How do we become moral people? We become moral because, as children, we fear punishment. We are told to behave properly, or we will be punished (required to be quiet for 10 minutes or being spanked). The child fears the loss of the parents' love, so it anxiously complies with demands to behave properly.

The small child internalizes this system, and as the child matures, the system remains in place but becomes more sophisticated. So it is, that adults do not need to be threatened with punishment every 5 minutes. They understand that behaving properly is better, and when they don't behave properly -- even if they are not detected -- they feel very guilty. Guilt is a gift that keeps on giving society well behaved people.

There are some people with varying degrees of psychopathy for whom this system of internalization was not possible. They don't have strong connections between their pre-frontal cortex and their limbic system -- the emotional center where guilt, love, fear, etc. live. It may be that the lack of neural connections between PRC and LS are literal.

Does the justice system work? Like locks exist for honest people, laws exist for moral, self controlled people. Once a crime is committed, the person needs to either be dissuaded from committing crime again, or they need to be secluded from society. Some people never commit a crime again after being punished (or they don't commit that particular crime again, anyway) and others get even better at crime, and do crime again and again.

The best way to reduce crime (there is no such thing as eliminating crime) is for adults to do a good job raising moral children. Unfortunately, there are people raising children who do not know shit from shinola. Their homes are too chaotic and disorganized for proper love, tender care, and beneficial discipline to operate. The children in these homes are screwed from the get go.

And, of course, adults who had excellent rearing occasionally decide to act against some social interest or rule. I have always been a very well behaved person, law abiding, and so forth; but even I have, on occasion, decided to commit some minor criminal offense. We need not go into details, but I think this is really quite common.

Some people, some societies, are just more crime prone than others. For instance, somebody told me a joke once... it was the recipe for an omelet from the Balkans. Step one: steal six eggs.

I would say that belief in a totally free will adds to retributive inclination. Like this jerk chose to screw me over so I'm gonna teach them a lesson (to not do that again). I only question whether or not one actually "chose" to teach them a lesson or if it is just what they were "taught" to do, and whether their "choice" to screw you over was or wasn't the best choice they were aware of at the time. Maybe after the proper trigger event you will no longer have such retributive inclinations?

Or in less deterministic lingo, it is likely your leading soceital influence--it's everywhere. Even gangster's in the movies demand their own version of Justice (snitches get stitches). That doesn't mean it is the only way to live (turn the other cheek).

As far as state sanctioned retribution-- now doubt it takes abuse from politics, but it is meant to prevent the gross misadministration of Justice. As in one of my eyes for both of yours and a left nut. That is the idea of mandatory sentencing. Misadministration of this state sanctioned justice is why those of us who can (might) vote or take up causes.

The ancient idea of "an eye for an eye" was an advance in justice. The victim of an assault or a theft isn't entitled to inflict just any amount of damage he or she might wish--like death for the lost of an eye. Damage and punishment should be balanced.

Balancing damage and punishment is still a sound principle. The theft of property isn't worth capital punishment -- though as recently as 250 years ago in England it was. Even the criminal's death is not considered a balanced punishment for killing someone in many jurisdictions around the world. (Though there are places were being gay merits the death sentence.)

More enlightened policy calls for rehabilitation or restorative justice, if restoration is possible (as it would be in the case of petty theft).

Back in the 1960s was it? Dr. Karl Meininger, a psychiatrist, wrote about The Crime of Punishment--where the form of punishment the state uses is a crime in itself. Being imprisoned in a hell hole for 30 years for drug crimes probably counts as a crime in itself. Juveniles are certainly subjected to criminalized punishment.

Have you seen The Sopranos--Tony Soprano, et al, the TV several year long serial story about the mafia? The Mafia was very strict about the rules. Break a rule and you'll find yourself being strangled to death. Or shot, beaten to a pulp, and so on. The Sopranos illustrates the question of why we like this creep and his crooked cronies. I don't know. I really enjoyed watching the series, even though the Soprano and Co. behavior was repulsive.

I agree with everything you said as far as I understand it, and basically I was saying that it's the state's job to see to it that justice is actually delivered justly.

I haven't seen it, but remember it being very popular when I was a child. I have seen other media though.

How do we become moral people? We become moral because, as children, we fear punishment.

I don't believe that at all. That just means you're playing a part, you're not actually moral if you pretend to be because you think someone might smack you around or stick you in a cell for the rest of your life if you break the rules. That's how you end up with repressed idiots who abuse their children and then they also become repressed idiots too.

I grew up as someone (maybe what you would call a "sociopath") who subverted the attempts of all authorities at limiting my will when it was not reasonable. However, that does not make me immoral. I had since made many decisions in my life that harmed others, and what made me feel that I had been wrong was empathy. I felt guilt not because I imagined prior punishments, but because I knew for a fact that I wanted the world in general to be better than what I had done to the people in question, and that by doing what I had done, I had only set back someone's trajectory in a way that no one should rightfully have to experience, because I believe that everyone is entitled to growth so long as it is not at the expense of others.

The child fears the loss of the parents' love, so it anxiously complies with demands to behave properly.

Also funny, because when my parents withdrew their love in order to manipulate me I disregarded them. Damn, this making sociopaths look really fucking sane.

Not gonna lie, I'm extremely emotionally charged by your response. But I know that I shouldn't voice that here, so respond at your leisure if you want to.

Did someone just delete my post? Yeah well fuck you guys too. Pretentious asshats.

Nice illustration there that one of the attractions of punishment is the justification of righteous anger, and general moral superiority, and the projection of negativity.

But it may well be the automatic spam filter that you are shouting at.
Or it may equally be that intemperate nature of the above post was also a feature of the one that may have been deleted.

If you believe something is good for the community, and you believe someone acts in a way that goes against this common good, then you may want to make them steer in the 'right' direction, make them understand that they must not act that way. Punishment is a way to force others to go your way, regardless of whether your beliefs were correct. The desire to punish is the desire to be in control. The desire to be punished may be a way to feel relevant, for people whose worst fear is to be ignored or abandoned.

@Bitter Crank

The first punishment was being born into existence. :gasp:

But once born, what to do now? Certainly youth need some sort of consequence for undesirable actions. Look at schools that have no way of enforcing anything. Look at households whose "parents" (if they exist) don't know how to set boundaries.. That begets generational poverty.


But a broader point I want to make is life itself. This is more abstract, so hear me out. I see any work done that would not otherwise be chosen is punishment. But we need to do it to survive. In a way, by needing an economy, our desires and wants leads to supply and demand, which leads to constant labor. Our own desires and needs punishes each other. Just another reason being born is not good.

Sure, we can post-facto praise work, praise perserverance, try to "triangulate" and learn to love the the thing we despise, but this is all stemming the wound that existence has wrought in the first place for each individual part of the greater economy.

So yeah we need punishment and boundaries for youth.. and if we are going to have a society that keeps on keeping on (cause of our perpetual needs and wants.. survival, maintenance, entertainment), we are going to need some form of consequence for deviated actions (which will always have abuse, corruption, and misapplication built into it).. but the fact that our very needs and wants punishes each other is the part I'm trying to convey. This is often lost because it is so basic.. but yet the implications never seem to sink in about it. Birth creates the punishment cycle.

Yeah you can't even tl;dr about it, you have to be sassy like a teenage girl except you lend extra words towards the exact same mechanic. Lol, "unenlightened". I'm not falling for it for a second. You think you're enlightened and also think that to be righteous you have to pretend you're not what you think you are. So many layers of pretension. Fuck this forum. Ban me. I'm done.

EDIT: Although apparently belligerence is okay when it's conducted with your passive-aggressive flavor, so maybe in order to post on this forum I should learn to be bitchy and indirect like you are? Thanks for the education.

I've struggled with my own vindictive nature for a long time now, — AuroraBeckingsway

Relax, dude, let the vindictiveness out, don't hold back like that. Sassy teenage girls are lovely things and once you get past their brittle nervousness, they are eager to please and eager to prove their love by sacrifice. It seems premature to be done so quickly - a vindictiveness turned in upon itself. Well, whatever gets you through the night, my love.

I struggle with vindictiveness too. You mentioned an explanation of this behavior relating to 'eliminating demonstrated threats.' That makes sense to me- anyone will attack when backed into a corner. And any community will expel those who threaten that community. My hunch is that problematically aggressive defensiveness- vindictiveness - comes about when the ability to accurately identify threats is faulty. Like, if its oversensitive. If you get a lot of false positives. And if you chronically misgauge the intensity of threats.

If that's right, then the key to your struggle would be less the question of punishment tout court and more like - why and how does the human capacity to detect threats get thrown out of whack?

One, tentative, answer would be something like: we're formed young. Our threat-detecting faculty forms slowly, mostly during childhood. In the language of neural networks its 'trained' on the 'data' its fed. If you grow up in a high-threat environment (vindictive parents, bullying peers etc) then your 'threat-detector' is trained to recognize a whole host of situations as dangerous. And if that environment is inconsistent - if a parent, or a bully, can sometimes, unpredictably, go from zero to a hundred - then it makes good sense to always assume the worst. Either brace, or launch a pre-emptive attack.

So the settings on your 'threat-detector- are on crisis mode, because they needed to be. Then you grow up, and leave the environment. And you're totally uncalibrated. The world is mostly harsh, but, still, most environments only require a medium-level threat-detecting setting.

The problem is the 'threat-detector' can't just be reset --- it grows organically, like a neural network. So you have to consciously try to relearn, which is really hard.

If any of that made sense, that's my two cents.

Is there a reason why children and criminals are punished?

Are criminals immature?

Are children bad?

It probably means evil is immaturity.

That doesn't sound right.

Children aren't evil.

Criminal aren't immature.

It's more than simply odd that children and criminals live together in the land of punishment, the difference between the two being enormous.