I’ve long know Thomas Szasz has argued for this but only recently have I come to agree with him on this.
Surely it’s irrelevant why someone commits a crime(motive) as long as they acted with intent.Furthermore isn’t it unjust to allow an aggressor to escape punishment merely because they have or claim to have a mental illness.
However I think we must distingush this from a person say who commits rape while sleep walking.I’m not sure how that crime could be resolved.
Any thoughts?
Is sanity a value scale judgement?
I believe it is rightful to compensate victims of property loss, no matter the value scales of the perpetrator. The however is that our current injustice system does not practice just law anyway.
No.
Whether it is a valid defense (in a natural order society) depends on whether plaintiffs would accept it as a mitigating factor. The opinion of courts would be irrelevant since decisions in a natural-order society are only binding by virtue of their mutual agreeability to both parties.
Clayton -
True but it still raises the questions (1) would it be better if it was abolished now while we live under a state and (2) do you personally believe it would be better if it was abolished under anarchy.
Under the current system, it’s hard to say. If it serves as a defense against any state-initiated charge (drugs, money-laundering, etc.) then it is surely a good thing since it reduces or mitigates state aggression. In the case of murder of another private citizen, it’s harder to say. I don’t think most people would want to hold a mentally handicapped person to the same level of moral (hence, legal) responsibility for the same act committed by a fully mentally competent person, so if insanity is a mental handicap, it may reduce the amount of retribution that people demand.
Of course, nothing should be “abolished” in a natural order society.
Clayton -
No, the insanity defense should not be abolished. The only point of holding someone responsible for their actions is if holding them responsible affects their actions. Otherwise you may as well hold heavy objects responsible for falling on your foot. Punishing a truly insane person (or a sleep walker) is just as irrational. The argument could be made that holding them responsible anyway removes the motive for faking it, but that implies it’s impossible to tell, when in fact one almost always can.
A better question, I think, is about what to do with the dangerously insane (or dangerous sleepwalkers). Have they surrendered their right to live freely in society?
The only point of holding someone responsible for their actions is if holding them responsible affects their actions.
This is wrong. Justice is about making the victim whole again, or at least allowing them to do what was done to them. Insanity, intoxication, being a child, etc. can’t fully absolve people of insanity. It can remove the intentional aspect of the punishment, but damage was still done and someone has to pay.
Intent is an empty concept. In fact why would it even matter what someones intent was versus someone’s actual action. Why would it matter if an impulse was the cause of a death or an intent, considering that such concepts could be differentiated. That is, considering that all action can’t be deducted to some level of impulse or even that all impulse can’t be deducted to some level of will.
Here are the possibilities
Thus, under scenarios 1 & 3 your face was slapped; but only in scenario 1 was my intent to do so. Under scenarios 2 & 4, your face is not slapped in (2) I wanted it to be.
In either (1) or (3) what is it about the intention that eliveates the pain from the slap? Though it may true that a flood of apologies may help to aliviate the embarrassment, but this flood of applogies and mothering may take place in either scenario regardless of the previous intention and may even take place under scenario (1) and not (3).
The point is, the victim of the slap may be less likely to pusure restitution if the slapper tries to make amends with them after the assault, but whether this amends takes place or not is separate from the fact that they have the right to seek restitution. Many criminals feel remorse for the damage they’ve done to their victims, but this too is separate from the crime. All factors may be take into consideration by the receiver of the restitution as long as it is up to the victim and not the arbitration company.
In simpler language, both intention and remorse of an act may play a role in the punishment of an act…but that role is not for an arbitration company to decide, it is for the victim to decide. The arbitration company should judge on the crime itself. The aggressors arbitration company may then present the case for less punishment based on wither (or both) intent and remorse. The victim may then decide to alter the punishment if they deem to alter it, at any time they deem it necessary.
That last post was a copy & paste from a project I’ve been working on, sorry if it was longwinded.
Are there any cases you’d like to cite where the insanity defense was successfully argued?
Moreover, do most successful insanity defenses lead to the judge just setting the defendant free?
Let’s put it this way. Suppose I’m strolling along a tropical beach. A coconut falls from a tree and strikes me on the head, giving me a concussion. Am I to take it that the “intent doesn’t matter” proponents would argue that justice has not been done until I injure the coconut tree in turn? What is the purpose of that, exactly? To make me feel better, to take “revenge” against an entity that means me no harm and could not grasp the concept of responsibility, let alone choose to act differently based upon it?
Restitution, perhaps I could see. (Can the coconut tree pay my medical bills?) But punishment? I can’t see that as anything but crazy.
You can’t ignore intention. I’ll be giving more details on this eventually.
Skeptanon, coconut trees don’t act. On the primacy of punishment over restitution read this post by Kinsella.
Sure it acted. It released a coconut. What you mean is it didn’t act with intent.
Sure it acted.
No, it did not.
I don’t really have anything to go as far as why you would deny that, so I’m not sure what to argue with. Is this some kind of Cartesian dualism thing? Why can I act but a coconut tree cannot?
Read Mises’ Human Action.
Even with a generous interpretation of the word ‘act,’ it’s a bit ridiculous to say a tree acts by dropping a coconut. For one thing, the tree does not drop a coconut; gravity pulls the coconut down. If your fingers fall off due to leprosy, do you say you acted? Just take your own example even further, and say a hurricane blows in and destroys your neighborhood. Did the weather act against you? Of course not; there is no being called the weather, or Mother Nature, or the hurricane, and so there is no action. They simply are. Justice does not apply here, only bad luck.
If, however, someone manipulated a tree so that a coconut would fall (that then bonks you on the head), or maniacally devised a machine to control the weather and form a hurricane (that then destroyed your neighborhood), you would have an actionable claim against that person, whether or not he intended to harm you. Now that an acting being has entered the picture, we can talk about justice.
Yea to be guilty of a crime you do need action+intent. If you unintentionally harm someone you owe them resititution, but I don’t think you are guilty in the same way. However I think there should be a careful examination of the insane defense. If someone is murdered and a knife was chosen as the tool to accomplish this, I would say that is perfectly sane. If a wet noodle was chosen as the weapon of choice; then maybe the insanity defense has some merit.
It’s not just gravity pulling the coconut down. There is an extremely complex physical process going on in the tree, all leading up to releasing a coconut. Sure, it’s all ultimately governed by physical laws.
But then, so are you and I.*
The difference is that the chain of causality in our case involves thinking, and intent. And I’m perfectly willing to accept that that makes all the difference. But there are those who are claiming intent doesn’t matter, and if that’s the case then in order to be consistent the coconut tree must be held accountable. I fully agree it’s ridiculous. That is, in fact, my point.
*This is a materialistic view because IMO that’s the most reasonable view, but it isn’t necessary for the argument. The point is that there is a chain of causality, i.e. determinism i.e. you do what you do for a reason. If you want to posit some religious concept of immaterial “soul” in there, that’s fine. It doesn’t make any difference. The alternative (if there is no reason you choose one action over another), then that is called randomness. This is a real possibility given the fine structure of the universe, but a fairly unlikely one given current understanding of neurological structures. (But I won’t bore committed non-empiricists with such things.)