If there is no free will, should we show sympathy for evil doers?

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Necromancer
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Re: If there is no free will, should we show sympathy for evil doers?

Post by Necromancer »

If victims get little sympathy in them being victims, why should abusers/broken toasters/offenders get any at all?
uwot
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Re: If there is no free will, should we show sympathy for evil doers?

Post by uwot »

Long story short; if there is no free will, there is no 'should'.
Wyman
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Re: If there is no free will, should we show sympathy for evil doers?

Post by Wyman »

MozartLink wrote:
Impenitent wrote:Henry is right, if there is no free will you don't have a choice what you show.

-Imp
I already know that. But this point you made was not the discussion I was having.
Yes it was. We all know how to read. Henry was being logical while you were being thick headed.
MozartLink
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Re: If there is no free will, should we show sympathy for evil doers?

Post by MozartLink »

Wyman wrote:
MozartLink wrote:
Impenitent wrote:Henry is right, if there is no free will you don't have a choice what you show.

-Imp
I already know that. But this point you made was not the discussion I was having.
Yes it was. We all know how to read. Henry was being logical while you were being thick headed.
All I was simply saying here was that if a criminal or a bad person cannot change since they are "broken," then the last thing that should be done is to try and make you change to show sympathy towards this person. If you cannot change, then there is nothing that can be done. We tried to change the criminal/bad person and it didn't work. So we then proceeded to try and make you change to show sympathy since this criminal/bad person was broken, but that didn't work either. So there is nothing that can be done beyond that point.
Wyman
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Re: If there is no free will, should we show sympathy for evil doers?

Post by Wyman »

MozartLink wrote:
Wyman wrote:
MozartLink wrote: I already know that. But this point you made was not the discussion I was having.
Yes it was. We all know how to read. Henry was being logical while you were being thick headed.
All I was simply saying here was that if a criminal or a bad person cannot change since they are "broken," then the last thing that should be done is to try and make you change to show sympathy towards this person. If you cannot change, then there is nothing that can be done. We tried to change the criminal/bad person and it didn't work. So we then proceeded to try and make you change to show sympathy since this criminal/bad person was broken, but that didn't work either. So there is nothing that can be done beyond that point.
I personally don't think that ethical questions can or ought to be analyzed logically. When they are, they lead to unhelpful and sometimes absurd conclusions such as: if you treat criminality under a model of an illness, you should also treat sympathy and altruism under the same model. What this does is, rather than really seeing altruism or criminality as a health condition, it just forces us to abandon the model and proceed to a different type of analysis such as a utilitarian analysis. But then the same value judgments that lead us to reject the prior model crop up again in the cost/benefit analysis of utilitarianism - is it better for society to encourage altruism and discourage criminality? Of course it is. Is it better for society to treat criminality as a health condition? I don't know; what I do know is that casting the question in utilitarian terms has not helped me answer the questions and I end up at square one.
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