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The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander

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Re: The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander

#41

Post by chmod600 »

Justice is a process.

Processes are important for the simple reason that it's much easier to agree on a process than an outcome.

Processes are generally free of context and confounding factors. Mere mortals aren't capable of juding the entirety of one's life, let alone going back generations. So they simply evaluate the question before them about a particular crime.

Sure there are a few exceptions, like when someone is insane or lacks intent. But those are usually quite narrow.

So justice is following the process, not getting to the heart of a moral issue.

Re: The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander

#42

Post by jschwartzi »

onethought wrote: post #18
solutron wrote: post #17

Evil doesn't have to have remorselessness or have awareness of it's evil to be evil. Ongwen is clearly traumatized. But, he is also the trauma. The spread of death and despair by his hand has to be adjudicated. Life in prison is the most morally just outcome for him, regardless of whatever reformations or personal developments he might make. Some things can't be undone and the consequences have to be lived with, fore…

Is prison to punish? Rehabilitate? Or both? I feel like we could be way more creative in how we treat prisoners in how they “repay their debt”. Someone like Ongwen could probably be very valuable in finding and converting other people away from situations similar to his. Or from helping security forces secure against the kind of tactics they used... I don’t know random thoughts, but we can punish someone and have val…

Even if that were possible, Ongwen may be too damaged to be very effective at such a "punishment." And it would be very cruel to expose him to the same environment which traumatized him enough to make him into a brutal commander.

Re: The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander

#43

Post by s1artibartfast »

akiselev wrote: post #11
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If that is the case, he still needs to be locked away for many years, because someone with that level of brokenness is not safe human society. Or rehabilitated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_(penology) > The effectiveness of Norway's methods is evident as they hold the lowest recidivism rate worldwide at 20% as of December 2014.

I too feel that rehabilitation, not vengeance, should be the goal of the justice system but in this case, I think it's a moot point. This is an individual with the means and clear history of organizing and wielding violent armed groups which (I hypothesize) requires a level of emotional intelligence that justice systems are not equipped to rehabilitate by design. The ones that try to rehabilitate offenders naturally…

I don't think that your last statement is supported. Why isn't rehabilitation possible and why is it impossible that public safety can be ensured?

You seem to assume that intelligent individuals are more difficult to rehabilitate but I see it is just as likely that the opposite the opposite. The burden of demonstrating public safety and rehabilitation should always be on the individual, but I don't see why that is impossible.

Re: The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander

#44

Post by smogcutter »

hntrader wrote: post #27
smogcutter wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But this killer is also very much a slave to their brain in the same way as the tumour individual. I think there’s an element of, ironically, survivorship bias there. We notice psychopathic serial killers because they kill people, and then we say they lack agency like the tumor victim. But the psychopaths who don’t kill people are invisible. We just call them CEOs (jk, but only kind of).

I believe this perspective is appealing because of our current inability to recognize what are the actual factors that drive psychopath A to become a killer and psychopath B to be a CEO. Agency is like the God Of The Gaps at the moment. We don't know what makes A and B differ and we magic that knowledge gap away with "agency". Over time, as we understand more about the brain and psychology, the serial killers who don…

This reminds me of the x files episode where a serial killer asks psychics “why do I do the things that I do?” before he kills them. Peter Boyle answers: “that’s easy, you do the things you do because you’re a homicidal maniac!”

More seriously, going all-in on biological determinism is just as much an article of faith at this point as looking for agency. This is one of the questions of western philosophy and science, let’s not pretend it’s settled or that we’re going to solve it in an hn thread either way.

Also I don’t think this is what you intend, but where the line you’re proposing leads is “phrenology, but with magnets this time so it looks like science.” No thanks, and even if it does turn out to be where we’re going it seems a mite early to take it for granted.

Re: The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander

#45

Post by mannerheim »

onethought wrote: post #18
solutron wrote: post #17

Evil doesn't have to have remorselessness or have awareness of it's evil to be evil. Ongwen is clearly traumatized. But, he is also the trauma. The spread of death and despair by his hand has to be adjudicated. Life in prison is the most morally just outcome for him, regardless of whatever reformations or personal developments he might make. Some things can't be undone and the consequences have to be lived with, fore…

Is prison to punish? Rehabilitate? Or both? I feel like we could be way more creative in how we treat prisoners in how they “repay their debt”. Someone like Ongwen could probably be very valuable in finding and converting other people away from situations similar to his. Or from helping security forces secure against the kind of tactics they used... I don’t know random thoughts, but we can punish someone and have val…

There are traditionally 4-6 purposes of justice. The four most common are deterrence, incapacitation, retribution, rehabilitation, and the other two less common are restoration and denunciation. These purposes are not mutually exclusive, not always possible to achieve (hard to restore dead people to life), and IMO there are valid reasons for all of them, even retribution (although of course it is possible to go to far).

Deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and restoration are pretty self-explanatory, and the reasons for those are clear. Denunciation means crimes are punished in order to send a message that such behaviour is condemned. But is there a good reason for retribution?

The meaning of retribution is that those who have hurt others suffer real consequences. This isn't necessarily something sadistic, as there are a number of reasons why this can be a valid purpose. You want people to have faith in the justice system, to not believe that people are getting off with slaps on the wrist, that mass murderers aren't being pampered, and so on, so that they don't turn to vigilante justice. It could be the case that, e.g., Brock Turner was unlikely to ever sexually assault a woman ever again after three months' jail time. But the perception that he was let off lightly could undermine faith in the justice system.

In a case like this, it may be that his victims need to see that he is punished so that they can have faith in their justice system. Whether or not that is the right call here, I don't know enough to make a judgement. But I don't think one can entirely ignore retribution as a purpose.

Re: The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander

#46

Post by f154hfds »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #38
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Going further, we're all slaves to determinisic or stochastic physics playing out in our brains and environment, and our agency is just a useful fiction. >The justice system should be premised on pragmatic concepts of deterrence, rehabilitation, protecting society, etc, and not on fantasy notions that person A had more agency than person B. Without a concept of agency it is pointless to talk about “justice”. At the…

Morality is not incompatible with free will. Needlessly killing all criminals is unjust because it devalues human life, and the right of individuals to exist. You don't need agency to experience happiness, love, intrigue, or anything else that makes life worth living.

I think the exact opposite is true - morality and free will share a symbiotic relationship [1]. When I find a bug in my code, I don't ascribe a moral judgement to its erroneous output. I fix the problem and make a new program. Applying this to criminal justice, there would no longer be any retributive justice, just deterrence and rehabilitation [2]. While for many this is a foregone conclusion eagerly awaited, not so much for the victims and their families, who now must believe that some cosmic forces crushed them, not the work of an individual. The individual can no longer be blamed for their actions, their circumstances are to be blamed, further and further into the past until it becomes a pointless exercise. Where does that leave the victim who is still there when the perpetrator is gone? We must be intellectually honest and say when there is no culpability for wrongdoing, there cannot be victims either, only unlucky segments of memory randomly corrupted by a faulty program.

[1] https://ethics.org.au/what-is-the-definition-of-free-will-et... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retributive_justice

Re: The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander

#47

Post by vkou »

jschwartzi wrote: post #42
onethought wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is prison to punish? Rehabilitate? Or both? I feel like we could be way more creative in how we treat prisoners in how they “repay their debt”. Someone like Ongwen could probably be very valuable in finding and converting other people away from situations similar to his. Or from helping security forces secure against the kind of tactics they used... I don’t know random thoughts, but we can punish someone and have val…

Even if that were possible, Ongwen may be too damaged to be very effective at such a "punishment." And it would be very cruel to expose him to the same environment which traumatized him enough to make him into a brutal commander.

I have doubts that a Dutch prison is quite the same environment as a child being kidnapped at gunpoint and forced to fight in the LRA.

Re: The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander

#48

Post by wizzwizz4 »

belval wrote: post #16
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If that is the case, he still needs to be locked away for many years, because someone with that level of brokenness is not safe human society. Or rehabilitated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_(penology) > The effectiveness of Norway's methods is evident as they hold the lowest recidivism rate worldwide at 20% as of December 2014.

He is not a felon convicted for illegal possession of a weapon or drug dealing, he's a warlord that killed a lot of people brutally. Presenting rehabilitation as a possible solution here is laughable and almost insulting to the memories of his numerous victims.

I don't understand. Why would it be?

Re: The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander

#49

Post by hntrader »

f154hfds wrote: post #46
s1artibartfast wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Morality is not incompatible with free will. Needlessly killing all criminals is unjust because it devalues human life, and the right of individuals to exist. You don't need agency to experience happiness, love, intrigue, or anything else that makes life worth living.

I think the exact opposite is true - morality and free will share a symbiotic relationship [1]. When I find a bug in my code, I don't ascribe a moral judgement to its erroneous output. I fix the problem and make a new program. Applying this to criminal justice, there would no longer be any retributive justice, just deterrence and rehabilitation [2]. While for many this is a foregone conclusion eagerly awaited, not so…

I don't think there's mutual exclusivity there. The individual can be blamed while also realising that their actions are a result of circumstances/physics/cosmic forces.

If a hurricane (individual) kills a person, it's accurate and fair to blame the hurricane (individual), while simultaneously realising that it's just the laws of physics unfolding and not erroneously attributing a god of the gaps type of agency. Likewise, it's accurate to say that someone who died by a hurricane (individual) is a victim, and that the hurricane (individual) is culpable for the death.

Retributive justice (and certainly other types of justice) can still be argued for even in the absence of free will, under a utilitarian perspective. The absence of free will doesn't imply the absence of utility/qualia/etc.

Families won't accept this of course, because our brains are designed to see agency, seek revenge, monitor debts to see who is not reciprocating, etc, these are just more adaptive heuristics which help us to perceive our social reality in a way that maximises fitness.

Re: The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander

#50

Post by s1artibartfast »

f154hfds wrote: post #46
s1artibartfast wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Morality is not incompatible with free will. Needlessly killing all criminals is unjust because it devalues human life, and the right of individuals to exist. You don't need agency to experience happiness, love, intrigue, or anything else that makes life worth living.

I think the exact opposite is true - morality and free will share a symbiotic relationship [1]. When I find a bug in my code, I don't ascribe a moral judgement to its erroneous output. I fix the problem and make a new program. Applying this to criminal justice, there would no longer be any retributive justice, just deterrence and rehabilitation [2]. While for many this is a foregone conclusion eagerly awaited, not so…

I’m not separating blame from the perpetrators of crimes. I think they should be held accountable. Just because the bug in your program didn’t choose to be faulty, doesn’t mean it isn’t to blame for problem. Similarly, Perpetrators of crimes are a problem. The fact that there are additional factors to blame shouldn’t absolve them. Bad inputs can make a bad person. When a drunk driver kills a pedestrian , is both the drivers fault and cosmic chance. The driver could drove the same road drunk 100 times and the pedestrian could have walked the same road 100 times. The fact that chance is involved doesn’t absolve the driver.
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