Hobbes' Choice wrote:That equation is made by a determined agent.
"Determined agent" is an oxymoron. If one is "determined," then by definition one is not actually an "agent" of anything. "Agency" itself is a psychological delusion -- the deep truth of all things is that they are fated by impersonal material forces, if determinism is true.
The assertion that determinism fails on law and legal grounds is a fallacy'; argument from adverse causes.
You've got me wrong: I didn't say it was a
reason to believe or disbelieve in determinism -- only that these things cannot be made rational if determinism is true. I left open the question of whether or not one still wants to assert determinism as true: I would only say that it will cost one any legitimation for things like morality, justice and law. For then, those things too will be merely illusions.
But on the contrary when determinism is used as a model it emphasises the causality of punishment, correctionalism and rehabilitation. Systems can be in place to cause people to think otherwise, and can be offered new skills to change their future.
That's not possible if they are determined. For then, there is no logical sense in which the future can be "changed." Prior causes account for absolutely everything, and predetermine the one possibility that can ever happen in the future. There is no way to change that course; one can only cultivate the delusion of having done so. But history is a train on one track. Determinism entails that.
In fact this is ONLY possible if you adopt determinsim. If a person has the FREE WILL to act in spite of themselves, their motivation and their experience then all attempts at REFORM fail. It is only when you accept that changes have to be made to the character and choices of a person, that any benefit from punishment/correctionalism can be effective, or necessary.
"It is only when you accept that changes..." etc. Note your amphiboly there. "Changes" cannot be made to a character that was composed of nothing but prior causes and will respond in future to nothing but the chain of causality. In fact, "change" is then just a perceptual imagining, a description of the fact that in our putatively predetermined cosmos things don't stay the same as they were before, but it is never an indicator of volition or agency.
And we only have to look to the correctional system to satisfy ourselves that reform is generally ineffective: the re-offense rates remain astonishingly high even for petty crime, and astronomical for extreme offenders like sexual predators and pedophiles. That reform is possible at all is surely an indicator of agency and choice, and a stroke against determinism.
The big problem with the US system right now is the belief in free-will.
That's an odd argument. For "belief," in a deterministic universe, is just another illusion of agency, and agency is an illusion. What we "believe" then has no causal impact on the predetermined outcome of events. So it shouldn't matter.
Moreover, if determinism is right, then people cannot "change" their minds any more than a rock can "decide" to fall or not fall off a cliff. Their minds are only "changed" in the sense that they reorder according to material, external forces, all of which have been preset from time immemorial.
This has provided them with the excuse to basically lock them up and throw away the key, because of the belief that each of them is free to commit crimes regardless of any causal effect of prison. The result is that prison does nothing to improve the lot of prisoners and causes resentment and hatred of society and the system.
I would argue the opposite: that prison and our reform system show that we don't know how to make people good. The dismal record of all penal systems should surely tend to that conclusion...and it really doesn't matter which one you choose. They are all, by any reasonable measure, resounding failures at reform. Hence the continual cries for new strategies: some work a little better than others, but none of them work the way we would hope.
The only hope is the embrace of deterministic principles to cause them to change their thinking.
This claim again mixes terms. What we "embrace" will change nothing, if determinism is true, since all of that is preset by material forces. So there is no "hope" anymore: whatever was predetermined to happen, happens. End of story.
Of course, I don't believe any of that. I'm not a determinist. But the thing about determinism is that if one wants to be rational about it, it has to be "in for a penny, in for a pound, so to speak." There are no half-hearted versions of determinism that do not thereby cease to be forms of determinism.
Either human volition is merely a delusion produced by our psychological misunderstanding of material causes, or people have some kind of unpredetermined "will." There are no other choices, because determinism and "free will" are mutually-exclusive postulates, just the sort for which the Law of Non-Contradiction applies unproblematically.
If people can act freely then nothing we do is of any consequence to change perpertrators
Au contraire..."free will," as I said before, does not mean "without influences." It just means that you have the choice of whether or not you respond to those influences. And the whole idea of reform is predicated on free will; for if a criminal cannot "change his mind," what's the point? If he was predestined to offend, why did we lock him up, in fact? It wasn't his decision, and we blamed him. He was the perpetual victim of previous causes, and thus cannot be accused of having chosen to do as he did, and he most certainly then can't be reformed at all. On the other hand, if he ever appears to "reform" it will only ever be because the causal circumstances precipitated that change, not that he deserves any pats on the back for having repented.
Determinism has been rightly called "the iron cage". That's not my phrase: it goes back to people like Weber.
Here's Encyclopaedia Britannica on the same subject:
Determinism, in philosophy, theory that all events, including moral choices, are completely determined by previously existing causes. Determinism is usually understood to preclude free will because it entails that humans cannot act otherwise than they do. The theory holds that the universe is utterly rational because complete knowledge of any given situation assures that unerring knowledge of its future is also possible . Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace, in the 18th century framed the classical formulation of this thesis. For him, the present state of the universe is the effect of its previous state and the cause of the state that follows it. If a mind, at any given moment, could know all of the forces operating in nature and the respective positions of all its components, it would thereby know with certainty the future and the past of every entity, large or small. The Persian poet Omar Khayyam expressed a similar deterministic view of the world in the concluding half of one of his quatrains: “And the first Morning of Creation wrote / What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.”
