Choice and Blame

This forum made possible through the generous support of SDN members, donors, and sponsors. Thank you.

Craigz

Full Member
10+ Year Member
Joined
Feb 28, 2013
Messages
15
Reaction score
2
Violence, rape, harassment, war, invasion, terror, etc, do they always involve a victim and a perpetrator? Often times it seems we blame one party 100%, saying they had a choice but they decided to commit a certain crime. So the other side is necessarily seen as 100% victim. Any explanation as to why the crime was committed or any environmental or personal reason advanced are seen as "blaming the victim" and not "explanation" but "justification." Something seems wrong about this. Because in my view sometimes more than one person plays a role in contributing to a bad situation. Sometimes the victim is also a perpetrator of another crime and the perpetrator also a victim of another crime.

But the way the legal system works does not seem to be based on knowledge of how human beings function and how the brain works. Unlike psychiatry and psychology where one tries to not blame the person, and instead explain problems in terms of one's level of neurotransmitter or various psychodynamics, the legal system has no problem blaming people. The legal system decides that someone is to blame because the person had a choice. I agree that 99% of people in 99% of situations have a meaningful choice. But the quality of one's choice is not the same as another's. A traumatized and extremely impulsive starving person who steals a loaf of bread has not committed the same crime as a highly self disciplined person who steals a load of bread despite not being hungry at all. I would like it if the justice system would make decisions about one's punishment based on their biological and psychological makeup.
 
Violence, rape, harassment, war, invasion, terror, etc, do they always involve a victim and a perpetrator? Often times it seems we blame one party 100%, saying they had a choice but they decided to commit a certain crime. So the other side is necessarily seen as 100% victim. Any explanation as to why the crime was committed or any environmental or personal reason advanced are seen as "blaming the victim" and not "explanation" but "justification." Something seems wrong about this. Because in my view sometimes more than one person plays a role in contributing to a bad situation. Sometimes the victim is also a perpetrator of another crime and the perpetrator also a victim of another crime.

But the way the legal system works does not seem to be based on knowledge of how human beings function and how the brain works. Unlike psychiatry and psychology where one tries to not blame the person, and instead explain problems in terms of one's level of neurotransmitter or various psychodynamics, the legal system has no problem blaming people. The legal system decides that someone is to blame because the person had a choice. I agree that 99% of people in 99% of situations have a meaningful choice. But the quality of one's choice is not the same as another's. A traumatized and extremely impulsive starving person who steals a loaf of bread has not committed the same crime as a highly self disciplined person who steals a load of bread despite not being hungry at all. I would like it if the justice system would make decisions about one's punishment based on their biological and psychological makeup.

They actually technically did both commit the same crime, although the mitigating factors may be different. This is why the legal system at least attempts to take said mitigating factors into account, particularly with respect to sentencing. Although yes, the legal and mental health views on things can often be quite disparate, at times necessarily so.

As for making sentencing-based decisions based on biology, I'd say we don't yet know enough about that to be consistently informing decisions. Psych components often are taken into account during sentencing, and sometimes also during the pre-trial and trial phases (e.g., incompetent to stand trial, NGBRI).
 
Violence, rape, harassment, war, invasion, terror, etc, do they always involve a victim and a perpetrator? Often times it seems we blame one party 100%, saying they had a choice but they decided to commit a certain crime. So the other side is necessarily seen as 100% victim. Any explanation as to why the crime was committed or any environmental or personal reason advanced are seen as "blaming the victim" and not "explanation" but "justification." Something seems wrong about this. Because in my view sometimes more than one person plays a role in contributing to a bad situation. Sometimes the victim is also a perpetrator of another crime and the perpetrator also a victim of another crime.

So how would a rape victim be the perpetrator of another crime? I'm not getting this logic at all......certainly not in this instance....
 
So how would a rape victim be the perpetrator of another crime? I'm not getting this logic at all......certainly not in this instance....

Think of cases of rape as revenge, for either actual or perceived injustice and crime committed by one party against the other, at a previous time.
 
War is tricky... history is written by the winners and that influences how blame is apportioned. There is also the problem of how to apportion blame between the leaders of a country and people. For example, Hitler can easily be blamed for the European portion of WWII. How much blame do the German people bear? One can say they voted for Hitler/Nazis, but these weren't exactly fair elections. The Treaty of Versailles and poor treatment of Germans after WWI is a mitigating factor.

I wonder how Sept 11, 2001 will be viewed 200 years from now- probably a lot differently if a global muslim caliphate is established than if there is a Christian resurgence.
 
Think of cases of rape as revenge, for either actual or perceived injustice and crime committed by one party against the other, at a previous time.

The OPs thinking wouldn't just codify a mitigating factor....one that could be presented anyway if one was foolish enough. What is being asked for in practice is the creation of a new right....the right to behave in a way towards another person that violates that persons rights.

It's axiomatic that that can't happen. A new right that legitimizes rape....I don't think so...back to the drawing board with that one.....
 
Ibid, nobody is legitimizing rape. Rape is a crime, it's about overpowering and invading another's physical boundaries. I'm just thinking through the issue of choice and assigning of blame in presence of other factors and whether the quality of choice one has makes a difference. I have no training in law and I don't know if the law is informed by psychological and psychiatric findings but I've found myself more and more interested in issue of choice, responsibility, and blame, recently. And whether mitigating factors do influence at all how much someone is to blame. And whether anything the victimized agent did or did not do have any influence. Compare this to a car accident and an officer trying to see how it happened. While one side my be held primarily responsible, sometimes the other side may also bare some responsibility. Secondly, I'm also interested in whether people are more likely to blamed for what they don't do vs what they do...do. Lol. I imagine, at least for doctors, abstaining from harm takes precedence. Any article or book recommendations by anyone are appreciated.

War is tricky... history is written by the winners and that influences how blame is apportioned. There is also the problem of how to apportion blame between the leaders of a country and people. For example, Hitler can easily be blamed for the European portion of WWII. How much blame do the German people bear? One can say they voted for Hitler/Nazis, but these weren't exactly fair elections. The Treaty of Versailles and poor treatment of Germans after WWI is a mitigating factor.

I wonder how Sept 11, 2001 will be viewed 200 years from now- probably a lot differently if a global muslim caliphate is established than if there is a Christian resurgence.

Yeah, thank you for your reply, I agree with most of what you're saying here. At the moment when something terrible happens, views can be much more black and white. The German/Jewish conflict and the Israeli/Palestinian issues, however, often continue to invite some of the most black and white kind of intellectual assessments, even from people who are typically very adept at considering all the angles and all the potential contributing factors. But not when it comes to this topic, here it's one side and one side only, and how dare we speak of these mitigating factors or simply pose questions, whose side are we on, the poor victim or the irrational monstrous heartless killers?!
 
There's a big difference between saying a victim shares some blame/responsibility versus just saying the victim did things that may have influenced what happened.

Okay, so here's a question, how is this decided exactly? I'm interested in psychological/psychiatrist/philosophical basis for this distinction, not the legal ones. Like what does it mean to say someone is at fault, someone is responsible for something, and if there are many agents to contributed to a bad situation, if there are many factors, how do you decide? I mean in the army, the excuse is "I was following orders" but that does not work in real life. It's the person who committed an action, that's where the fault seems to lie.

I know that agents of politics, religion, and law, have little problem assigning blame quickly and exacting punishment, but I've noticed that psychiatry/psychology have difficulty with this. You commit a sin, you're a sinner, you commit a crime, you're a criminal. But in this field, there seems to be a separation between doing something bad and "being" a bad person. Yet at the end of the day, it is the whole person that is going to be held fully responsible for something, spend time in prison, get fined, whatever.

I'm not talking about the insanity defense specifically, but the idea that psychiatry/psychology seems more understanding and compassionate towards the person and less likely to assign as much blame as these other institutions (psychiatry probably does respect religious laying of blame at all anyways). Yet psychiatry also works with the legal system, so how does this work in practice? Does psychiatry adapt itself to the justice system way of attributing blame and fault, or is the justice system using psychiatric research to decide intention and blame and so forth?

Sorry I'm all over the place, this topic excites me a lot and I know very little about it.
 
Secondly, I'm also interested in whether people are more likely to blamed for what they don't do vs what they do...do. Lol.

Well, in some cases I think the reverse is true...consider....some people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia do well without long term medication and others don't. It's impossible to know in advance who belongs to which group. That being so it would be just as logical not to take medication and see how that goes as take it and see how it goes....given the risk profile of the medication.

In practice EVERYONE gets put on drugs long term. A big part of the reason is that in the event of an adverse outcome the doctor is able to defend an action, a prescription, where as an inaction would not be so easy to defend even if it was just as reasonable or even better course of inaction.

You can see how patients are the losers here but thats another conversation.

Just how I see it in my jaundiced world...
 
Interesting thoughts. I think the concepts of "blame" and the assumption of free will are not very scientific, and more for the lay person. Most of the time, they are the easy way out to explain a specific action or situation and avoid the task of a more nuanced explanation. I tend to think that assuming someone has a free will (and thus deserving punishment and blame) is merely our inability to understand and explain how the situation arose in the first place.

Maybe the above is wrong as clearly the science of free will and personal agency is weak, but what I think is most certainly true is that we do overestimate free will. Coming to the relationship with the legal system, I believe it should have an evidence-based approach with less emphasis on punishment and more on security and prevention.
 
Ideally, the justice system would use the expertise of psychiatrists/ psychologist to help educate and inform the courts on issues of mental illness that might have affected a defendant and his behavior. The expert does not tell the court what to decide - they don't dole out blameworthiness or lack of it, but might shed light on circumstances and nuances of the defendant's mental illness, psychological, cultural, social factors that contributed to the defendant's behavior. In light of what the expert's opinion is, the judge or jury might decide, for example, based on that evidence that even it's clear the defendant committed the crime, he should receive a different / lesser sentence based on more of a rehabilitative model than a punishment based one.
 
Top