Prominent professors in the Netherlands have proposed to replace the criminal prosecution for young adults (<21 years), stating that young criminals should not be punished, but should instead be transferred to forensic psychiatry. The idea: “The criminals are not yet fully grown mentally and deserve psychiatric help.”
Would it be good to replace criminal law with preventive measures?
What would happen when people start to believe that there is no guilt, and that people are not responsible for crime, and that criminals instead should be submitted to psychiatric care?
It will effectuate something in human interaction.
Preventive psychiatric measures are by definition about prosecuting people on the basis of vague suspicions and not on the basis of facts. It will cause people to lose the basic dignity as a human being (the Presumption of innocence) before they have committed a crime, so that they will commit a crime faster.
When vague suspicion based prosecution becomes effective in society it will put some people at risk while they did not commit a crime. In a conflict situation, it is logical that the opposing party can concretize the requirement for preventive psychiatric measures by which the person affected has lost a reason to not commit a crime. The measure for a crime that he did not commit has been determined beforehand. The dignity as a human was already gone. (psychiatric disorders/treatments are highly stigmatizing)
Criminal behavior is a potential, so when people come to believe that it is caused by a brain disease that they themselves cannot be blamed for, they will commit a crime faster.
'belief' in free will
The people who make the decisions (legislators and people working in the criminal justice system) will probably have to make their decisions based on an evaluation of the validity of a belief in free will.
Why would the interest of a criminal weigh higher than for example a desire by victims for retribution, or to set an example for society with regard to good and bad behavior?
It will ultimately come down to abolishing a belief in free will.
Law makers and people who work in the criminal justice system are giving in because they ultimately have only a 'belief' in free will as a foundation for their practice, opposed to a presumed 'objective science'.
It may not matter if Free Will Skepticists can make a strong case against free will. It is more easy to simply question the validity of a belief in free will.
If a law maker is provided with the idea that crime can be prevented, and when that idea is substantiated and promoted by a science-field in general, there appears to be little argumentative ability to resist a proposition to replace the retributive justice system with preventative measures.
Despite the financial interests of Big Law, Big Pharma + psychiatry + the idea of the ability to prevent crime may be able to gain the upper hand. There is simply much more money involved for them and they can paint a picture of a better world.
As it appears, it will come down to the ability to defend free will. And if that defense is impossible (for an individual) they will likely simply put their trust in a science-field. It is a non-risk choice versus taking responsibility for defending free will. It may explain why psychiatry has been winning so easily, while from the outlook, Free Will Skepticism may appear questionable.
At question is: Why would one want to defend free will?
Will people who work in the criminal justice system be able to hold on to a belief in free will? They have a much tougher time. They may not have a philosophical background and may merely be confronted with the reality of crime within the scope of their profession.
When you are a judge and are confronted with horrific crimes on a daily basis, at some point in time it may be logical that you wish for a mere chance to be able to prevent the crimes. The abolishing of a belief in free will may then seem worth the chance. A multi-trillion USD science+business is eager to take over responsibility and control. As it appears, a mere plausible philosophical consideration may have a hard time to defend free will at the moment that a hint of a chance of prevention presents itself as a choice.
No one can blame someone who chooses to abolish a belief in free will in favor of a replacement of the retributive justice system with preventative measures. On the contrary, holding on to a belief in free will on the basis of philosophical consideration bears a heavy responsibility.
Reference: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-retributive/
Free Will Skepticism
debatingfreewill.com (2021, by professors Daniel C. Dennet and Gregg D. Caruso).
Free Will Skepticism in Law and Society: Challenging Retributive Justice.
(2021) The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?Elizabeth Shaw, Derk Pereboom, and Gregg D. Caruso have compiled a volume that centralizes a question of great philosophical and practical importance -- what is the relationship between skeptical views about free will and criminal punishment? It provides an excellent new resource for anyone who finds some variety of free will skepticism appealing (or troubling), and thus feels a looming threat to retributive justification for our modern criminal justice system.
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While there are a variety of ways that we might understand the motivation for free will skepticism and its ultimate scope, the majority of contributors here accept something akin to Pereboom's version. For those unfamiliar with the position, it is a relatively cautious variety of skepticism. According to Pereboom, the troubles for traditional success theories of free will and moral responsibility suggest that, at best, we have no good reason to think that we ever have the kind of freedom needed to make us morally responsible and deserving of praise and blame in the basic (non-consequentialist) sense. In other words, the assumption that we sometimes genuinely deserve backward-looking, retributive blame for our actions is unfounded. And, in light of the significant harms associated with this kind of blame and its attendant practices (perhaps foremost among them, punishment) we ought to take seriously the skeptical position that they are in fact never truly deserved.
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/free-will-skep ... e-justice/
Book: Cambridge University Press, 2019
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/fr ... AF7E270760
A growing chorus of scientists and philosophers argue that free will does not exist. Could they be right?
By far the most unsettling implication of the case against free will, for most who encounter it, is what it seems to say about morality: that nobody, ever, truly deserves reward or punishment for what they do, because what they do is the result of blind deterministic forces (plus maybe a little quantum randomness). “For the free will sceptic,” writes Gregg Caruso in his new book Just Deserts (DebatingFreeWill.com), a collection of dialogues with his fellow philosopher Daniel Dennett, “it is never fair to treat anyone as morally responsible.” Were we to accept the full implications of that idea, the way we treat each other – and especially the way we treat criminals – might change beyond recognition.
For Caruso, who teaches philosophy at the State University of New York, what all this means is that retributive punishment – punishing a criminal because he deserves it, rather than to protect the public, or serve as a warning to others – can’t ever be justified.
Retribution is central to all modern systems of criminal justice, yet ultimately, Caruso thinks, “it’s a moral injustice to hold someone responsible for actions that are beyond their control. It’s capricious.” Indeed some psychological research, he points out, suggests that people believe in free will partly because they want to justify their appetite for retribution. “What seems to happen is that people come across an action they disapprove of; they have a high desire to blame or punish; so they attribute to the perpetrator the degree of control [over their own actions] that would be required to justify blaming them.”
Caruso is an advocate of what he calls the “public health-quarantine” model of criminal justice, which would transform the institutions of punishment in a radically humane direction.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/a ... n-illusion
(2021) https://www.amazon.com/Rejecting-Retrib ... ks&sr=1-14
A case for Free Will
A recent study suggests that all particles in the Universe are entangled by kind, a qualia of which it is assumed that it is non-physical. It would be proof of free will. The study is discussed in topic: viewtopic.php?f=16&t=33092
The main argument by Free Will Sceptics is the following, which is essentially the idea that mind is necessarily 'caused' within the scope of physical reality.
To make a choice that wasn’t merely the next link in the unbroken chain of causes, you’d have to be able to stand apart from the whole thing, a ghostly presence separate from the material world yet mysteriously still able to influence it. But of course you can’t actually get to this supposed place that’s external to the universe, separate from all the atoms that comprise it and the laws that govern them. You just are some of the atoms in the universe, governed by the same predictable laws as all the rest.
(2021) The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?
A growing chorus of scientists and philosophers argue that free will does not exist. Could they be right?
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/a ... n-illusion
As can be seen from the reasoning by Free Will Sceptics, only the idea that mind has a primary role in nature could prevent a belief in determinism.
Scientific evidence for the idea of “a primary role for the mind in nature” is mounting from several angles. For example, recent quantum physics studies through experiments have shown that the observer precedes reality (the scientific "observer" = consciousness = mind).
(2020) Do Quantum Phenomena Require Conscious Observers?
“Experiments indicate that the everyday world we perceive does not exist until observed,” writes scientist Bernardo Kastrup and colleagues earlier this year on Scientific American, adding that this suggests “a primary role for mind in nature.”
https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/ar ... -observers
How observers create reality
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.06774.pdf
(2018) Is the Universe a conscious mind?
https://aeon.co/essays/cosmopsychism-ex ... d-for-life
(2021) Can our brains help prove the universe is conscious?
If it is proven that consciousness plays a causal role in the universe, it would have huge consequences for the scientific view of the world, said Kleiner. "It could lead to a scientific revolution on a par with the one initiated by Galileo Galilei," he said.
https://www.space.com/is-the-universe-conscious
(2019) Quantum physics: objective reality doesn't exist
Clearly these are all deeply philosophical questions about the fundamental nature of reality. Whatever the answer, an interesting future awaits.
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-quantum-p ... oesnt.html
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What is your opinion? Does free will exist?
Would it be good to replace the retributive criminal justice system with a system based on the idea that criminals are not responsible for their crimes?