Hi all, there seems to be a strange view in the world that people 'deserve' things like punishment..

In reality people are essentially not in control of who they are, what they do, not fundamentally anyway. We are all simply the products of our experiences. No one chooses their genetics, who raises them or their experiences.
This is of course a claim, im perfectly open to anyone suggesting otherwise.

Many people find this dissolution of 'free will' (whatever thats supposed to be) to be de-humanizing or somehow absolve us of responsibility, to suggest that we have no 'purpose' or that everything is simply pointless, this seems to me to be a massive confusion.


If a man is born, raised, and lives through certain experiences that lead to him being a deeply flawed human, what does it even mean to say that he could have done otherwise? further, what on earth could it possibly mean to say that this man 'deserves' to be punished for any wrongdoings?

Of course we are perfectly validated by reason to prevent this man from causing harm, if a person shows themselves to be synonymous with a system of thoughts and beliefs that can likely lead to actions that negatively affect the well-being of others, then its perfectly reasonable to imprison this person, or to do anything we can to prevent that harm, or even to harm this person as a deterrent for others considering the same crime. But how does it make any sense to 'hate' the person themselves? or to seek 'vengeance' upon him? hate the crime, not the criminal seems a purely logical command.

The simply fact is that if you were born with the brain of a psychopath, and raised with insufficient experiences to prevent you from causing harm to others, then regardless of how much you think you would fight these tenancies, you simply would be a dangerous person, where does any room for personal responsibility come into it?


A note on what i mean by responsibility: people are not ultimately responsible for their actions, but we must act responsible, and hold each other responsible, for practical reasons. While still recognizing intellectually that we are not the arbiters of who we are, and as such things like hatred, vengeance etc, make no sense.
The difference here being that, one should not hate Hitler, one should pity Hitler, hate what he does, and strive to prevent it, but were one to become in possession of Hitler himself, if you could ensure he could do no harm, it would be your moral responsibility to ensure he was comfortable and happy. Regardless of his evil actions, he was still a conscious being and did not 'deserve' to be harmed, after all what would it actually achieve?

This argument is a moral argument, not necessarily a pragmatic one, as i mentioned above, there is of course still a necessity for punishment as a deterrent, though one could imagine a world where punishment was pretend, people believed it was real but it was actually just CGI for example.