Quote:
Originally Posted by Revolution
I find that very interesting. I would counter that the "illicit desire" should not be punished if it is not voluntary (not the product of free will). And if we are nothing more than genetics+experience, then the desire is indeed involuntary. Surely, involuntary acts/desires should not be "punished." (Again, incapacitation is fine, as is deterrence, but retribution is another matter.)
|
What does voluntariness have to do with it? It's your will that is the problem. Why it helps if the will is unconditioned by anything, and is utterly, radically free, is a mystery to me from the perspective of applying punishment. The real argument isn't that the will needs to be "free" per se, it's that it isn't really "your" will -- instead you have some true underlying will, free of temporal circumstances. But that makes nonsense out of the nature of the self and will. Will is NEVER free in the sense of some secret reality beneath empirical happenstance. Will is the expression of the organism's drives, socially mediated. There isn't some ideal person hidden beneath the empirical person. There's just an organism.
Even if you do go down the "true will" path, you would want to start with something like a concept of duress (extraordinarily oppressive contingent circumstances), rather than positing a mythological "free will" and proceeding forward from that point. You're basically just positing a mythical innocent Christian soul if that's your approach. And that's what creates the problem that has to be unwound -- people are envisioning the problem as if "evil" and "good" souls were floating around in the aether, prior to embodiment in a living organism. This theology is complete nonsense, but it's part of our heritage as the secularized remnants of Christianity continue to drift through our legal system (and that of post-Christian cultures).