The Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution reflect the Classical movement, thus the law of today is classical in nature. Cesare Beccaria, believed crime could be linked to bad laws, not necessarily bad people. He thought that if a criminal justice system could be implemented to guarantee equal treatment of all before the law. His famous book, On Crimes and Punishment presented a new design for the criminal justice system that serviced all people, and dubbed him the father of modern criminology. The Positivist School of Criminology was developed by Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909).
Rousseau’s General Will Jean-Jacques Rousseau wanted to find a form a political association in which naturally free individuals can join with each other as a member of the sovereign, and makes laws that apply equally to all. Rousseau uses the concept of General Will as a means by which a group of people enter into this social contract. The General Will is constructed by the people who in turn obey it as citizens. The separate wills, rights and desires of each member of a society brought together as a single unit is the General Will. The idea of the general will is at the heart of Rousseau's philosophy.
Finally, I will state which viewpoint I agree with and give my reasons why. Determinism is stated as “the view that every event, including human actions, is brought about by previous events in accordance with universal casual laws that govern the world. Human freedom is an illusion” (Chaffee 141). As the definition bluntly states, people who believe in determinism believe that everything is predetermined based on prior events and people and do not believe that humans have free will. In the philosophical view of determinism with respect to free will, it focuses more on the circumstances surrounding the agent instead of just the individual agent.
Free will must account for our undeniable experience of freedom of choice. However, it does not necessarily need to conclude that our choices are free from antecedent factors - empirical evidence. It must also account for the flexible, conscious control that we experience in everyday life - the fact that we deliberately select goals, values, and optional plans of action (Voss 1997). In free will, there is something or someone who will choose and choice is an action, therefore there should be an “actor”, and this is “our mind” which is the totality of our mental processes. This aspect of our “mind” knows and aware of the self that recognizes the free will.
In my last duchess the characters mentioned in this poem are based on real life, historical figures. The narrator is Duke Alfonso II who ruled a place in northern Italy called Ferrara between 1559 and 1597. The Duchess of whom he speaks was his first wife,Lucrezia de' Medici who died in 1561 aged 17, only two years after he married her. In real life, Lucrezia died in suspicious circumstances and might have been poisoned. The poem is set in 1564, three years after the death of the Duchess.
The philosopher Hegel stated people are punished not only to acknowledge them as human beings ,by punishing people, pain is inflicted for a wrong deed in much the same way that good behaviour is rewarded. Dating as far back as the 18th and 19th century punishment has always been seen as an act of inflicting pain upon offenders on account of a crime committed. Punishment during that ranged from public standing in the pillory, to branding, whipping and burning and in most cases death by hanging. This sort of public shame was done in an effort to deter the offender from committing any future crimes as well as sending out a message across society that crime was not tolerated. With the passage of time into modern society punishment is seen as having evolved.
By locating its concern on the issues about morality and violence andexploring the limits of human cruelty Waiting for the Barbarians challenges humanityand imperialism in several ways. Presenting a psychoanalytic discussion of Waiting for the Barbarians this study focuses on the impact of fear in human psyche andimperialism’s self destructive power. How far fear and anxiety can go and how far members of society can follow a blind power is the main concern of this essay. AsCoetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians is an allegorical novel, this essay will try tointerpret the allegories created in relation to the tensions raised in the novel. The examination of the critiques raised in the book, may be broken down into thefollowing main components.
In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne uses the symbolism of the letter “A” and the Jail in the Puritan town to portray the theme of sin, and show how the puritans, despite their biggest beliefs and deepest desires for a utopian society, looked to seek out sin and punish it publically because they knew that ultimately sin was inevitable as it was human nature. The theme of sin is a reoccurring phenomenon throughout the book, and ultimately an integral part of the story’s plot and moral. The symbolism that the author conveys through the mentioning and description of the Jail in the center of the Puritan town clearly shows how immense the desire to punish sin, which the puritans realize is inevitable, really is. The letter “A” serves as a symbol that portrays the importance of seeking and labeling out sinners to the puritans in their society. The theme of sin, and its inevitability and punishment in the puritan society, is clearly conveyed by Hawthorne through the symbolism of the town Jail in The Scarlet Letter.
- Literature Review (3,720) ‘To what extent was Hannah Arendt correct in saying that human beings are conditioned to be evil by authority?’ Exploring the dispute between dispositional evil and conditioned/situational evil Eichmann and the Banality of Evil Stephen Whitfield addresses Hannah Arendt’s thesis on evil. Whitfield argues that perpetrators of evil during the Holocaust did so through three factors; thoughtlessness, distance and the nature of bureaucracy. Whitfield notes that an aspect of bureaucracy causes the wrongdoers to become engrossed with the logistical side of genocide, presenting a barrier between action and consequence. Alluding to Arendt’s illustration of Eichmann, Whitfield reinforces the idea of Eichmann lacking the staple traits of evil such as hatred, aggressiveness and virulent anti-Semitism apparent in the higher echelons of Nazism. In other words, both authors emphasize Eichmann’s normality, epitomising a diligent, acquiescent worker who perhaps absolved his heinous crimes through a duty to the state, the conditioning factor here being compliance to those giving orders and fulfilling one’s task to the utmost of one’s ability.
Capital Punishment and the Deterrence Theory Capital Punishment Deters Crime 11/9/2012 Dr. Ji Seun Sohn Brooke Lee Capital Punishment and the Deterrence Theory: Capital Punishment Deters Crime Jerry Kilgore said in an editorial written for USA Today, “As a former prosecutor, former secretary of public safety and now attorney general, I believe that some crimes are so evil, some criminals so dangerous and some victims so tortured that executing the criminal is appropriate” (Kilgore, 2002). Capital punishment, or commonly referred to as the death penalty, is the most controversial of all of the disciplinary practices. Since it involves taking another human being’s life, this is not at all surprising. Since it is the most severe of all sentences, there have been countless efforts to abolish the death penalty, and in most of the industrialized nations, with the exception of Japan and the United States of America, these efforts have proved effective. In this paper, I will discuss the effect that capital punishment has on deterring criminal activity.