Discussion of whether “punishment” is even a useful concept from the government-level perspective or whether the goal should always be reduction in future crime.
more broadly, to what degree ought a government promote any specific framework of morality, v.s. preserve the space for society at large to explore.
i happen to mostly agree with you on those broad ideals. a large space full of constant experimentation allows for regularly finding better ways of doing things: American dynamism in a nutshell.
Abortion comes to mind as an example of a moral question that the government has to legislate on.
yes, and no. abortion is relevant to a government because most governments promise a specific set of rights to their citizens which must be defended, and one of these rights is protection from violence. it’s reasonable for a government to approach abortion strictly from the angle of “at what moment(s) in human development do we grant humans their citizenship.” as with the question of justice, the decision-making here could be guided by processes which are either closely tied to morality (“life is sacred; citizenship is granted at conception”) or less directly related to morals (“for the good of the country, citizenship should be granted once the expected gains from providing it outweigh the cost”).
in a competitive landscape, one might expect selective pressures to optimize for the latter interpretation. in fact, if one understands morality to be a thing which emerged in the context of social cooperation, one might expect the individual’s moral view to yield similar results to the amoral view of decision making — and that significant disagreements at that level are due to radical changes in the human experience since roughly the agricultural revolution, where the optimal methods of cooperation began to shift at a rate that challenged the ability for morals to match. but this is me shooting loosely-formed ideas from the hip here: i’ve never looked into the history of morality and it could easily exist for reasons other than facilitating social cooperation.
more broadly, to what degree ought a government promote any specific framework of morality, v.s. preserve the space for society at large to explore.
i happen to mostly agree with you on those broad ideals. a large space full of constant experimentation allows for regularly finding better ways of doing things: American dynamism in a nutshell.
yes, and no. abortion is relevant to a government because most governments promise a specific set of rights to their citizens which must be defended, and one of these rights is protection from violence. it’s reasonable for a government to approach abortion strictly from the angle of “at what moment(s) in human development do we grant humans their citizenship.” as with the question of justice, the decision-making here could be guided by processes which are either closely tied to morality (“life is sacred; citizenship is granted at conception”) or less directly related to morals (“for the good of the country, citizenship should be granted once the expected gains from providing it outweigh the cost”).
in a competitive landscape, one might expect selective pressures to optimize for the latter interpretation. in fact, if one understands morality to be a thing which emerged in the context of social cooperation, one might expect the individual’s moral view to yield similar results to the amoral view of decision making — and that significant disagreements at that level are due to radical changes in the human experience since roughly the agricultural revolution, where the optimal methods of cooperation began to shift at a rate that challenged the ability for morals to match. but this is me shooting loosely-formed ideas from the hip here: i’ve never looked into the history of morality and it could easily exist for reasons other than facilitating social cooperation.