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Nice post. As a defense investigator, I collect letters of support for Bad Crimes clients, and it certainly gives me a fonder vision of humanity than the rest of the process. Unfortunately, the courts and prosecutors here usually don't weigh them much at all at sentencing - but they are very psychologically beneficial to defendants and a bright spot for me.

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4dEdited

"I think I’ve finally realized what’s going on. A lot of people think that to forgive X is to excuse X- is to come to see X as is in some way ‘defensible’ even if it is not right. But to think this is to miss the whole point of mercy in the deepest sense to be merciful is not to excuse, it is to refuse to exclude utterly, despite the presence of the inexcusable."

I often wondered why people are so adamant sometimes to sentence someone to death - thinking of them as wanting to exclude the person from life makes a lot of sense ~intuitively~ to me.

And I think that's a really good conception of mercy.

I also think some think death is more punishing than others - eg someone who thinks "This person should be /really punished/!" and thinks "Death is really punishing" may think, "We ought to sentence this person to death!" while someone else who thinks "This person should be /really punished/!" but thinks "Death is not that punishing, but life in prison is really punishing", may think, "We ought not to sentence someone to death!" And they want different outcomes, but behind that they both agree that the offender should be really punished.

This goes for the social death penalty too; some may see it as really punishing (I do, personally), and some may see it as not really punishing.

Personally, I think that we should punish people as little as people.

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> I sometimes wonder about radical methods for altering a person’s character to make them more benificient- future drugs, neurosurgeries, etc. Most people, when I tell them this, suggest it is a dystopian nightmare. I guess in a way it is, but it seems like it might be less nightmarish than our current system where a surprisingly long list of misdeeds generally means someone will never be welcome in the human community again.

I guess my intuition there is that the sort of thing which would so radically change someone's character make them, in ethical terms, a different person. Cut the murderous capacity out of a murderer and you've sentenced them to the death penalty, albeit with a consolation prize that they will be "reincarnated" as a new, non-murderous individual.

Of course, you could imagine kinds of interventions — preferably reversible — that don't alter the subject's consciousness but, for example, place upon them an artifical block against taking violent *action*. That's got an ick factor too but I could be convinced of its ethical validity. The distinction seems important, though. Don't change values, don't change desires, don't change impulses. That is murder, albeit piecemeal.

In any case I have to hope that by the time we have that sort of fine-grained technology we'd be post-Singularity and have technology that safeguards the innocent against criminal violence without cutting into individuals' autonomy at all. I'll cheerily accept an unmodified knife-murderer into my company if I have a digital body that's immune to knives.

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"In extreme cases, this manifests itself in so-called prison abolitionists who support just killing anyone who has done something over a certain threshold of wickedness. I worry that prison abolitionism acts as a mental block that stops people from thinking about the hard issues of justice, and we see this when confronted with obvious wrongdoing, the abolitionist simply reverts to maximal rage."

Steelmanning might serve you here: why aside from hurt feelings might, ah, maximal deterrence, say, be employed?

If you agree that the reasons for punishment include deterrence, rehabilitation, and restoration - setting aside incapacitation and retribution as wrong - fines seem saner than imprisonment. Rehabilitation, where applicable, seems good. Where money and therapy don't apply, I'd prefer corporeal punishment to prison. Where that too fails, and the cost to society is too great, killing seems less cruel than life imprisonment, in the same way that hunting seems less cruel than factory farming.

Soft Lex Talionis provides a sanity check here: if the considered punishment is worse than that, keep considering.

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