Do What You Want without Punishment

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

So I’ve been caught up on this idea of doing what I want lately. I’ve tried writing it down to organize and analyze my thinking, and this is what I’ve come up with.

Theorem. You should do what you want.

(1) Either you do what you want or you don’t do what you want.
(2) If you do what you want, then you feel good.
(3) If you don’t do what you want, then you feel bad.
(4) You should always feel good.

Therefore, (5) You should do what you want.

(4) seems to be less grounded than the other premises. Our society has come to a general consensus that if you violate the law, you should be punished, and therefore you should NOT feel good. Thus our society has come to the consensus that (4) is false. If (4) is false, then the above proof is unsound.

The notion of “should” seems to correspond with the notion of “good.” You should do good. You should not do bad. You should get a good score on the test. You should come up with good solutions to your problems. You should run to the mailbox; so, running to the mailbox is good. This argument supports (4) as being true.

If (4) is true, then it follows from the argument two paragraphs above that you should never NOT feel good. Thus, you should not be punished, ever. This implies that punishment should never occur; nobody should ever be punished. Nobody should ever feel bad. The conclusion here seems to be that if (4) is true, then society’s consensus that criminals should be punished is wrong.

Theorem. You should never be punished.

(6) If you should be punished, then you should feel bad.
(7) You should never feel bad. (Follows from (4).)

Therefore, (8) You should never be punished.

So, since you should never be punished,

(9) Society should never punish you.

Therefore by the do-what-you-want theorem, (5),

(10) Society never wants to punish you.

But this result is undoubtedly counterintuitive. Society has come to a consensus that sometimes some people SHOULD be punished! Society often WANTS to punish criminals! Does this mean that society is committing a giant wrong by punishing criminals? Is this a case of the majority being wrong? Should we stop punishing people completely?

I can’t help but notice how this argument echoes that of many determinists who believe that moral responsibility does not exist. This argument is different from theirs, however, in that it still promotes rewarding people, while their arguments go on to criticize rewarding people.

So: Should you do what you want? Is punishment just a big wrong? Is society mistaken? Explain your position in terms of my argument, please.

2

Doing what you want does not equate feeling good, necessarily. Therefore that is a false assumption.
I have known and continue to experience many a personal act that I choose to do though it does not make me feel good. The notion of self-sacrifice enters into this. If “self-sacrifice” makes you feel good, then I would argue that it no longer is self-sacrifice, but self-pleasing. Feeling good does not necessarily come from doing what one wants (and vice-versa).

As for the punishment aspect, I fail to see how it relates at all. Punishment is subjective, relative to the “mood” of one’s current society. Men who commit “crimes of honor” against women in Sikh or Hindu societies are not punished. In Western societies those crimes are considered murder. The men indulge in rape and torture before they kill the woman, and I’m sure they are not feeling bad about their behavior. Maybe I just don’t follow. I don’t think you can approach your subject as some sort of “if” - “then” argument. Perhaps you are indulging in a semantics exercise? If you mean to be serious here, I can see you will never arrive at a satisfactory solution.

The topic, “Do What You Want Without Punishment” is something our sociopathic “leaders” in politics and finance would certainly agree with, though. In “The Psychopath’s Mask of Sanity” by Harrison Koehli, he writes, in part: “the psychopath’s inability to feel and thus identify with the emotions of others blocks the development of a “moral sense” that allows normal individuals to care for others and treat them like thinking and feeling beings. Psychopaths just don’t care. To them people are things, objects. When they’re no longer useful they can be discarded or destroyed without a second thought.” Isn’t that what this point is leading to: the justification for pshychopathy?

3

I’m semi-vaguely okay with 1-5 (not completely, but it’s not anything I can pin down and argue about), but 6-10 (excluding 7, as it’s synonymous with 4, which I’m not arguing about) are just nonsense.

6 explicitly contradicts 4. 8 doesn’t follow from anything, and 9 is just a more specific version of 8, so same complaint there. 10 is just totally bonkers, I don’t know how you got there.

Imo, this is a great example of trying too hard. What are you trying to do? I don’t understand the purpose of this set of attempted syllogisms. What were you trying to accomplish? Maybe if you explain that, we could figure out a better approach.

4

I disagree, of course. 6 does not explicitly contradict 4. Just because the conclusion of 6 contradicts 4 doesn’t mean 6 and 4 explicitly contradict. That’s simple logic. Suppose “If an animal is a bird, then it is strong,” and “All animals are weak” are true. This doesn’t mean that the two statements contradict. It just means that no animals are birds. Think logic. Come on now.

8 follows by modus tollens on 6 and 7. 9 follows from 8, as you say. Since any person or group should NOT punish you by 8, and any person or group should do what they want and only what they want (That’s (5)), it readily follows from 9 that 10.

Focus a little more please, Flannel Jesus.

5

I actually focused pretty hard when I was looking at 6,7 and 8. They appear to be a valid syllogism, but they’re not. Here, I’ll explain:

let’s say X = you should be punished, and Y = you should feel bad.

If X, Y
not Y,
.: not X

that’s the proper formulation of modus tollens

If you should be punished, you should feel bad.
It’s not true that you should feel bad.
Therefore, it’s not true that you should be punished.

That would be a valid syllogism. Your formulation is not synonymous with this one, by my reckoning.
And besides, you didn’t explain why any of your premises are true in the first place. You should never feel bad is true, and it’s simultaneously true that if you should be punished, you should feel bad? How did you come up with this stuff?

6

I know what modus tollens is. Forgive me for being a little sketchy. I think you should be able to fill in my gaps here. The two premises are always true, hence the conclusion is always true. You should never be punished.

I think the first three premises are self-evident. Can you give me a vaild counterexample? 4 I gave in argument in support of, seeing that it’s not all that self-evident. Is there a counterexample you would like to bring up? 6 follows from the definition of punishment. To punish somebody means to make that person feel bad. Simple enough. Do you have a valid counterexample to 6 as well?

7

The upper social classes or aristocratic welfare system will never allow people to do whatever they want.

Their protectionist laws will never allow it.

It is all about their welfare not yours.

8

I think if you change ‘should’ to ‘would’ in 6, it works. 8 now follows and, yes, 7 should be presented as 4.

9

because someone else is trying to make you feel bad, you should feel bad? that doesn’t follow at all. that’s not simple enough to me. explain how that follows.

10

also, I want to point out that in your OP, the “shoulds” don’t consistently apply to the same person. You’re saying person A shouldn’t feel bad, and then using that to derive what every other person should and shouldn’t do. But, I think it’s worth questioning if that’s a valid approach. Can one person’s moral resposibility be made into another person’s moral responsibility? I think not. Let me give an example:

Bob and Bill:

Bob shouldn’t kill. Bob is a Klu Klux Klan member. Bob wants to kill black people.
Bill is black. Bill just unknowingly bought a house next to Bob. If Bill continues to live there, Bob will kill him.

So, since Bob shouldn’t kill, does that mean Bill should move? Bill have a moral responsibility to move?

No, one man’s moral responsibility can not be translated into another person’s moral responsibility. If you have a responsibility to do X, it’s yours and yours alone. Nobody else is responsible for helping you meet that responsibility. Bill is not morally required to help Bob meet his responsibility.

So, since your whole OP is about taking one person’s responsibility to not feel bad, and making that into everyone else’s responsibility to not make him feel bad, I think it’s as a whole wrong.

11

This OP, while presented in some manner as to uplift it from idiocy, is still idiocy. Sorry. I don’t mean to insult but I can’t stand this kind of garbage. Yes, this is partly why I’m WW_III_ANGRY.

12

Flannel Jesus, I don’t see how anything about “Bob” and “Bill” relates to my argument. It doesn’t contradict any of the premises so far as I can see, and all consequences are logical.

13

Bob and Bill is an example of one persons’ moral obligation being used to derive another persons’ obligation. Your OP is likewise an example of just that.

Also, there’s another even more obvious fallacy in the very last part of the proof

(8)Society should never punish you.
(5)You should do what you want.
(10)Society never wants to punish you.

10 would follow from 8 and 5 if 5 was reversed, into “You want to do what you should do.” However, since it’s not, it doesn’t follow. There’s nothing that logically requires that somebody can’t want to do what they shouldn’t do.

And, here’s the flaw that’s so obvious to me: if you’ve come to the deductive conclusion that society never wants to punish you, but in reality society does want to punish you, then that should send some alarm bells ringing off in your brain: BEEP BEEP, ANYBODY HOME? If your conclusion contradicts reality, your conclusion is wrong. Reality isn’t wrong. Therefore, either you’ve made some incorrect steps in your logical sequence, or some of your premises are wrong. So, you tell me, what do you think is wrong with your argument? There’s no doubt something is wrong with it, all that’s left is to figure out what it is. What do you think it is?

14

“Do what though wilt is the whole of the law.”

Oscar Wilde- probably.

Yes that was pointless, just book marking for later perusal. :slight_smile:

15

I take (5) as meaning “You should do X if and only if you want to do X.” If I want to do X, then by (5) I should do X. If I don’t want to do X, then that’s like saying “I want to do not-X.” By (5), it follows that I should do not X. Thus (5) contains both conditional statements needed to prove the biconditional. Interpreting (5) in this equivalent biconditional form, it can easily be seen how (8) and (5) lead to (10).

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the argument. I don’t see any flaw in the premises and deductions. Therefore I think the “problem” lays in that sometimes what we think we want differs from what we actually want. Perhaps we don’t actually want to punish anybody, and we just don’t know this.

Here’s a good example. Suppose Russia fires a nuclear missile at the United States. According to one theory in nuclear arms strategy, we would “want” to punish Russia. We would “want” to strike back with our own nuclear weapons. But is this actually what we want? No, of course not! We’d all be dead before you knew it! What we actually want to do is NOT punish Russia for what they have done. We don’t really have a choice. Isn’t it striking how this conclusion agrees with the theory?

16

You’re taking “good” and using it in a universally moral way. One doesn’t say “it ought to be good weather.”

There is a school of thought that agrees that feeling good is a (or the) moral imperative. However, most people agree that you should try and feel good only insofar as it doesn’t make other people feel bad. So we jail people (the theory goes) for taking actions that have a net negative effect.

Wilde, Shaw, Twain and Churchill gave us at least 93% of all known quotes :stuck_out_tongue: That one, though, was Crowley.

17

Uh, no, you can cherry pick examples that agree with your theory all you want, it’s not striking at all. What about all the examples of punishment that don’t have such an obvious downside? Isn’t it striking how that disagrees with the theory?

If I logically prove that all men are gay, and then point to a gay guy…well, isn’t it striking? No, no it’s not.

18

The point I’m getting at, Flannel Jesus, is that punishment isn’t always right, even though we may think it is.

Sometimes we may think punishment is right, when it actually is not. Our minds, at least sometimes, fool ourselves.

It’s possible, from this perspective, that all punishment is wrong.

19

Punishment makes sense in a setting of severly limited resources.

As Nietzsche said, mercy is a sign of over-abundance.

20

The point you’re getting at isn’t that punishment isn’t always right. The point was that punishment is always wrong. Pointing to one example of punishment being wrong isn’t “striking”. It’s easy and meaningless. Just like me pointing at a gay guy isn’t real evidence that every man is gay.

But still, a good portion of your premises are questionable and you haven’t really supported them well. Why should we always feel good? Why should we feel bad if we should be punished? Go on then, some real arguments now.