Rabbit's Cradle

25 July 2010

Mo' Mirro'

I'm just building up to my favorite of the bunch, promise.
By the way, some of these night shots are better viewed in a bigger size, which you can do by clicking on them (and zooming in, if so desired).

Crime and Punishment, or Not

A friend of mine, who shall remain unnamed, recently had a brush in with the law, and it got me to thinking about the eye-for-an-eye principle that's at the heart of just about every criminal proceeding. In fact, it seems as though fines and incarcerations generally have two purposes, one of deterrence and the other of "due" punishment. Deterrence, perhaps, can be justified, albeit with a somewhat cynical view of human nature (ok, it's probably accurate). It is the idea of punishment as a necessary repercussion of wrongdoing that worries me, however. It seems evident that most people would agree that a criminal deserves to be punished, especially when the crime does serious damage to others. And my immediate reaction is the same - yeah, the murderer deserves his three lifetimes in jail - but when I think about it further I am stymied at what exactly may be the basis of that judgment. How is it that I can find it immoral (see next sentence for caveat) for a person to purposely ruin another's life, and yet agree to the same action as a punishment?

A philosophy professor in my last semester of college did a rather fine job of convincing me that free will - defined as that which gives people moral responsibility for their actions - does not exist, and so any punishment or praise is the equivalent of teaching a dog not to pee in the house or to roll over, respectively. While I'm still reeling from the implications of this idea (the subject of a subsequent post, I would venture), it does suggest that perhaps retribution is nothing but behavior correction and deterrence, a view against which, as I mentioned, I can raise fewer objections. As I'm woefully unversed in legal philosophy, I can only say that maybe Hammurabi's eye-for-an-eye system really was principally a method of keeping the peace through deterrence, but that still does not explain the deep-seeded intuition that a wrong-doer a priori deserves to be punished, and my more recent counter-intuition that this feeling is rather baseless. Although, in the end it still feels right to be happy when the purse-snatcher it pummeled by the helpless old lady, so I remain as conflicted as ever.

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In other news, I intend to have more posts such as this one along with all the photos, as I've been itching to write, partially for fear that I will have neither the time nor the assignments to do so when medical school rolls around, and partially because that is, after all, a stated purpose of this blog.