Are people that do crime really responsible?

[drumbo]

On 8/21/2020 at 10:29 AM, paulsutton said:

Would a universal basic income be far better for society,  ?

We can't even identify what the goals of society are so we are moving forward blindly. But yes I think basic income makes sense to just about everyone. People who have great empathy and concern for others regardless of where it leads will always support basic income, and clinical robot eugenicists will probably also support it since giving the poor more money slows their breeding.

[dimreepr]

9 hours ago, drumbo said:

We can't even identify what the goals of society are

Sure we can, survive...

9 hours ago, drumbo said:

But yes I think basic income makes sense to just about everyone.

If that were true we'd have it already...

The problem is, the wealthy can't imagine why it's a good idea to keep people alive with money to spend. 🙄

[drumbo]

11 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

Sure we can, survive...

If that were true we'd have it already...

The problem is, the wealthy can't imagine why it's a good idea to keep people alive with money to spend. 🙄

I think the wealthy want the poor to breed in great numbers since that would provide a large supply of surplus labor which cannot do much beyond menial labor which drives down their wages. The wealthy wisely have fewer children which ensures the jobs which the wealthy tend to do will have a lower supply of candidates in the next generation, increasing their own earnings. If you are innately smarter and more dominant it may actually be wise to avoid having too many bastard children lest you dilute your advantage by sharing your precious DNA.

[dimreepr]

3 minutes ago, drumbo said:

I think the wealthy want the poor to breed in great numbers since that would provide a large supply of surplus labor which cannot do much beyond menial labor which drives down their wages. The wealthy wisely have fewer children which ensures the jobs which the wealthy tend to do will have a lower supply of candidates in the next generation, increasing their own earnings. If you are innately smarter and more dominant it may actually be wise to avoid having too many bastard children lest you dilute your advantage by sharing your precious DNA.

It's interesting, what you think is wise... 

[Area54]

49 minutes ago, drumbo said:

I think the wealthy want the poor to breed in great numbers since that would provide a large supply of surplus labor which cannot do much beyond menial labor which drives down their wages.

It's an amusing perception. Do you have any  evidence to support it. For example, how many wealthy people did you interview to arrive at this conclusion?

52 minutes ago, drumbo said:

The wealthy wisely have fewer children which ensures the jobs which the wealthy tend to do will have a lower supply of candidates in the next generation, increasing their own earnings.

The wealthy have fewer children largely for two reasons: they no longer need to ensure sufficient numbers to support them in old age; they wish to use their wealth for their personal pleasure, not to support large numbers of offspring.

46 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

If you are innately smarter and more dominant it may actually be wise to avoid having too many bastard children lest you dilute your advantage by sharing your precious DNA.

I see you didn't get the e-mail about the evolutionary pressures to breed.

[dimreepr]

5 minutes ago, Area54 said:

I see you didn't get the e-mail about the evolutionary pressures to breed.

I can only imagine, the address was wrong... 😉

[paulsutton]

Prior to the pandemic,  poverty and inequality was hidden to some extent, the pandemic has really put this in the public eye,   a UBI could perhaps address issues such as food poverty,  allow people to buy basic IT kit the rest of us take for granted and kids could study on their own devices.   This in some cases, if they are not turned off from education will help kids achieve more in school , eat properly and produce better outcomes,  too many people of all ages seem to be falling through cracks in the system.

I am not working,  back in January I attended training for a Lego WeDo session for schools. The main which was mean tot take place in about June was cancelled due to the pandemic, and with that went my chance to network with teachers, and school staff and perhaps move in to paid employment.

People like me WANT to work,  the pandemic is making this far harder to get than normal.  

A UBI would be a real safety net for a lot of people, , at least it would give people a chance.

 

[Michael McMahon]

Civilians in war time might join the army of the aggressor to engage in evil actions. Yet during peacetime there'll only be a minuscule fraction of the population that will engage in criminal violence. So there must a small segment of the population in the average country who'll ordinarily be cooperative and law-abiding despite being a slightly amoral. However if they felt they'd get away with it as they might during a victorious war then they might be tempted to engage in evil. I think this shows that people good and bad are guided by the same evolutionary instincts to avoid doing wrong in case of punishment. Even if someone has an immoral mindset and wanted to commit a crime they still might think it's not worth the risk. This example is doesn't support general deterrence because that's about warning other criminals rather than the individual who actually perpetrated whatever crime is in question. It may however show that some slight element of punishment can ward off malevolent intentions from apathetic individuals.

 

Our subconscious human psychology evolved over millennia and so we're hardwired to be wary of retaliation. If we removed punishment altogether as an option for criminal rehabilitation then it might not change our evolved cost-benefit analysis of committing crime immediately but after a long period of time it might eventually lead to sinister individuals being habituated into thinking they can afford to commit crimes. For instance if I were to hypothetically think about carrying out a random assault on the street then I'd simply automatically assume there'd be repercussions in jail time even if I knew nothing about the current jail time statistics for assault. Contrastingly if I somehow felt there'd be no real consequences and for whatever reason I wanted to hit a particular somebody then it might result in people actually accepting the risk to act cunningly and selfishly. Just as some people are truly immoral and deliberately evil, other people will be truly amoral in not being bothered at all whether they do good or bad. Individual deterrence is compatible with rehabilitation because amoral people can be deterred from committing crime due not only to negative incentives like confinement but also to positive incentives such as the gratefulness a criminal might feel from being forgiven, opportunities in both their career and personal growth achieved from education, or finding spiritual and familial well-being in doing good. Individual deterrence might not always prevent immorality since people might evade capture but it might reduce lazy amorality to a relatively greater extent. 

 

"If you call someone immoral, you are saying that person knows better. If you call him amoral, you are saying that person does wrong but doesn't understand that it is wrong. It can be a fine line, other times it's clear: If a giant wave turns your boat over, that wave isn't being mean, it's amoral. If another boat rams into you and does the same thing, that is an immoral act, especially if the immoral captain laughs instead of helping you out of the water." (vocabulary)

 

Wiki:

"Individual deterrence is the aim of punishment to discourage the offender from criminal acts in the future. The belief is that when punished, offenders recognise the unpleasant consequences of their actions on themselves and will change their behaviour accordingly.

General deterrence is the intention to deter the general public from committing crime by punishing those who do offend. When an offender is punished by, for example, being sent to prison, a clear message is sent to the rest of society that behaviour of this sort will result in an unpleasant response from the criminal justice system. Most people do not want to end up in prison and so they are deterred from committing crimes that might be punished that way."

 

Habituation: "the diminishing of an innate response to a frequently repeated stimulus."

[mistermack]

Just as there is no absolute right or wrong, there is no absolute "responsible". 

It's purely down to what we decide as a society. And since we have lots of societies, there is a wide range of ways that responsibility gets treated. 

So the OP question contains a false assumption, that there is such a thing as "really responsible".

[dimreepr]

6 minutes ago, mistermack said:

So the OP question contains a false assumption, that there is such a thing as "really responsible".

Indeed +1, it's like asking if evil exists,,,