| | Robert B:
Gosh, Nathan, I was agreeing with and sending sanctions to you for your earlier posts, and here you go and fly off into the wild blue yonder of rehabilitation!
LOL Or did I slip the surly bonds?
I take every attack on proportionate retribution to be a rejection of justice, for reasons made clear in my essay "Crime and Moral Retribution."
Clearly we proceed from different premises.
Rand said that the nature of an entity will determine what it will do. This applies to criminals in spades. They are quite different from thee and me...different primarily in how they think about the world, themselves and others.
The question is whether a volitional entity can choose to change its nature. I think proceeding from the premise of a fixed nature is unwarranted.
But thinking is a matter of volition. The notion that we can rehabilitate, or externally transform someone's thinking without the individual's own voluntary desire to change, is the height of deterministic arrogance.
Nothing I've said, including my advocacy of "brainwashing," would suggest otherwise.
Sadly, most criminals do NOT want to change. Equally sadly, most "experts" and "theorists" don't want to face that fact.
That assertion is no less true for noncriminals, Robert. Change does not come easily. How many obese people or chain smokers easily change their habits?
How many criminals "do not want to change" simply because they feel their lives are beyond hope, or because they have been brutalized into feeling worthless, or because they see themselves as powerless to change even if they wanted to?
What, precisely, would make criminals different from anyone else when given a choice between a bad life and a better life?
For a dose of reality on whether criminals can be rehabilitated -- or even simply "habilitated" -- then besides my own book, I'd recommend Stanton E. Samenow's classic Inside the Criminal Mind. It's about the closest thing to an Objectivist perspective on criminal behavior that's ever been written by a non-Objectivist--a brilliant clinical psychologist who has specialized in working with criminals for decades.
Once having understood the nature of the beast, then we can fruitfully discuss the merits of various responses to crime--not before.
Robert, I don't buy the 'they're just evil' assertion. People are they way they are for REASONS, i.e., there are CAUSES for why people behave as they do, even if part of that cause is the present state of their own twisted volition.
- I proceed from the premise that it's better to make an enemy into a friend, if possible, than to destroy an enemy--and that includes criminals.
- I proceed from the premise that criminality has CAUSES, and whether those causes are genetic, brain damage, psychological abuse, bad association, chemical imbalance and mental illness, culture, a belief in one's inherent worthlessness, insufficient love, etc., that with sufficient effort some lives can be salvaged now by reversing the effects of those causes--and that science offers the promise of far more in the near future. These are human lives, whatever they've done, not disposable hunks of bad meat.
I believe it is in our self-interest to salvage lives, because there for the grace of circumstance go I. Or, dare I say, you. And there without the grace of our efforts goes an even more hardened criminal.
If you think minds are fixed and inalterable, then we are proceeding from different premises. I think the PRESENT truth lies somewhere between the extremes, but we're just beginning to map the human mind, and the potential for human transformation is staggering.
How many criminals, grasping and BELIEVING a clear picture of the POSSIBLE, a good and fulfilling life with the blue pill, contrasted with the miserable life they now lead, would say, "No, this is the life for me! Keep your damned blue pill."
But I suspect we're just going to have to disagree on this one, as I imagine our worldviews are rather different.
Nathan Hawking
(Edited by Nathan Hawking on 6/02, 12:28am)
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