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Comment by maxaf | Hacker News Reader

Alright, I’ll bite. Are you saying that most inmates are serving time for alleged violations of law that have not actually occurred?

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Not OP, but just because you've broken the law once doesn't mean you're a bad person, much less lack moral agency.

People make mistakes. Sure, some deserve to rot in prison for irredeemable crimes, but many (at least, in my context as an American citizen) are there for nonviolent drug offenses or failing to pay fines.

That's irrelevant. All that the OP's point requires is that, on average, the moral choices of such people are worse. The existence of outliers -- or even common exceptions -- does not refute that.

You break a lot of laws every morning while driving to work; doesn't mean your moral choices on average are worse than someone else.

My frequency of lawbreaking would indeed (anti-)correlate with the quality of moral decisionmaking, and my frequency of lawbreaking is likely lower than those who have been convicted (at least if severity-weighted).

Further, the comparison was against convicts, who do it frequently and severely enough that someone finds it worth the money to prosecute and get a conviction. And at that point, yes, a correlation appears.

You're still making the same fallacy: "I can find an exception, so the correlation doesn't hold." That doesn't follow.

(And, FWIW, I don't drive to work.)

I think he is saying that the reason why people do bad stuff is not because they don't know what's moral. It's because they made a decision to ignore moral.

While I would personally wager that those in prison are on average less moral, there was nonetheless a valid point above that those who commit crimes don't necessarily lack morality. The argument here would be that law does not perfectly equate to morality, and separately, that people will commit crimes out of the lesser of two evils in some given scenarios.

Additionally, despite the reasonable conclusion we can make that those in prison are less moral, it probably does no good for recidivism rates for us to talk about how immoral prisoners must be. It stigmatizes them, and puts more barriers on the path to recovery and reintegration into society.

Theft because you're poor and hungry is a really shitty situation to be in and is done out of desperation, not malice.

Well, in Finland you should have no need to steal as social services generally attempt to support people in the general case above biological poverty (ie. pay for food and shelter).

Not everyone is protected by social services. Finland still has a homeless population, and not all of them are mentally or psychologically challenged.

Illegal and immoral behavior are not the same thing, especially when you consider bias in the legal system as to whom the law is enforced against (poor, male, minority).

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