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Comment by redthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

What's the purpose of the law? Is it to give redress to victims and punish perpetrators, or is it to punish criminal intent -- that is, thought? Do we view criminal law as a way to enforce societal rules against harming others, or do we view it as a means of punishing people who harbour antisocial intentions?

I suspect the answer is "both", but I'm leery of using criminal law to enforce consensus views on how one should think. I'm far more comfortable with using the law to address actual harm than to punish the desire to cause harm or even an attempt to do so. I realize, however, that there are many cogent counter-examples: being convicted of drunk driving does not require you actually hurt someone, trying to buy drugs in a sting does not require there actually be drugs present, etc.

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That's an unsettled question - a political one, in many ways. We certainly have some interest in deterring criminal acts, as Rayiner explains.

Also, intent and thought are not the exact same thing in legal terms. For example, I have certainly daydreamed about robbing a bank - not because I want to take anyone else's money particularly, but because it's amusing to imagine what sort of clever tricks you might employ to pull it off. I'm sure you've noticed there's a whole genre of movies and crime novels about likable criminals pulling off an elaborate heist, doesn't mean the film production people or the audience that enjoys the films actually want to take up a life of crime.

Now if I start making all the preparations to commit a robbery - enlisting co-conspirators, or acquiring weapons, or suborning employees of the bank, etc. I've obviously gone quite a way past simple daydreaming. Such acts are demonstrative of my intention. Picture yourself sitting in a car outside a bank, with a bag on your lap that contains a gun, a ransom note, and a mask. You'd obviously be in a very different frame of mind from someone who was simply musing on the general possibility of robbing a bank, and a prosecutor would certainly be justified in asking a jury to take that into account if you were on trial for attempt or conspiracy.

First, you have to keep separate three distinct things: 1) criminal intent; 2) actions to carry out that intent; 3) concrete injury to some victim.

"Thought crimes" refers to punishing people for (1) only. But just because (3) is lacking does not mean we're talking about "thought crimes" so long as (2) is present.

Second, the purpose of the criminal law is not to give redress to victims. That's the purpose of the civil law. The purpose of the criminal law is to punish those who are morally culpable and to create societal norms certain kinds of behavior. That is precisely why (3) is not necessary to prosecute a crime.

> The purpose of the criminal law is to punish those who are morally culpable and to create societal norms certain kinds of behavior.

The purpose of any law should never be to punish the culpable. It may very well be reasonable to punish the culpable if it results in normalizing societal norms by way of a threat deterrent ("if you do crime $x, you'll get locked up just like this bad boy here"), but simply punishing a criminal for the sake of punishing -- hurting, torturing, locking up -- is an idea that I don't think stands to any thoughtful, philosophically-informed scrutiny.

I think if we get over this type of thinking society will improve. Now and then whenever debate about capital punishment gets picked up, people point out something about the histories of serial killers: almost invariably they've had particularly shitty childhoods, they were born to drunkards and criminals themselves, they were abused -- sexually, physically, they grew up in cultural filth, they had virtually no access to opportunity. The thing is, thieves, sexual predators and other folk who do sometimes petty crime aren't greatly dissimilar in this respect, they've also been enraged to some point to lose a sense of control, to lose respect for themselves and others. So to reform society for lasting good, the idea of punishment -- that you should make someone suffer -- is totally wrong. Instead we should should have social programs that hook criminals up with psychologists and therapists, see what's wrong, what's bothering them, give them a dignified place to live, and let them heal and let them rejoin society when they're better.

After all, this strategy works and gives good results where it's been tried: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/why...

Isn't the purpose of the law to shape society into what we collectively think it should be like?

Under this reading, the mechanics of how you choose what to punish don't really matter, so long as the result is closer to what you want.

Granted, we might want to live in a society where thoughtcrime isn't a thing, and this might shape the laws we create, but collective processes can be considerably less rational than that.

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