Criminal Responsibility and Causal Determinism. Moore , University of New South Wales. In analytical jurisprudence, determinism has long been seen as a threat to free will, and free will has been considered necessary for criminal responsibility.
Accordingly, Oliver Wendell Holmes held that if an offender were hereditarily or environmentally determined to offend, then her free will would be reduced, and her responsibility for criminal acts would be correspondingly diminished. In this respect, Holmes followed his father, Dr. Holmes, a physician and man of letters.
Similar theories, such as neuropsychological theories of determinism, continue to influence views on criminal responsibility, although such theories do not imply that it is physically impossible for accused persons to act other than they do. This suggests that some amount of free will is compatible with theories of this kind.
Other environmental factors can have an impact on our future such as areas where there is high unemployment often have poorer school attainment results even with pupils with similar IQ levels.
Psychologists have determined that people can often have compulsions to act in certain ways. They may hear voices that tell them to act in a certain way. There are many explanations for this such as exposure to traumatic experiences as a child. There is said to be a common link between criminals — the majority of criminals struggle with education and have a low reading age. In UK Prisons, the average reading age is that of an 8 year old.
When watching violent movies or games, criminals in the study would react in a violent way and would need to calm down after. It could therefore be argued that certain people who fit these traits are destined to be criminals. This is the theory that a person has no Freewill. Everything is already decided in their lives and they have no choices as to what will happen — even things like who they fall in love with, how many children they will have, what job they will have etc.
Soft Determinism argues that whilst the odds are stacked as to what people will do and how they will behave. We can still break free and make our own choices.
For example — someone who has been brought up in a poverty stricken home with illiterate parents can still break out of this cycle and achieve well at school, get a good job and no longer live in poverty. It will just be much harder for them. The Leopold and Loeb case was a very famous case that has been dubbed the crime of the century. It is the tale of two young men from Chicago who were incredibly wealthy and intelligent.
They believed they were so smart they could execute the perfect crime and not get caught. They kidnapped a young man, Bobby Franks who was a cousin of one of Loeb. The boys were traced down and arrested. They had no real motive for the crime. Leopold was quoted as saying —. Hard determinism sees free will as an illusion and believes that every event and action has a cause. Behaviorists are strong believers in hard determinism. Their most forthright and articulate spokesman has been B.
S he is propelled in this direction by environmental circumstances and a personal history, which makes breaking the law natural and inevitable. For the law-abiding, an accumulation of reinforcers has the opposite effect. Having been rewarded for following rules in the past the individual does so in the future. There is no moral evaluation or even mental calculation involved. All behavior is under stimulus control.
Soft determinism represents a middle ground, people do have a choice, but that choice is constrained by external or internal factors. Soft determinism suggests that some behaviors are more constrained than others and that there is an element of free will in all behavior.
However, a problem with determinism is that it is inconsistent with society's ideas of responsibility and self control that form the basis of our moral and legal obligations. Free will is the idea that we are able to have some choice in how we act and assumes that we are free to choose our behavior, in other words we are self determined. For example, people can make a free choice as to whether to commit a crime or not unless they are a child or they are insane.
This does not mean that behavior is random, but we are free from the causal influences of past events. According to freewill a person is responsible for their own actions.
One of the main assumptions of the humanistic approach is that humans have free will; not all behavior is determined. Personal agency is the humanistic term for the exercise of free will. Personal agency refers to the choices we make in life, the paths we go down and their consequences. For humanistic psychologists such as Maslow and Rogers freedom is not only possible but also necessary if we are to become fully functional human beings.
Both see self-actualisation as a unique human need and form of motivation setting us apart from all other species. There is thus a line to be drawn between the natural and the social sciences. To take a simple example, when two chemicals react there is no sense in imagining that they could behave in any other way than the way they do. However when two people come together they could agree, fall out, come to a compromise, start a fight and so on.
The permutations are endless and in order to understand their behavior we would need to understand what each party to the relationship chooses to do. However there is also an intermediate position that goes back to the psychoanalytic psychology of Sigmund Freud.
At first sight Freud seems to be a supporter of determinism in that he argued that our actions and our thoughts are controlled by the unconscious. However the very goal of therapy was to help the patient overcome that force.
Indeed without the belief that people can change therapy itself makes no sense. This insight has been taken up by several neo-Freudians. One of the most influential has been Erich Fromm
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