Determinism and Law

Laws and penalties are in place to condition us to act a certain way, if one doesn’t act that certain way anyways because other conditions have determined them not to, then they are determined to face the penalties. Them having to face the penalties is designed to reinforce and strengthen the stimuli to increase the conditioning effectiveness of these laws for others. When a person is found guilty, they are guilty of breaking a law in which they had no choice but to break (no free-will). The real failure is on the deterrence systems part as the conditions set in place didn’t work. However, even the systems failure was determined, so it can’t be blamed either. However, the result is that when the law punishes someone, the person being punished is just collateral damage in a cause that has a greater agenda then just the individual.

Take one who has murdered another. In a deterministic environment, the murderer didn’t choose to think those thoughts nor choose to act on them. The thoughts were determined by the conditions of his environment, and the determined thoughts determined his actions. “He” is just the product of his biology’s reaction to his accumulated experiences with his environment. We can’t blame him for being determined to that course. What we are in effect doing with laws and consequences is conditioning people to behave in a way we have deemed appropriate. If they act against the conditions we’ve set forth anyways, we know that there were conditions greater then the ones we’ve put in place that caused that individual to behave the way they did. By making them faces the consequences we strengthen the effect of the conditions we’ve put in place as it serves as a model for others and that individual for future incidents. But was he really to blame, probably not.

This is how laws function from a determinist point of view. However, as you can see in court, People are held responsible for their actions as though they had free-will, as if they had a choice. Some people are thought to be bad people, while others are thought to be good or ordinary people who simply carried out “bad” actions. Carry out too many “bad” or “very bad” actions (”bad” as determined by society) and you may be considered a entirely “bad person.” Because, you are thought to of had control, had free will to choose to be good or bad.

Where from a deterministic point of view, there are no good or bad people or good or bad actions, just actions and reactions, no value. Just as your being came to exist as determined by the conditions of the environment, your action are determined by the conditions of the environment. Everything moved by cause and effect. Not by some mysterious, uninfluenced, uncaused, personally controlled free-will.

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