Philosophical question

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Almost all of the threads on here are either politics or religion. I throw a philosophical one out there just for fun.

Imagine this scenario. A man commits horrible atrocities with frequency, including murder and rape. This man before he is caught has a bump on the head from which he gets amnesia and does not remember who he is. After the bump on the head he stops commiting these horrible atrocities and does not remember even doing them. Here's the question. He is caught because his amnesia made it so that he stopped covering his tracks because he forgot who he was. Should he be punished for his past misdeeds that he doesn't even remember?

hell yes... amnesia doesn't absolve you of previous crimes... besides, theres the practical application... if it became known that not remembering one's crimes would lead to absolution, then we'd surely see criminals faking amnesia just to get off... which begs another question... how would anyone be sure he's not faking it?

There is a lot to be said about making the legal system rational. Punishment is supposed to be the remedy for committing a crime. Would punishing him make him stop? Execution might be the only remedy - or life imprisonment.

Although it raises a good question, I think the guy should still be punished. Otherwise we are setting a precedent for which anyone can escape justice by faking amnesia.

I would go with the side that amnesia and true personality change is difficult to prove and therefore the best option is to end this person's life for utilitarian reasons. If personality change could be tested and empirically proven to a great extent then I would not kill him simply because there would not seem to be reason to kill this person. Essentially speaking, I am taking the position that human law should seek to be utilitarian, if there is no utility gained from removing this person's life then it should not be done.

I think you and I disagree upon the purposes of human justice. I think that human justice is functional but not necessarily tied to that which is moral, you seem to make a moral claim of well... moral debt. I don't think we can prove morality, and if morality is not provable then can we really use the claim of moral debt?

Why not look at it from the moral standpoint? That's probably trickier so more interesting. If there was a way we actually knew for sure that he wasn't faking it and he behaved differently since the bump on the head would he from a moral standpoint be fully accountable?

The supreme court permitted Georgia to execute a feeble minded man. See http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference ... et=60&s=ne
Someone suffering mental disability from an injury is not all that different. Whether it was just is another story.

Because, nobody can even prove the moral premises that they go off of, even utilitarianism is a false utterance in some ways although at least it attempts to be more moral neutral than other methods. Trying to look at things from a moral standpoint is trickier, but largely because not much can be stated about it, morality is the ultimate sign of our flawed nature, it is unseeable, untouchable, unhearable, unsmellable, and inedible, yet at the same time we all declare a moral reality to the world that is absolute fact. There is no empirical evidence for what one ought to do, as well, the statement that all human beings know X to be a fact is refutable by the human beings who deny and defy X so it is not a matter of logic, axiom, or pure instinct. I see no reason to delve in the faiths of others which are assuredly as or more irrational than my own, and I don't think that any conversation on such is incredibly telling, especially given that people will look at these opinions and preferences as facts with relationships to the world rather than their own delusions.

Nobody can even prove that murder and rape are wrong without using moral premises, from a purely utilitarian standpoint this man may be doing the society a favor by helping to aid an overpopulation crunch, in which case he should be rewarded. Saying that this man did something wrong is a moral statement. The laws that govern are based off of moral premises. This quandary is moral in nature, and can be debated as such. This is not about empirical evidence, this is a philosophical question that is not intended to be definitively answered, it is a hypothetical quandary that will be nigh impossible to answer. That is also what makes it worth asking.

Well, the issue is that from a utilitarian point of view controls over these processes would be seen as necessary. I say that man does not know what is wrong necessarily, he does know his own interests. Saying that this man is to be punished says nothing about absolute morality, only our intentions and our beliefs. The quandary is undeniably moral, however, morality is undeniably beyond knowledge and thus cannot be debated at all. It cannot be definitively answered, and the fact that we will get no closer nor further by asking this question makes it not worth asking. It is worth individual reflection, but asking? No.

Well, some of the people wouldn't even be reflecting on it if I hadn't asked it. That could make it worth asking. Some will put their two cents in, too, which is fine, that's basically the purpose of the thread, to get people thinking.

If he has no recollection of the events, he would be unable to defend himself.

The problem is that, if this argument were successful, what would stop people from faking amnesia in order to escape prosecution? There would, IMO, need to be some means of verifying it. However, I don't know whether such a test is available to psychiatrists or neurologists.

Cheers,

Mark

Most people are not really really going to reflect that deeply or honestly unless there is a way to put their ideas to a test and through a fire. Most people will follow whatever answer they have already basically conceived for problems of this nature. It becomes more of an outwards statement of internal biases, which is not often a source of much good.

Our courts I think work too much with precedent. It should be treated more on by a case by case basis. Nothing would stop them from trying, but is that really wrong?

Let's say the guy had some serious psychological issues that were recorded that disappeared after his bump on the head. Preferably, issues that would be enormously difficult to hide. I'm thinking psychological issues that manifested themselves possibly because of some sort of trauma in his life. After the hypothetical bump on the head those issues were unapparent to the psychiatrists that evaluated him. Would you like to be on that jury?

Can you prove that statement?

Absolutely prove that statement? I cannot absolutely prove most things, however, most people do work within a thought system riddled with bias, and that is logically an element of our nature. Without external forces to create or reveal dissonance then it seems logical that we will always react to data within the interpretations of our current biases. Moral biases seem to be the strongest if we merely look at the world and its workings as we are most likely to call moral biases truths without evidence.