On a similar note, it is becoming increasingly popular to assert that there's no such thing as free will, asserting that this will lead to "compassion" for people convicted of crimes. But it's really about giving up on people, warehousing them, and denying them any chance at all. It is a caste system, just disguised as a compassion system, or a "justice" system, all a nothing system in which people mean nothing.
Has a popular podcaster or news stating been saying this recently? I never heard this excuse until a few days ago and then all of a sudden it’s all over the Internet forums.
A lot of people in the west have not believed in capitol “F” Free Will for a loooong time. A huge swath of the intellectual world stopped around the time of Hume, so it’s been a central idea in the intellectual class since the American revolution. Not sure why now is different.
Firstly Sam Harris published a popular book deriving anti-free-will from scientific determinism, and Robert Sapolsky has also been a contributor, deriving it from baboon research and neurology.
I think the American Revolution was vehemently predicated on free will, vis-à-vis liberty. Many other political agendas reject the notion of a "commoner" being able to think for themselves and seek a more restrictive society.
It's all off topic, but I've thought that what does the question of free will have to do with sentencing? That's just too metaphysical. Punishments surely have a function that's independent of free will.
Because if there’s no free will, the person you’re punishing merely behaved according to the state in their brain and couldn’t have acted differently in the moment. Punishment is still useful as a deterrent, but there’s no “they deserved it” component.
I’m not quite sure what to make of it all. I read Sam Harris’s book on the subject, and can’t fault the logic. On the other hand I find the conclusion unsettling and prefer not to dwell on it. Usually I follow the logic fearlessly whatever it takes me, regardless of my feelings. But on this one, I do not.
I think free will aside, I’d rather the legal system focused on rehabilitation than on punishment where possible. It just screws up enough that the punishment might be applied to an innocent person. Also you want people that are able to rejoin society to do so from a position where they have hope and opportunity, and don’t fall back on old habits.
Philosophically, I think there is a "you deserved it", maybe even more so, if there is no free will. After all, it is then unavoidable. How could it be any more deserved than that? :)
If there's no free will, I'm merely punishing according to a state in my brain and I couldn't act differently.
> I’d rather the legal system focused on rehabilitation than on punishment where possible.
Rehabilitation is science fiction. We're vaguely aware that we should be able to travel to other stars... and we might manage that too, someday. But at least the details are known with that one. We understand how much reaction mass it'd take. What payloads would be possible. We have an inkling of how to make some robotic probe navigate a new stellar system.
Rehabilitation? If we define it in a meaningful way, that is for a criminal that is likely to reoffend again in a significant way after being released... can we condition that incarcerated human to have a measurably lower risk of reoffense?
That's voodoo. There are lots of ways to cheat it (just pick the criminals who are unlikely to reoffend and put them in resort prison for a short stint far away from the bad apples). Lots of ways to be blind to the bad outcomes, and overemphasize the good outcomes no one should take credit for.
I've asked many times for someone to cite some credible theory of (criminal/non-criminal) human minds that makes it possible to lower the risk of recidivism... and everyone's sure that there must be. If you don't even have such a theory, how can you engineer a solution? The best that I ever hear is "but Europe!".
I believe people can change. Especially if given the opportunity. Even if, often, they don’t.
You’re essentially saying once a criminal, always a criminal. That’s objectively false, even if it might be a statistically sound bet (I don’t know if it is, but to address the strongest version of your argument.)
How best to go about that is an open question, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying.
I didn't say that I don't believe people can change. You're very confused.
For that matter, I assert that it is definitively provable that some people do change, and likely that the details of their personality and circumstances would demonstrate that this is generalizable to everyone. In short, everyone can change... not just some.
But that they can change is nothing like the idea that because people can change that we know how to rehabilitate.
You're so very confused. The idea that "people can change" is somehow equivalent to you with the idea that "rehabilitation is something science has figured out enough that we can skip straight to the applied science or even engineering phase".
What makes you confused like that? Are you prone to bouts of emotional irrationality? Are there many members of your family that are susceptible to magical thinking?
You say "I believe in lightning". I'm saying "but we don't know how to harness electricity". And we don't. You should stop using phrases like "objectively false" until you're able to think more clearly.
> but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying.
Yes, it actually does mean that. For one, the dangers of random experimentation on a criminal element that we have quite reasonably sequestered away from those they would harm can't even be easily measured.
For another, it is actually unethical to experiment on human beings in this way. Even on prisoners. The "it's worth trying by randomly doing shit and hopefully we'll stumble across something that seems like it will work when it takes decades to determine if someone has spontaneously rehabilitated" sentiment is lunacy.
Figure out how to do it first, and we'll talk.
PS Don't bother, I figured it out a few years ago. At least in principle. The trick is to have non-convicts outnumber the convicts, probably at minimum to a ratio of 12:1. Could be higher. Then we have to screen those correctional officers. And build every convict their own prison that looks too much like a home to make the voting public comfortable. So that we don't get any weird folie à deux issues, each room in that "prison" will need to be surveilled, and the correctional officers rotated out if things start to go off the rails. This would work, but it can't... that's 600,000+ guards in Ohio alone. Heck of a jobs program, until it works so thoroughly that there are no prisoners left and I tank the economy. And all those single-prisoner prisons that I spent a million bucks on each (50,000 of them in Ohio, for the bargain price of $50 billion) that are hidden in all the suburbs and whatnot... what is anyone going to do with those? I actually think about this stuff. It's never been more than a passing sentiment to you.
Yes they do, and even morality can be independent of free will. It just becomes impossible to assert that a Christian God judges some super-natural “You” without Free Will. That’s about all your lose.
By any reasonable method of cataloging Christian deities, there are well over a dozen. Perhaps hundreds, all distinct. Christianity has this annoying habit of failing to (often) speak the name of their deities, so it's difficult to make the distinction sometimes.
But even in fictional narratives where names are not used, it's possible to identify distinct individuals based on their actions, personality, and carefully correlating together various stories. Same here.
The author is a lawyer, which is important to note because a lot of what they say about how "we don't have a race-based system now" seems to be considered exclusively through an explicated, legalistic framing. They say as much by chastising that "it isn't 1930 anymore". This perspective excludes any 2nd- and further-order effects as regards correlations between latent/implicit bias and statistical outcomes for people belonging to certain groups, which is the primary focus and concern of critical studies. By definition critical studies starts where legal studies ends.
It's uniquely grimly funny because "how do disparate impact & outcomes emerge across racial lines in systems that are explicitly written without regards to race" is a pretty complex and interesting question that a lot of scholars have added to the understanding of over the years.
The loosely collected framework formed by those approaches was what used to be called critical race theory, before the right wing moral panic got their hands on it and made it mean something else.
A formal (e.g. legal) system is by definition uncritical, as it poses axioms that are not challenged but simply assumed as true. You can only criticize something that is already formalized, as criticism is inherently a skeptical practice whose explicit aim is to challenge known assumptions.
And yet she is a black lawyer, despite of all the assumed systemic oppression. Maybe she knows more about the actual challenges of black people than the CRT theoreticians?
That it's possible in an oppressive and hateful environment that someone managed to get a job title?
When I was a child, I had multiple field trips to a plantation in Louisiana. We didn't live very far away, so it was a convenient spot to go when our history teachers wanted to take us somewhere. And on the three separate trips I took, from the time I was a first grader to the time I was a junior in high school, not once did we ever visit the slave cabins, nor did the tour guides or teachers ever discuss the living conditions of the slaves or the fact that there were dozens of dead black heads on pikes outside of the entrance after the outcome of a slave rebellion. No, the tour guides talked about the artwork and the owners and the types of crops that grew.
It turns out we've been covering up the sins of our ancestors for generations, and it's part of the reason people like you are so stone-cold ignorant on the issue. Because if you're going to teach history, you should fucking TEACH HISTORY, not the whitewashed version that excludes all the naughty bits that make your ancestors look bad.
I'd hazard a guess that black lady lawyers and CRT theoreticians such as, say, Kimberlé Crenshaw know something about the actual challenges of black people in the USofA and likely teach that and a bit about the history of black law in the USofA.
What with CRT being a university level course and all.
Are you arguing that we should take the word of of, say, black people as being more valid in this debate? Because if so, I'm not at all sure that most black people would vote on this issue the way you seem to suspect they would. The reality is that this is one person's opinion. It's not more valid than mine simply because she's black and I'm small town Wisconsin. Nor is it more valid than the voice of the white liberal. Nor even the voice of the black liberal for that matter.
In short, your bringing up her race, is completely irrelevant to the validity or invalidity of the arguments presented. (Which are pretty much boilerplate by the way. As conservatives, and liberals for that matter, we all really need new material if this is the best we can do.)
You just assume most black people would feel oppressed? And how would you disentangle that opinion from them being taught they are oppressed in school?
Would you say it absolutely doesn't matter how black people feel about it? Wouldn't that make the whole subject somewhat ridiculous?
And of course a black lawyer is a data point against the claims of systemic oppression.
Ah, so we've arrived at the truth: you don't actually understand the concepts being discussed, so you reject them out of hand to avoid contending with your own lack of knowledge in a social space that highly values deep and wide competencies.
I promise you, if you dedicate yourself to good-faith study, you will discover the essence of what people are talking about when they talk about "systemic" forces at play in the world.
Note that I am referring specifically to systemic forces because this encompasses the sum total of all causal influences on all elements of the system writ large. Systemic oppression is merely one half of a dichotomy, the other half being systemic privilege. Every sub-population within a general population can be evaluated along this 1D quantitative axis of "net-oppressed" vs "net-privileged". Some may be exactly balanced at the origin on this axis, but it would be simply absurd to assert that every sub-population is on average net-zero on that scale -- the probability of that happening is "almost surely zero". Ergo, some groups are more oppressed than others. Further, our constructed systems are not so complex that causation is unknowable. The civilization that humanity has built has relatively direct cause-effect relationships, largely due to its artificiality. So it stands to reason that we can determine that a) some groups are more oppressed than others, and b) the reasons for that net-oppression of a given group can be determined as functions of the components of the system they inhabit. Does this help clarify things?
While it's important to remember than no group is a monolith, there seem to be a great number more people of color who disagree with this take than who agree with it.
Turns out, the USDA has a pretty wide gap in approving funding for farmers that can be explained by race. Seems like it may still be an on going issue, or that a history of systemic factors have contributed to it. Either way, we ain't there just yet boss.
I agree, it seems so simple. The more we focus on this stuff the more it makes people adopt it as a worldview, imho. I just don't understand why people want to look at the world this way - and it is something you need to be taught.
> Race struggles were a relic of the past 50+ years ago.
Race struggles were a current event 50 years ago. The Civil Rights Act was signed in 1968 -- 55 years ago -- for example, and it hardly represented the end of racial injustice in the US. (Indeed, it's still an ongoing process in some regards.)
It took roughly a century to go from constitutional amendment to legislative enforcement for equal treatment under the law. In 2023, for political points, state and local leaders are banning critical race theory in schools (even though it’s an academic legal theory).
However one feels about “race”, it’s a current theme, not a relic, politically, economically or legally. And that shouldn’t be at odds with the individual choice to treat others equally.
> In 2023, for political points, state and local leaders are banning critical race theory in schools (even though it’s an academic legal theory).
Critical race theory is a fad among academicians, but it isn't academic in any way. It's a prescriptive worldview about how to interpret social dynamics; it is not a descriptive theory from which one can derive testable hypotheses.
Like any other prescriptive worldview, it has no place being taught as truth in a public school, which is what the opposition is all about.
The obvious answer is because some people have different starting points than others. Thus, even if all rules were changed equally, there wouldn't be equal outcomes.
And consider the Monopoly experiment where some people are given twice the money, still attribute the fact that they win to their decision making and the losers losing to their poorer decision making.
We psychologically will never attribute what we've accomplished to external factors and will never see that those who don't accomplish what we've done may be disadvantaged -- even with the factors are pretty obvious.
The problem is that some people want to treat people equally and not address any wrongdoing. And another group is fine to not treat people equally -- and since there is no one left to address wrongdoing, they can do so with impunity.
In the US, sure, but the rest of the world is in varying states of dealing with long seated prejudices.
The issue I have with the US is that for all the talk of trying to rectify racism everyone seems more intent on "othering" than ever before. By that I mean it spends significant time trying to slot everyone into categories so they can then be treated in some prescribed manner. These categories are not based on the actual needs of individuals, but a persons RGB value. The policies in the US, at the governmental and private level say that people, based on color, are not equal, and some people need more help and others less. It's prejudicial at the core and the whole way of looking at things needs to be rectified.
I would be shocked, shocked to learn that school administrators, principals, superintendents etc are somehow not over-represented in the membership of the lobby group involved. They have a conflict of interest where their jobs are made easier and they are awarded more bonuses every time that educational standards are dropped.
The average principal doesn't make any bonuses, nor do administrators. Some individual districts may award them, but you usually won't find any big money being doled out aside from superintendents, who tend to be obscenely overpaid.
Maybe so, but can you please follow the site guidelines when commenting on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are? You broke them badly here, and we've had to ask you this before:
I make no promises? You guys should consider whether or not your rules end up cutting out what actually might be useful/interesting conversations, even if they're a little spicier that you might like.
If you want to make that argument, you need a better foundation than "Idiots like the author need to shut up forever". That kind of comment simply doesn't belong here.
Whoever wrote this article is either disingenuous or lacks critical thinking skills. For example, it says:
"It also tells kids, and I quote, that institutions “chronically favor white people and disadvantage people of color.”"
The quotation doesn't say that. The quotation is defining institutional racism and saying that one case of it is if institutions create outcomes that chronically favor white people... The fact that this author could jump to that interpretation of that sentence is ridiculous.
