cool. let me extend my thanks by giving you an important life-lesson in determinism.
in a court of law a person is not held accountable for committing a crime if he is judged to be ‘insane’ (they call it), judged to be ‘not of sound mind’, and therefore unable to recognize right and wrong. now it gets good. two idiotic assumptions are made before we even get out of the gate. first, that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ have ever meant anything more than ‘useful’ and ‘not useful’… valuations and judgments made in some context in which costs and benefits are being weighed against each other by a person who at the time is incapable of believing anything different than what he believed during the course of his actions. example; joe robs a bank to get the money to pay for his kid’s liver transplant. joe knows what he’s doing is illegal, but joe cannot believe it is wrong. or, joe might believe it is wrong… but he also believes it serves a greater good, and is therefore incidental.
second idiotic assumption; that joe had the freewill to not decide that he should rob the bank. now the court is in a pickle. they can’t say he’s insane, and they can’t say joe can simultaneously believe and not believe what he did was the right thing to do. if holding joe ‘responsible’ here means anything more than ‘being subject to consequences’, such a concept is senseless. the court can certainly condemn joe for breaking the law, but not for doing something wrong, and certainly not for having the capacity to magically not believe what he believes and believe something else instead. dilemma; does the court proceed consequentially or deontologically? for the former, no need for the theory of freewill… for the latter, absolute reliance on the theory of freewill. but the latter is definitively false and with no empirical basis whatsoever.
why then does the theory persist in a court of law? because it simplifies for an institution that requires control but lacks it, a means to avoid the responsibility of preventing the circumstances that produce the criminals it needs to control. it is far easier to subdue a citizen by making him feel guilty then it is to make the effort to modify the environment in which he was made. and to top it off, they turn this inconvenience into an advantage. quite brilliant. they industrialize the criminal justice system. they turn it into a money making racket. they neglect their responsibility, create criminals as a result, and then figure out a way to get paid for it. unrequited genius. let the federal government give money to state and privatized prisons to house criminals the federal government doesn’t have enough power to prevent. it’s no mystery why the united states has the highest crime rates. there is not just ‘correlation’ between blue collar crimes and capitalistic societies. there is a causal relationship here.
‘capitalist-democracy deserves every bit of the crime it has’ - lenin (not verbatim)
instead of making health care affordable and/or a basic right, our capitalist-democracy uses an age old philosophical subterfuge to brainwash joe into thinking he’s a bad guy… that he knew damn well what he did was ‘wrong’, and that he chose to do what he knew was wrong. that joe wasn’t compelled by the preponderance of the evidence he believes that makes him feel robbing the bank is the right thing to do, and instead secretly knew it was wrong and what… just wanted to do a bad thing for the hell of it? get the fuck outta here. joe had a reason. he believed he was right. he had no choice in believing it was right, because he has no choice in what he feels certain of. there is no ‘freewill’ in any of this nonsense. and yet the greatest institution over and above society rests the very foundation of its practice on just such nonsense.
now i know everything i just said will enter one ear and go right out the other, if it even makes it into your head at all. i look forward to a response about gymnasts being able to jump higher than midgets or slaves being envious of their masters.