Our freedom to make ethical choices is an illusion. Discuss. This is a hard determinist statement which I do not agree with, hard determinism states that all your choices including ethical and moral choices, are predetermined and you have absolutely no free will to choose to do anything other. Therefore a person would have no responsibility for their actions. In my own opinion this causes many issues which can lead people to do immoral things and commit bad crimes, and be able to justify their actions by stating it was already determined for them to do it.
The death penalty gives those that are actually guilty the easy way out of punishment, and the innocent a wrongful death. Giving the guilty the death penalty keeps them from ever coming to terms with what they have done wrong. They don’t get the chance to truly feel apologetic or right the wrong they have done. The death penalty allows the guilty to escape their own thoughts and guilt. “But the others were perfectly rational.
The main question asked by psychologists surrounding human beings having control over behaviour is ‘Does our behaviour result from forces over which we have no control or do we have free choice to behave as we wish?’ Determinism is the view that internal or external forces of which they have no control over control an individual’s behaviour. An example of an external force would be parents raising their offspring with certain rewards and punishments. An example of an internal force would be hormones within the body. Determinism is an extremely controversial view and has many arguments surrounding it both for and against. The universal determinism theory suggests that causal laws govern everything and therefore if you knew all of the properties of the universe then you could predict future events including human behaviour.
Determinism, the antithesis of indeterminism, is as its name implies- the concept of having no free will. Philosophers imply, when under deterministic school of thought, that everything anyone does is pre-determined to happen and nothing can say otherwise. Determinism has an argument for every action that occurs in a way that it can state that destiny is inescapable. Similar to how most movies always have the good uprising over evil at the end, things will happen as they do because of outside influences out of everyone’s control. This is a very difficult statement to counter, for when say a indeterminist tries to explain away a determinist’s observations they can be thwarted by the simple words ‘you were destined to make that argument as a result of things around you’.
We act selfishly in order to survive. This idea is often understood as Psychological Egoism, which Kavka defines as “the doctrine that all human action is selfishly motivated”. This idea is central to Hobbes’ idea that in the State of Nature, a hypothetical situation in which there is no form of government, humans will live in a state of universal conflict. Kavka describes this as “the perils of anarchy”. It is not just this universal egoism, however, which results in this conflict, but rather humans’ insatiable desire for power.
Hobbs believed that if man had complete freedom it would result in chaos. This perception of the original state of nature is what would exist if there were no ruling power to execute and enforce the laws to restrain and individual’s fears and desires. The “Hobbesian Trap” can be seen throughout society today. For example, the nuclear arms race is run by each country’s fear of another even though no threat has been made. This is essentially what Hobbes believes what happens at the human level and that this fear would justify chaos if there are no laws and regulations on freedoms.
And in between these 2 theories there is compatibilism, which is also known as soft determinism, this is the belief that our actions are free but they are conditioned. Hard determinism is called that as their position is very strict, as they see that all our actions have prior causes, so every choice we make is determined by the situation before it. Hard determinist see humans as sorts of machines, we are not free or have moral responsibility as because everything is caused by prior situations we are not free to change them. They also see humans as a machine in the sense that if something is broken you simply fix it, for example if a person is violent you try to fix it and if this does not work you put them in prison to stop their violence being put on others. In 1924 Clarence Darrow defended 2 young men on the charge of murder.
Since the law states that the offender is legally not responsible for the action then that offender absolutely cannot be held responsible by any means. It is instances such as these that make the justification of preventive detention by means of a retributive defense problematic. Antony Duff seems to be up for the challenge and he constructs an argument for continued punitive confinement on what he believes to be a small population of offenders who are tireless in that they show a pattern of violent offending even when they have had previous and recurring convictions and punishments, they prove time and time again that they cannot be deterred. Though he admits the fact that individuals have the right to be presumed harmless, even after the recurring convictions and punishments for thereof, he argues that that right is revocable and can be taken away. A violent criminal past of a sufficiently reluctant and recurring type might be sufficient in order to do so.
Many prosecutors use the threat of the death penalty as a way of getting a plea deal to get the offender off the streets. (Ewegen, 1994) Yet using the death penalty this way does not make it a deterrent against crime, it just keeps the judicial system from spending more money on trials. The death penalty has been abolished in many developed societies. The death penalty has no deterrent effect on capital crime. More over, the risk of executing an innocent person is unacceptable.
A life of incarceration without the possibility of parole is a realistic alternative for the small number of offenders who are likely to be executed in any given year. Justice does not mandate death but justice does request that murderers be punished. If punishment is reasonable for returning justice and the moral order, it does not necessarily follow that capital punishment is moral. “The death penalty only allows us to extend the pain. It allows us to continue to blame one another, to turn against one another, to learn to hate better”.