Right. Similarly if regular people don’t usually murder when drunk and YOU have neurological faults that make you drunkenly homicidal, see what I mean. It’s just like the law thing. It’s one thing if the law is simple and clear and well known, it’s another if you’re just helping out a friend by carrying a few live crayfish through customs or an endangered species.
The legal judgements are nonsense and unjust, the penalties are imposed for societal convenience.
I’m not actually sure what any of this has discussion sub-branch has to do with free will and moral responsibility? It seems to have gone off on a tangent about legal minutiae as opposed to whether moral responsibility is compatible with determinism. But I guess topic drift happens.
It may happen to be true that in some specific case, with much better medical technology, it could be proven that a specific person had neurological differences that meant that they would have no hesitation in murdering when drunk even when they would never do so while sober, and that it wasn’t known that this could be possible.
In this case sure, moral responsibility for this specific act seems to be reduced, apart from the general responsibility due to getting drunk knowing that getting drunk does impair judgement (including moral judgement). But absolutely they should be held very strongly responsible if they ever willingly get drunk knowing this, even if they don’t commit murder on that occasion!
This holds regardless of whether the world is deterministic or not.
Right. Similarly if regular people don’t usually murder when drunk and YOU have neurological faults that make you drunkenly homicidal, see what I mean. It’s just like the law thing. It’s one thing if the law is simple and clear and well known, it’s another if you’re just helping out a friend by carrying a few live crayfish through customs or an endangered species.
The legal judgements are nonsense and unjust, the penalties are imposed for societal convenience.
I’m not actually sure what any of this has discussion sub-branch has to do with free will and moral responsibility? It seems to have gone off on a tangent about legal minutiae as opposed to whether moral responsibility is compatible with determinism. But I guess topic drift happens.
It may happen to be true that in some specific case, with much better medical technology, it could be proven that a specific person had neurological differences that meant that they would have no hesitation in murdering when drunk even when they would never do so while sober, and that it wasn’t known that this could be possible.
In this case sure, moral responsibility for this specific act seems to be reduced, apart from the general responsibility due to getting drunk knowing that getting drunk does impair judgement (including moral judgement). But absolutely they should be held very strongly responsible if they ever willingly get drunk knowing this, even if they don’t commit murder on that occasion!
This holds regardless of whether the world is deterministic or not.