotional intelligence that justice systems are not equipped to rehabilitate by design. The ones that try to rehabilitate offenders naturally err towards giving people the benefit of the doubt in order to make the process fairer for the falsely accused which is very easily exploitable, especially for the well resourced. I think this individual presents a clear cut case where public safety is more important than the individual's right to rehabilitation post-conviction, in a way that even the worst civilian criminals like serial killers do not. There is just no way to reintegrate him to like a POW of an opposing nation in war or a rebel soldier who joined a movement - he was a primary instigator in the conflict and his enemy was the system he'd be rehabilitated into.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  I don't think that your last statement is supported. Why isn't rehabilitation possible and why is it impossible that public safety can be ensured? You seem to assume that intelligent individuals are more difficult to rehabilitate but I see it is just as likely that the opposite the opposite. The burden of demonstrating public safety and rehabilitation should always be on the individual, but I don't see why that is impossible.
inglor_cz 6y ago
It is a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue. People in Norway rarely grow up in totally deprived, violent conditions. Maybe they respond to rehabilitation efforts better, in the same way that a healthy person exhibits better wound healing than someone with diabetes 2nd type. One could make a practical experiment by dumping an assortment of, for example, Islamic State executioners into Norwegian prisons and watching how many of them return to their old habits, but Norwegians wouldn't probably want to try that.
convolvatron 6y ago
how much of that is due to basic social safety net? on the creek behind my workshop, thieves were running stolen copper. they would use boats to come up into businesses storage yards from the SF bay, then dump the copper in the creek. wait until they had a buy lines up and pull it up at their leisure. they were caught eventually. 5 years later and out on parole. and guess where they came first - back to the creek. no other way of making a living, no basic support. i think criminality becomes very different when its just a lifestyle choice and not the only way to provide for basic human needs. sure, focus on rehabilitation. but it doesn't matter if they throw you back on the street when you're out.
belval 6y ago
He is not a felon convicted for illegal possession of a weapon or drug dealing, he's a warlord that killed a lot of people brutally. Presenting rehabilitation as a possible solution here is laughable and almost insulting to the memories of his numerous victims.
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  I don't understand. Why would it be?
  - belval 6y ago
    The concept of rehabilitation makes plenty of sense when everyone agrees that we live in a society of inequalities and that everyone has various privileges which have a real impact on their financial situation. Someone that is poor might resort to stealing or even violence because the situation in which he evolves demands it to survive. I am completely on board with that and it makes sense. This man is a war criminal that that was directly and indirectly involved in murder and rapes. Worse, he actively enabled that behavior in his organization. Now in an exercise in empathy, put yourself in the shoe of someone who saw his entire family be massacred. You don't understand why theymight find it insulting to their suffering that this man is eventually allowed to walk free. To be clear you can disagree, but I really doubt that you don't understand.

f154hfds 6y ago

There's a sort of disconnect going on in our sense of justice between gaining explanatory power to describe why a person did something, and that person's culpability. We seem to think if we can understand why they behaved in such a way (for instance, they were victims themselves, they had a mental disorder, etc.) they must merit compassion. The converse is perhaps more troublesome: if we can't understand how someone could have done that thing, it is somehow more heinous. My view is that this dynamic in our collective compassion does not help us accomplish justice. It seems that to pursue justice we must believe in agency of the individual. Agency to, no matter what their circumstances, make the right choices. As soon as we begin to weigh our explanatory power over individual agency we lose justice. Am I happy this man met justice? No, it's deeply sad and points to an irrevocable brokenness in humankind. Was it deserved? Yes. It was.

ip26 6y ago
I think the short summary is we are coming to understand circumstances where an individual has lost their agency. In which cases the nature of justice changes. if we can't understand how someone could have done that thing... If we are not aware of a reason they did not posses agency, then we must assume they still had it.
- hntrader 6y ago
  The big problem with this is that our recognition that there's extenuating circumstances (e.g a brain tumour in the prefrontal cortex) says more about our capacity to recognise such situations than it does about actual differences in agency between individuals. For example, we might say that a serial killer who was born into a life of wealth and advantage and has no macroscopic brain damage has more agency than the individual with a large brain tumour. But this killer is also very much a slave to their brain in the same way as the tumour individual. They were gifted with psychopathy and an inability to feel remorse, which will undoubtedly come down to concrete brain states that differ in a material respect to non-psychopaths. Just because we can't see any obvious macroscopic markers of this says more about our knowledge limitations than it does about relative levels of agency. Going further, we're all slaves to determinisic or stochastic physics playing out in our brains and environment, and our agency is just a useful fiction. The justice system should be premised on pragmatic concepts of deterrence, rehabilitation, protecting society, etc, and not on fantasy notions that person A had more agency than person B.