If you had a brain condition so that you had no—here it’s a little vague—consciousness, or moral sense, or free will, or, well, something—then it would be cruel to punish you for your crime.
If people in your pre-crime condition would commit certain crimes regardless of people in your pre-crime condition generally being punished for committing such crimes, punishing people post-crime does not deter others in such a position from committing such crimes.
Harming anyone who injures is still retributive.
Prison may sometimes serve to rehabilitate or improve the criminal, regardless of deterrence or responsibility.
Punishment may still be useful to some entities other than criminals, particularly if it is difficult to determine who is undeterrable. E.g., punishing the probably innocent as a warning to others, or strict liability even for the demonstrably innocent lest society spend resources determining truth. In extreme cases, the utility of prison or punishment may be dissociated from crime, e.g., society has decided Mr. J.J.J.S. is most useful in a chain gang and sends him there, or it is easier to send him to prison than admit according to its values society should pay for more expensive mental health treatment.
It’s important to remember this about forbidden things: things are forbidden because if not for the law or taboo, people would find it useful to do them. The American Constitution forbids punishing relatives as a deterrent, i.e. “corruption of blood”. To be able to credibly threaten relatives would often be useful, but we don’t allow it regardless.
Rather than give up on the benefits of harm as it has given up on blackmailing relatives, our society tries to keep the useful practice of punishment by restricting it to a narrow group of people it defines as guilty. Not surprisingly, it goes too far and punishes with harm far more than is useful.
As an analogy, to how we ought to consider cases in which we think we get utility from harming others, consider the following. We know that many people who were wrong to think (metaphorically) that to save five they must kill one. From the inside, we can expect that the many of our beliefs that we must damage to save are in fact false beliefs. An unbiased being should always kill one to save five; a biased being must judge its internal belief that to save five it must kill one as likely false, all else being equal.
A society that aimed to determine (as straw-man act utilitarians do), for every suspect, the sentence most beneficial to society, the result would be a broken society. Instead, a commitment is made to only exploit the power of intentionally inflicted harm in a limited set of cases, those where we have reason to believe the criminal himself or herself was a member of the class of people deterrable by punishing people like him or her for crimes like his or hers. Society has correctly concluded that utilitarian calculations beyond that are both distorted views by minds prone to inappropriately value harm to others and sub-optimal to “rule utilitarianism” (which really telescopes back into sophisticated act utilitarianism).
If society is to continue down the road of replacing swathes of straw-man act utilitarianism with patches of rule utilitarianism to make sophisticated telescoping act utilitarianism, it will further restrict the scenarios in which we harm convicts.
If people in your pre-crime condition would commit certain crimes regardless of people in your pre-crime condition generally being punished for committing such crimes, punishing people post-crime does not deter others in such a position from committing such crimes.
Harming anyone who injures is still retributive.
Prison may sometimes serve to rehabilitate or improve the criminal, regardless of deterrence or responsibility.
Punishment may still be useful to some entities other than criminals, particularly if it is difficult to determine who is undeterrable. E.g., punishing the probably innocent as a warning to others, or strict liability even for the demonstrably innocent lest society spend resources determining truth. In extreme cases, the utility of prison or punishment may be dissociated from crime, e.g., society has decided Mr. J.J.J.S. is most useful in a chain gang and sends him there, or it is easier to send him to prison than admit according to its values society should pay for more expensive mental health treatment.
It’s important to remember this about forbidden things: things are forbidden because if not for the law or taboo, people would find it useful to do them. The American Constitution forbids punishing relatives as a deterrent, i.e. “corruption of blood”. To be able to credibly threaten relatives would often be useful, but we don’t allow it regardless.
Rather than give up on the benefits of harm as it has given up on blackmailing relatives, our society tries to keep the useful practice of punishment by restricting it to a narrow group of people it defines as guilty. Not surprisingly, it goes too far and punishes with harm far more than is useful.
As an analogy, to how we ought to consider cases in which we think we get utility from harming others, consider the following. We know that many people who were wrong to think (metaphorically) that to save five they must kill one. From the inside, we can expect that the many of our beliefs that we must damage to save are in fact false beliefs. An unbiased being should always kill one to save five; a biased being must judge its internal belief that to save five it must kill one as likely false, all else being equal.
A society that aimed to determine (as straw-man act utilitarians do), for every suspect, the sentence most beneficial to society, the result would be a broken society. Instead, a commitment is made to only exploit the power of intentionally inflicted harm in a limited set of cases, those where we have reason to believe the criminal himself or herself was a member of the class of people deterrable by punishing people like him or her for crimes like his or hers. Society has correctly concluded that utilitarian calculations beyond that are both distorted views by minds prone to inappropriately value harm to others and sub-optimal to “rule utilitarianism” (which really telescopes back into sophisticated act utilitarianism).
If society is to continue down the road of replacing swathes of straw-man act utilitarianism with patches of rule utilitarianism to make sophisticated telescoping act utilitarianism, it will further restrict the scenarios in which we harm convicts.