On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 8:45 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
> I think Bruno gave a good definition of 'free will' as unpredictability > (even by oneself). > Bruno's definition? For well over 20 years I have been insisting here and elsewhere that there are only 2 definitions of Free Will that are not gibberish, and they are almost never used: 1) "Free Will" is the inability to predict your own actions even in a stable environment. 2) "Free Will" is a noise made by the mouth. > An extreme case would be the bank manager who robs his own bank because > his wife and children are held hostage. > Very extreme. A case could be made for mitigating punishment if it could be proven that the circumstances that caused him to commit the crime were very unusual and unlikely to be repeated in the future. Unfortunately texting during a movie is not very unusual so I'd throw the book at the guy who murdered a man for doing that. Junk food like Twinkies are not very unusual either, nevertheless the "Twinkie Defense" has allowed people to literally get away with murder. The law is an ass: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinkie_defense#Diminished_capacity > On the other hand the man who murdered for money is obviously more > thoughtful about weighing his options > And thus is less dangerous and at least in my eyes less contemptible than the impulse killer, > and is more likely to be deterred by the prospect of punishment. > Granted. > Imprisoning or executing the first man will prevent him from shooting > other texters, > I'm not at all sure imprisoning him will have that effect because people text in prison, and people escape from prison, and who knows what other trivial thing could send him into a homicidal rage. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
