Re: [asa] Law, Mind, Free Will

Merv, the interesting thing is that the trend in scholarship that deals with
public affairs, certainly in legal scholarship, is towards seeing this view
of humanity as scientifically determined. It's a bit too easy to
hermetically seal off methodological naturalism from metaphysical naturalism
when we talk in-house about ID. The reality in the social sciences and law
is that the methodology is informed by a metaphysic.

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 9:59 PM, <mrb22667@kansas.net> wrote:

> Maybe Lewis' musings on this are out-of-date as well, but this all reminds
> me of
> his "Abolition of Man" --the indignity (inhumanity) of anyone being denied
> the
> human right to actually be *responsible* for their actions. Lewis paints
> Orwellian visions of "rehabilitation centers" from which unfortunate
> parties
> (future Christians?) will only emerge after they have been relieved of any
> offending sensibilities as determined by the controlling elites of the day.
>
> I am glad that such questions are mostly safely beyond the reach of
> science, and
> I hope not too many others in power think the same way as your colleague
> does,
> David.
>
> --Merv
>
> Quoting George Murphy <GMURPHY10@neo.rr.com>:
>
> > I thought B.F. Skinner was dead. He had some slight excuse for believing
> in
> > Laplacian determinism since quantum theory hadn't had much of an impact
> > beyond physics when he was being educated & chaos theory had not yet been
> > invented. Nowadays talking so casually about determinism is like
> believing
> > in phlogiston.
> >
> > & that's only for starters.
> >
> > Shalom
> > George
> > http://home.neo.rr.com/scitheologyglm
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: David Opderbeck
> > To: ASA
> > Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2008 3:39 PM
> > Subject: [asa] Law, Mind, Free Will
> >
> >
> > We had a fascinating talk at the law school today by a lawyer who is a
> > behavioural psychologist. His perspective was that we should no longer
> > include any aspects of "punishment" in criminal law because the notion of
> > "mens rea" -- that an intentional mental state is required for an act to
> be
> > "criminal" -- is unsound. Our mental states, he argued, arise from
> > deterministic processes. "Mind" and "will" are emergent properties but
> they
> > exert no independent downward causation. Therefore, it makes no sense to
> > "punish" someone for having "bad intent". The only thing the criminal
> > justice system should focus on is behavioural modification that will
> prevent
> > recidivism.
> >
> > In a conversation after that talk, I asked him if most people in his
> field
> > take the assumption that there is no independent human "mind" as a
> > methodological or a metaphysical limitation. He said this is the
> > metaphysical view of most people in his field.
> >
> > Here is a concrete example, outside our in-house debates about ID, in
> which
> > methodological naturalism has important, and in my view terrible, social
> > consequences. We cannot really say that a criminal act -- say, hitting
> an
> > old lady with a shovel (an example he used) -- is an "evil" or "wrong"
> act
> > that a system of justice should inherently condemn. All we can say is
> that
> > hitting old ladies with shovels has some undesirable social consequences
> that
> > the criminal justice system might be able to mitigate through behavioural
> > engineering. In fact, this isn't simply "methodological" naturalism,
> it's a
> > metaphysical judgment about the nature of "justice."
> >
> > --
> > David W. Opderbeck
> > Associate Professor of Law
> > Seton Hall University Law School
> > Gibbons Institute of Law, Science & Technology
> >
>
>
>
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>

-- 
David W. Opderbeck
Associate Professor of Law
Seton Hall University Law School
Gibbons Institute of Law, Science & Technology
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