There was a case in my local area where a teenager beat another teeanger to death with a bat. On another blog, some commenters were saying that since his brain wasn’t fully developed yet (based on full brain development being attained close to 30), he shouldn’t be held to adult standards (namely sentencing standards). This was troubling to me, because while I don’t advocate the cruelty of our current prison system, I do worry about the message that lax sentencing sends. The commenets seem to naturally allow for adult freedom (the kids were all unsupervised, and no one said that was problem), then plead biological determinism. To me, morality is about how communities react to transgressions. “Ought not to” has no utility outside of consequences. Those may be social, like the experience of shame, to physical, like imprisonment. I think discussing morality as being solely a quality within individual agents is a dead end.
And thanks for starting this discussion. This is the type of rationality that I find not just interesting but important.
There was a case in my local area where a teenager beat another teeanger to death with a bat. On another blog, some commenters were saying that since his brain wasn’t fully developed yet (based on full brain development being attained close to 30), he shouldn’t be held to adult standards (namely sentencing standards). This was troubling to me, because while I don’t advocate the cruelty of our current prison system, I do worry about the message that lax sentencing sends. The commenets seem to naturally allow for adult freedom (the kids were all unsupervised, and no one said that was problem), then plead biological determinism. To me, morality is about how communities react to transgressions. “Ought not to” has no utility outside of consequences. Those may be social, like the experience of shame, to physical, like imprisonment. I think discussing morality as being solely a quality within individual agents is a dead end.
And thanks for starting this discussion. This is the type of rationality that I find not just interesting but important.