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Comment by thejudge | Hacker News Reader

Nobody can blame me for disagreeing with the article because, following their own reasoning, if you trace back all the faculties that lead me to develop critical thought then you reach a point in which I am blameless and happened apparently through chance: my birth.

Since I'm not responsible for my birth, I am not responsible for anything I do after I was born, no matter how noble or horrendous.

So their reasoning goes, and if upheld in the courts nobody could be blamed for anything, but as the popular saying goes, "tell that to the judge."

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Even if free will is a myth and people aren't responsible for any of their actions, prison still makes sense for two purposes:

(1) deterrence is still possible even without free will, and

(2) it's important to remove potential repeat offenders from society so they don't have the opportunity to offend again.

The only aspect of the criminal justice system that it removes is the vindictive element-- it no longer makes sense to send people to prison to punish them and 'get back at' them, because they may not have been truly in control of their actions.

Rehabilitation has been shown to be more effective than punitive deterrence though.

Rehabilitation still includes removing offenders from society till they're fixed.

Absolutely, totally agree. Prison should only be used when someone absolutely must be removed from society in order to keep the rest of the population safe; I think many people currently in prison should be in some sort of rehabilitation program instead.

This is so important. It removes the very idea of "justice" as a valid reason for enforcement. Social Justice is far less interesting to me than Social Good. Let's promote things with good outcomes, regardless of our judgement on who deserves those outcomes.

If you argue for free will you are arguing for mind over matter. I'm not aware of anything in the laws of physics which allow free will.

That being said, we probably have to behave as if there was free will if we want (is that a pun?) any kind of society.

Yes, you can be blamed as much as an earthquake, would try to stop earthquakes from happening if you could?

If free will is the deterministic consequence of the sum of your experiences, then the experience of the punishment assigned by the court system is a necessary input to create desirable outputs. So, even if you are not responisble for your actions, you must still be punished.

I wouldn't consider a bear that attacked my village and killed some of my friends "guilty". It's just biology, which is just chemistry, which is just physics.[1] As are we all. In the same way I don't assign blame to viruses, or hold the river responsible for flooding.

I'm still gonna kill the bear, though.

[1] https://xkcd.com/435/

Guilt is a psychological and social human concept. Imagined result of a potential action. Few sociopaths feel it at all...

It is probably adaptive as in helps survival die to fostering group cohesion when present in enough individuals.

hinduism explains this with karma...and dharma. you have a rope you are tied to against a tree, the length of the rope and the land around it is chosen by your karma, but you can change your karma with your dharma.

Are you sure? That is just a round about way of saying, karma means nothing. “Hey, you can’t have more than 1 cookie because karma. But wink you can.”

you "assume" free will, but even that runs out when you run out of money for the cookies, everything is capped somewhere due to your karma.

Or amount of matter in the Universe. The latter is something, that can be observed and studied. That's why karma is unscientific.

Why are people born rich and poor? Purely due to luck? Professor Ian Stevenson's reach pretty much proves otherwise, that infact rebirth and karma is very much observable

Professor Ian Stevenson's research

Which is very weak judging by Wikipedia article. None of his cases disprove null hypothesis, unless you trust random folks to tell truth, which no sane scientist would for the factual basis.

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