(1) the probability that the criminal will hurt another person in the future
This is wrong. The statist who is guilty of the error of talking about “crimes against society” often tries to set an optimal level of crime based on arbitrary criteria. A person, sane or not who takes another life has no coherent objection to his own life being taken. It’s not justified to burden a victim’s family with the cost of imprisonment or institutionalization and such is not possible to be provided without a state system of taxation.
Edit: Skeptanon, this determinism crap is completely off topic. Respond to me in another relevant thread or I will just ignore and report your post.
The first and foremost fallacy is a false dichotomy between determinism and free will. (The true dichotomy is between the determined and the random.)
So, are Man’s actions then determined or random? Let me guess, I have no choice but to act like I have a choice. You are going to do more than merely assert this right?
This false dichotomy is also projected on a straw man “determinist.”
It seems that you don’t understand what scientism is. We know that 2 hydrogen will combine with an oxygen atom to form water. We don’t know why this happens though. Atoms don’t act. Their behavior is mechanistic. Then, an entirely different methodology, contra the utterly flawed one of the positivist, is valid for the social sciences. We know that Man acts. To deny this places one in performative contradiction. As much as central planners will it to be true, Man is not a servomechanism. I could go on about the methodology, but it is really off topic and I don’t have time for it in every thread, every time someone wants to argue their crackpot theories.
A claim is made, bizarrely, that determinism must be rejected in order to study economics. One must conclude then that the author believes economics to be not just unpredictable but actually random, else the claim (and the premise of this “economics”) is incoherent. Yet reason cannot be applied to events without cause - they just are. So I guess he has (presumably unwittingly) rejected reason entirely.
Odd, before my post the word “rejected” only appears in yours. Do you want to cite exactly what you are talking about? No constants with regard to human action can be isolated, thus the need for methodological dualism.
There are also several appeals to ridicule (what is “obviously” or “intuitively” true)
These “words” are not to be found in what Rothbard wrote either. You can deny the truth of self-evident axioms just as much as you can say 1+1=3, and things are just as they were for anyone else to see. Perhaps you haven’t read Mises on materialistic monism and are not familiar with the phenomenological concepts of intuitive emptiness/fullness.
and arguments from ignorance (you can’t reach this arbitrary goal I’ve set, therefore my way is correct), and straw man arguments (“man is like a stone”, it is impossible to change one’s mind, etc.).
Cite? It seems like you are having reading comprehension issues and/or making false claims.
Yet, aside from the complexity of our decision making process, there is not a shred of evidence that we are fundamentally unique, and quite a bit to the contrary.
The fundamental difference in nature of Man from rocks or other animals is not magic and not due solely to the complexity of decision making. There’s not a shred of predictive power that has been exhibited by those attempting to apply the hypothetico-deductive methodology appropriate for the natural sciences to the social sciences, cf. mainstream economics for instance.