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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

This argument is unsound. Philosophers have been talking about justice and morality for æons, something so small isn’t going to turn our thoughts on justice on their head.

Responsibility is really a kind of duty. When we say that you are responsible for your own behavior, we are not saying that “you are the sole cause for your own behavior”, we are saying that you have a duty to control your behavior. Duty is a moral concept, not a factual concept. So if you think that this assumption at the very core of criminal justice is “false”, you have misinterpreted it as some kind of statement of fact (which would be refutable).

It is not a statement of fact, you can’t refute it.

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> Philosophers have been talking about justice and morality for æons, something so small isn’t going to turn our thoughts on justice on their head.

Theologists have been talking for æons about the essence of God and what the role of Jesus in the holy trinity is. Try to convince atheists that this æons-talking should turn their thoughts on religion on their head.

If you’re going to try and find a cutesy way to flip someone’s words around, you could at least flip the words around in a consistent way, rather than turning the entire sentence into sausage like that.

> Philosophers have been talking about justice and morality for æons, something so small isn’t going to turn our thoughts on justice on their head.

Yes, but now neuroscientists show light on how our brain works.

> we are saying that you have a duty to control your behavior.

My point is that humans are not "in control" of their behavior.

> My point is that humans are not "in control" of their behavior.

Not at all or not completely?

Not at all.

I think the greater point is that if the legal system is supposed to alter behavior, it should follow the science and the science suggests that simply punishing crimes based on a rulebook isn't very efficient at preventing future crimes.

It doesn't matter if the man is autistic for his behavior to have a negative impact. The impact would not have been any better or worse if he wasn't autistic.

The question thus should be how to prevent this kind of behavior, or in his case, how to make it less likely that he'll do it again. His autism may factor in to the answer for that, but either way throwing the book at him is likely not the best solution.

Of course this assumes the purpose of the legal system is crime prevention, not punishment as an end in itself, which seems to contradict reality.

And why is it that you can deliberately and measurably and - to some degree - reproducibly modify your behavior over the course of time? How is it that I am a vastly different person from 5 years ago, and I know that if I want I can become a completely different one in ~ 1 or 2 years? Which one is my "true" behavior and which ones are my "fake" ones? All feel natural to me...

Of course humans change. A state machine can also change state. Doesn't mean that a state machine has control over their behavior.

> My point is that humans are not "in control" of their behavior.

You’re playing catch-up with discussions that philosophers started centuries ago. Whether humans are “in control” of their behavior is… well, it’s a concept that needs to be clarified in the first place, because it’s extremely vague… but various philosophers have tried to come up with their own ideas of what “free will” means and what is necessary in order to think about moral responsibility.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

If you argue “humans are not in control of our actions and therefore we do not have moral responsibility” (I’m not sure if you do argue that), then you must be using definitions of “in control” and “moral responsibility” which support that argument. Coming up with good definitions is not easy. Philosophers were laying the groundwork for this discussion long before neuroscientists came into view.

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