Isn’t “a Catholic lay priest” how you’d best describe the person, in colloquial terms, to a readership that wasn’t familiar with the definition of catechist?
No, I'd define the term. That's not hard to do - especially if you're willing, as the article is, to spot the reader knowledge of the difference between laity and ordination.
To be clear, I'm not OP, and I don't judge the quality of the article on this basis. It's commonplace to see a journalist do sloppy work, especially in parts of an article less critical to its thesis. But the article already defines the term 'catechist', albeit incorrectly. I don't think it's unreasonable to consider that the same trouble should go toward getting it right.
That's not a comparable example. There's a lot more to the priesthood than teaching the catechism - Mass and most sacraments, for example, I believe save only viaticum - and "lay priest" is oxymoronic in any case. To someone knowledgeable in the faith, it sounds like the writer is trying to say "deacon", which would still be wrong anyway, and missing nonetheless; to someone lacking such knowledge, it confers an entirely false impression.
As I said, I think OP makes too much of the phrase, but I agree it's entirely risible.
We either view Ongwen as an morally culpable human who is capable of making moral choices (certainly by the time he reached adulthood) and hold him responsible for those choices, and likely lock him away for many, many years as punishment for the horrible choices he made.
The other way is that we view him as so broken by his childhood trauma that he has had no moral capacity, even in his adulthood. If that is the case, he still needs to be locked away for many years, because someone with that level of brokenness is not safe human society.
I too feel that rehabilitation, not vengeance, should be the goal of the justice system but in this case, I think it's a moot point. This is an individual with the means and clear history of organizing and wielding violent armed groups which (I hypothesize) requires a level of emotional intelligence that justice systems are not equipped to rehabilitate by design. The ones that try to rehabilitate offenders naturally err towards giving people the benefit of the doubt in order to make the process fairer for the falsely accused which is very easily exploitable, especially for the well resourced.
I think this individual presents a clear cut case where public safety is more important than the individual's right to rehabilitation post-conviction, in a way that even the worst civilian criminals like serial killers do not. There is just no way to reintegrate him to like a POW of an opposing nation in war or a rebel soldier who joined a movement - he was a primary instigator in the conflict and his enemy was the system he'd be rehabilitated into.
I don't think that your last statement is supported.
Why isn't rehabilitation possible and why is it impossible that public safety can be ensured?
You seem to assume that intelligent individuals are more difficult to rehabilitate but I see it is just as likely that the opposite the opposite. The burden of demonstrating public safety and rehabilitation should always be on the individual, but I don't see why that is impossible.
People in Norway rarely grow up in totally deprived, violent conditions. Maybe they respond to rehabilitation efforts better, in the same way that a healthy person exhibits better wound healing than someone with diabetes 2nd type.
One could make a practical experiment by dumping an assortment of, for example, Islamic State executioners into Norwegian prisons and watching how many of them return to their old habits, but Norwegians wouldn't probably want to try that.
how much of that is due to basic social safety net?
on the creek behind my workshop, thieves were running stolen copper. they would use boats to come up into businesses storage yards from the SF bay, then dump the copper in the creek. wait until they had a buy lines up and pull it up at their leisure.
they were caught eventually. 5 years later and out on parole. and guess where they came first - back to the creek. no other way of making a living, no basic support.
i think criminality becomes very different when its just a lifestyle choice and not the only way to provide for basic human needs.
sure, focus on rehabilitation. but it doesn't matter if they throw you back on the street when you're out.
He is not a felon convicted for illegal possession of a weapon or drug dealing, he's a warlord that killed a lot of people brutally. Presenting rehabilitation as a possible solution here is laughable and almost insulting to the memories of his numerous victims.
The concept of rehabilitation makes plenty of sense when everyone agrees that we live in a society of inequalities and that everyone has various privileges which have a real impact on their financial situation. Someone that is poor might resort to stealing or even violence because the situation in which he evolves demands it to survive. I am completely on board with that and it makes sense.
This man is a war criminal that that was directly and indirectly involved in murder and rapes. Worse, he actively enabled that behavior in his organization.
Now in an exercise in empathy, put yourself in the shoe of someone who saw his entire family be massacred. You don't understand why theymight find it insulting to their suffering that this man is eventually allowed to walk free.
To be clear you can disagree, but I really doubt that you don't understand.
There's a sort of disconnect going on in our sense of justice between gaining explanatory power to describe why a person did something, and that person's culpability. We seem to think if we can understand why they behaved in such a way (for instance, they were victims themselves, they had a mental disorder, etc.) they must merit compassion. The converse is perhaps more troublesome: if we can't understand how someone could have done that thing, it is somehow more heinous.
My view is that this dynamic in our collective compassion does not help us accomplish justice. It seems that to pursue justice we must believe in agency of the individual. Agency to, no matter what their circumstances, make the right choices. As soon as we begin to weigh our explanatory power over individual agency we lose justice. Am I happy this man met justice? No, it's deeply sad and points to an irrevocable brokenness in humankind. Was it deserved? Yes. It was.
I think the short summary is we are coming to understand circumstances where an individual has lost their agency. In which cases the nature of justice changes.
if we can't understand how someone could have done that thing...
If we are not aware of a reason they did not posses agency, then we must assume they still had it.
The big problem with this is that our recognition that there's extenuating circumstances (e.g a brain tumour in the prefrontal cortex) says more about our capacity to recognise such situations than it does about actual differences in agency between individuals.
For example, we might say that a serial killer who was born into a life of wealth and advantage and has no macroscopic brain damage has more agency than the individual with a large brain tumour. But this killer is also very much a slave to their brain in the same way as the tumour individual. They were gifted with psychopathy and an inability to feel remorse, which will undoubtedly come down to concrete brain states that differ in a material respect to non-psychopaths. Just because we can't see any obvious macroscopic markers of this says more about our knowledge limitations than it does about relative levels of agency.
Going further, we're all slaves to determinisic or stochastic physics playing out in our brains and environment, and our agency is just a useful fiction.
The justice system should be premised on pragmatic concepts of deterrence, rehabilitation, protecting society, etc, and not on fantasy notions that person A had more agency than person B.
This assumes you define a person as a constant irrespective of everything else. In effect an 8 year olds must therefore be judged as harshly as anyone else.
It’s a consistent standpoint, but justice isn’t about punishment. It’s a belief that the world despite all evidence to the contrary should be fair. As such people’s internal thought process is inherently part of the judgement process, the same action with different causes is judged differently.
You’re for example allowed to break some rules in an emergency therefore belief that something is an emergency is relevant. Punching someone doing a jump scare because you think their a threat is perfectly legal.
I believe circumstance should be taken into account, but not for the purposes of assigning agency, which is a fantasy concept.
It should inform the probability of recidivism, the chances that rehabilitation will work, etc, and therefore inform what type and duration of sentence/treatment is appropriate for a given case.
To your example, belief that something is an emergency means that P(recidivism) is effectively the same as if they hadn't committed the action, which is the real reason why there shouldn't be any sentence given to that individual.
> Going further, we're all slaves to determinisic or stochastic physics playing out in our brains and environment, and our agency is just a useful fiction.
>The justice system should be premised on pragmatic concepts of deterrence, rehabilitation, protecting society, etc, and not on fantasy notions that person A had more agency than person B.
Without a concept of agency it is pointless to talk about “justice”. At the very least, by advocating a notion of justice, you are saying that members of society as a whole have agency to implement that concept of justice.
If we all have no agency, how is a feeling that we should immediately execute all criminals unjust?
Needlessly killing all criminals is unjust because it devalues human life, and the right of individuals to exist.
You don't need agency to experience happiness, love, intrigue, or anything else that makes life worth living.
I think the exact opposite is true - morality and free will share a symbiotic relationship [1]. When I find a bug in my code, I don't ascribe a moral judgement to its erroneous output. I fix the problem and make a new program. Applying this to criminal justice, there would no longer be any retributive justice, just deterrence and rehabilitation [2]. While for many this is a foregone conclusion eagerly awaited, not so much for the victims and their families, who now must believe that some cosmic forces crushed them, not the work of an individual. The individual can no longer be blamed for their actions, their circumstances are to be blamed, further and further into the past until it becomes a pointless exercise. Where does that leave the victim who is still there when the perpetrator is gone? We must be intellectually honest and say when there is no culpability for wrongdoing, there cannot be victims either, only unlucky segments of memory randomly corrupted by a faulty program.
I don't think there's mutual exclusivity there. The individual can be blamed while also realising that their actions are a result of circumstances/physics/cosmic forces.
If a hurricane (individual) kills a person, it's accurate and fair to blame the hurricane (individual), while simultaneously realising that it's just the laws of physics unfolding and not erroneously attributing a god of the gaps type of agency. Likewise, it's accurate to say that someone who died by a hurricane (individual) is a victim, and that the hurricane (individual) is culpable for the death.
Retributive justice (and certainly other types of justice) can still be argued for even in the absence of free will, under a utilitarian perspective. The absence of free will doesn't imply the absence of utility/qualia/etc.
Families won't accept this of course, because our brains are designed to see agency, seek revenge, monitor debts to see who is not reciprocating, etc, these are just more adaptive heuristics which help us to perceive our social reality in a way that maximises fitness.
I’m not separating blame from the perpetrators of crimes. I think they should be held accountable. Just because the bug in your program didn’t choose to be faulty, doesn’t mean it isn’t to blame for problem. Similarly, Perpetrators of crimes are a problem. The fact that there are additional factors to blame shouldn’t absolve them. Bad inputs can make a bad person. When a drunk driver kills a pedestrian , is both the drivers fault and cosmic chance. The driver could drove the same road drunk 100 times and the pedestrian could have walked the same road 100 times. The fact that chance is involved doesn’t absolve the driver.
> But this killer is also very much a slave to their brain in the same way as the tumour individual.
I think there’s an element of, ironically, survivorship bias there. We notice psychopathic serial killers because they kill people, and then we say they lack agency like the tumor victim. But the psychopaths who don’t kill people are invisible. We just call them CEOs (jk, but only kind of).
I believe this perspective is appealing because of our current inability to recognize what are the actual factors that drive psychopath A to become a killer and psychopath B to be a CEO.
Agency is like the God Of The Gaps at the moment. We don't know what makes A and B differ and we magic that knowledge gap away with "agency".
Over time, as we understand more about the brain and psychology, the serial killers who don't have any macroscopic impairments are going to look very much like the ones that do. And the psychopaths that become killers are going to look very different to those that become CEOs (either brain and/or environment).
Only then, we will be able to point our fingers towards the precise causal pathway at play (genetics+environment). Until then, the best we can do is recognize that such a pathway exists, which the individual was gifted at birth, even though we're ignorant of the specifics.
This reminds me of the x files episode where a serial killer asks psychics “why do I do the things that I do?” before he kills them. Peter Boyle answers: “that’s easy, you do the things you do because you’re a homicidal maniac!”
More seriously, going all-in on biological determinism is just as much an article of faith at this point as looking for agency. This is one of the questions of western philosophy and science, let’s not pretend it’s settled or that we’re going to solve it in an hn thread either way.
Also I don’t think this is what you intend, but where the line you’re proposing leads is “phrenology, but with magnets this time so it looks like science.” No thanks, and even if it does turn out to be where we’re going it seems a mite early to take it for granted.
I think this is conditional, not universal. If someone did a crime for greed, or because they are a "bad person" who is seemingly rational but simply enjoys hurting people, I think you'll find that most people are not sympathetic.
He did not take prior offers of amnesty, that went back to 2000, and only surrendered when his position in the LRA became untenable.
This seems enough to condemn him. It's a complicated issue, which is why blanket amnesty gets offered in these kinds of situations - to people who want to re-integrate back into society. He did not do so until he had no other choice.
The split personality disorder is a beautiful story, that fails to explain why he didn't surrender at any point in the preceding two decades. If we were to suppose he was not culpable for his actions during his Dominic B states, Dominic A must surely be culpable for not extracting himself from a situation where Dominic B would keep on committing his atrocities.
Evil doesn't have to have remorselessness or have awareness of it's evil to be evil. Ongwen is clearly traumatized. But, he is also the trauma. The spread of death and despair by his hand has to be adjudicated. Life in prison is the most morally just outcome for him, regardless of whatever reformations or personal developments he might make. Some things can't be undone and the consequences have to be lived with, forever. Like, he could become an international voice for reforming child soldiers, educating policy makers, and literally every good thing he could do with his experience. Yet, he should still be in prison. Forever.
I feel like we could be way more creative in how we treat prisoners in how they “repay their debt”. Someone like Ongwen could probably be very valuable in finding and converting other people away from situations similar to his. Or from helping security forces secure against the kind of tactics they used...
I don’t know random thoughts, but we can punish someone and have value generated at the same time.
Its purpose is not just those, another is protecting society. I actually think that is its primary function, rehabilitation can be done in better ways.
I think jail should only be considered where a threat to the public is posed. This case is an open and shut example of a dangerous threat.
Even if that were possible, Ongwen may be too damaged to be very effective at such a "punishment." And it would be very cruel to expose him to the same environment which traumatized him enough to make him into a brutal commander.
There are traditionally 4-6 purposes of justice. The four most common are deterrence, incapacitation, retribution, rehabilitation, and the other two less common are restoration and denunciation. These purposes are not mutually exclusive, not always possible to achieve (hard to restore dead people to life), and IMO there are valid reasons for all of them, even retribution (although of course it is possible to go to far).
Deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and restoration are pretty self-explanatory, and the reasons for those are clear. Denunciation means crimes are punished in order to send a message that such behaviour is condemned. But is there a good reason for retribution?
The meaning of retribution is that those who have hurt others suffer real consequences. This isn't necessarily something sadistic, as there are a number of reasons why this can be a valid purpose. You want people to have faith in the justice system, to not believe that people are getting off with slaps on the wrist, that mass murderers aren't being pampered, and so on, so that they don't turn to vigilante justice. It could be the case that, e.g., Brock Turner was unlikely to ever sexually assault a woman ever again after three months' jail time. But the perception that he was let off lightly could undermine faith in the justice system.
In a case like this, it may be that his victims need to see that he is punished so that they can have faith in their justice system. Whether or not that is the right call here, I don't know enough to make a judgement. But I don't think one can entirely ignore retribution as a purpose.
It is curious how the trauma from his kidnapping is considered different than if he had been a 2nd generation war criminal.
Presumably the child of a war criminal would also have suffered trauma in youth, but there would no consideration of mercy, or sympathetic longform articles for the 30something 2nd generation war criminal. They would be simply be treated as evil.
If it is possible to do so much evil that no amount of good can overcome it then it is not also possible to do so much good that no amount of evil deserves consequence?
People tend to define retribution and the scales in a way that they themselves can be forgiven and return to good standing, but people they don’t like cannot.
> The French-American author Jonathan Littell happened to be filming a movie in Obo on the day that Ongwen was extradited. Ongwen gave him a rare 30-minute interview
I searched briefly but could not find this footage. Does anybody have access to it?
Processes are important for the simple reason that it's much easier to agree on a process than an outcome.
Processes are generally free of context and confounding factors. Mere mortals aren't capable of juding the entirety of one's life, let alone going back generations. So they simply evaluate the question before them about a particular crime.
Sure there are a few exceptions, like when someone is insane or lacks intent. But those are usually quite narrow.
So justice is following the process, not getting to the heart of a moral issue.
52 comments
[ 991 ms ] story [ 2874 ms ] threadTo be clear, I'm not OP, and I don't judge the quality of the article on this basis. It's commonplace to see a journalist do sloppy work, especially in parts of an article less critical to its thesis. But the article already defines the term 'catechist', albeit incorrectly. I don't think it's unreasonable to consider that the same trouble should go toward getting it right.
The silly objection here is like objecting to the statement "he was a pilot, an airplane driver", because a "driver" drives a car, not a plane.
As I said, I think OP makes too much of the phrase, but I agree it's entirely risible.
The other way is that we view him as so broken by his childhood trauma that he has had no moral capacity, even in his adulthood. If that is the case, he still needs to be locked away for many years, because someone with that level of brokenness is not safe human society.
Or rehabilitated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_(penology)
> The effectiveness of Norway's methods is evident as they hold the lowest recidivism rate worldwide at 20% as of December 2014.
I think this individual presents a clear cut case where public safety is more important than the individual's right to rehabilitation post-conviction, in a way that even the worst civilian criminals like serial killers do not. There is just no way to reintegrate him to like a POW of an opposing nation in war or a rebel soldier who joined a movement - he was a primary instigator in the conflict and his enemy was the system he'd be rehabilitated into.
You seem to assume that intelligent individuals are more difficult to rehabilitate but I see it is just as likely that the opposite the opposite. The burden of demonstrating public safety and rehabilitation should always be on the individual, but I don't see why that is impossible.
People in Norway rarely grow up in totally deprived, violent conditions. Maybe they respond to rehabilitation efforts better, in the same way that a healthy person exhibits better wound healing than someone with diabetes 2nd type.
One could make a practical experiment by dumping an assortment of, for example, Islamic State executioners into Norwegian prisons and watching how many of them return to their old habits, but Norwegians wouldn't probably want to try that.
on the creek behind my workshop, thieves were running stolen copper. they would use boats to come up into businesses storage yards from the SF bay, then dump the copper in the creek. wait until they had a buy lines up and pull it up at their leisure.
they were caught eventually. 5 years later and out on parole. and guess where they came first - back to the creek. no other way of making a living, no basic support.
i think criminality becomes very different when its just a lifestyle choice and not the only way to provide for basic human needs.
sure, focus on rehabilitation. but it doesn't matter if they throw you back on the street when you're out.
This man is a war criminal that that was directly and indirectly involved in murder and rapes. Worse, he actively enabled that behavior in his organization.
Now in an exercise in empathy, put yourself in the shoe of someone who saw his entire family be massacred. You don't understand why theymight find it insulting to their suffering that this man is eventually allowed to walk free.
To be clear you can disagree, but I really doubt that you don't understand.
My view is that this dynamic in our collective compassion does not help us accomplish justice. It seems that to pursue justice we must believe in agency of the individual. Agency to, no matter what their circumstances, make the right choices. As soon as we begin to weigh our explanatory power over individual agency we lose justice. Am I happy this man met justice? No, it's deeply sad and points to an irrevocable brokenness in humankind. Was it deserved? Yes. It was.
if we can't understand how someone could have done that thing...
If we are not aware of a reason they did not posses agency, then we must assume they still had it.
For example, we might say that a serial killer who was born into a life of wealth and advantage and has no macroscopic brain damage has more agency than the individual with a large brain tumour. But this killer is also very much a slave to their brain in the same way as the tumour individual. They were gifted with psychopathy and an inability to feel remorse, which will undoubtedly come down to concrete brain states that differ in a material respect to non-psychopaths. Just because we can't see any obvious macroscopic markers of this says more about our knowledge limitations than it does about relative levels of agency.
Going further, we're all slaves to determinisic or stochastic physics playing out in our brains and environment, and our agency is just a useful fiction.
The justice system should be premised on pragmatic concepts of deterrence, rehabilitation, protecting society, etc, and not on fantasy notions that person A had more agency than person B.
It’s a consistent standpoint, but justice isn’t about punishment. It’s a belief that the world despite all evidence to the contrary should be fair. As such people’s internal thought process is inherently part of the judgement process, the same action with different causes is judged differently.
You’re for example allowed to break some rules in an emergency therefore belief that something is an emergency is relevant. Punching someone doing a jump scare because you think their a threat is perfectly legal.
It should inform the probability of recidivism, the chances that rehabilitation will work, etc, and therefore inform what type and duration of sentence/treatment is appropriate for a given case.
To your example, belief that something is an emergency means that P(recidivism) is effectively the same as if they hadn't committed the action, which is the real reason why there shouldn't be any sentence given to that individual.
Without a concept of agency it is pointless to talk about “justice”. At the very least, by advocating a notion of justice, you are saying that members of society as a whole have agency to implement that concept of justice.
If we all have no agency, how is a feeling that we should immediately execute all criminals unjust?
Needlessly killing all criminals is unjust because it devalues human life, and the right of individuals to exist. You don't need agency to experience happiness, love, intrigue, or anything else that makes life worth living.
[1] https://ethics.org.au/what-is-the-definition-of-free-will-et... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retributive_justice
If a hurricane (individual) kills a person, it's accurate and fair to blame the hurricane (individual), while simultaneously realising that it's just the laws of physics unfolding and not erroneously attributing a god of the gaps type of agency. Likewise, it's accurate to say that someone who died by a hurricane (individual) is a victim, and that the hurricane (individual) is culpable for the death.
Retributive justice (and certainly other types of justice) can still be argued for even in the absence of free will, under a utilitarian perspective. The absence of free will doesn't imply the absence of utility/qualia/etc.
Families won't accept this of course, because our brains are designed to see agency, seek revenge, monitor debts to see who is not reciprocating, etc, these are just more adaptive heuristics which help us to perceive our social reality in a way that maximises fitness.
I think there’s an element of, ironically, survivorship bias there. We notice psychopathic serial killers because they kill people, and then we say they lack agency like the tumor victim. But the psychopaths who don’t kill people are invisible. We just call them CEOs (jk, but only kind of).
Agency is like the God Of The Gaps at the moment. We don't know what makes A and B differ and we magic that knowledge gap away with "agency".
Over time, as we understand more about the brain and psychology, the serial killers who don't have any macroscopic impairments are going to look very much like the ones that do. And the psychopaths that become killers are going to look very different to those that become CEOs (either brain and/or environment).
Only then, we will be able to point our fingers towards the precise causal pathway at play (genetics+environment). Until then, the best we can do is recognize that such a pathway exists, which the individual was gifted at birth, even though we're ignorant of the specifics.
More seriously, going all-in on biological determinism is just as much an article of faith at this point as looking for agency. This is one of the questions of western philosophy and science, let’s not pretend it’s settled or that we’re going to solve it in an hn thread either way.
Also I don’t think this is what you intend, but where the line you’re proposing leads is “phrenology, but with magnets this time so it looks like science.” No thanks, and even if it does turn out to be where we’re going it seems a mite early to take it for granted.
Justice shouldn't be based on the violation of expectations. It should be based on maximizing harm prevention.
This seems enough to condemn him. It's a complicated issue, which is why blanket amnesty gets offered in these kinds of situations - to people who want to re-integrate back into society. He did not do so until he had no other choice.
The split personality disorder is a beautiful story, that fails to explain why he didn't surrender at any point in the preceding two decades. If we were to suppose he was not culpable for his actions during his Dominic B states, Dominic A must surely be culpable for not extracting himself from a situation where Dominic B would keep on committing his atrocities.
I feel like we could be way more creative in how we treat prisoners in how they “repay their debt”. Someone like Ongwen could probably be very valuable in finding and converting other people away from situations similar to his. Or from helping security forces secure against the kind of tactics they used...
I don’t know random thoughts, but we can punish someone and have value generated at the same time.
Deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and restoration are pretty self-explanatory, and the reasons for those are clear. Denunciation means crimes are punished in order to send a message that such behaviour is condemned. But is there a good reason for retribution?
The meaning of retribution is that those who have hurt others suffer real consequences. This isn't necessarily something sadistic, as there are a number of reasons why this can be a valid purpose. You want people to have faith in the justice system, to not believe that people are getting off with slaps on the wrist, that mass murderers aren't being pampered, and so on, so that they don't turn to vigilante justice. It could be the case that, e.g., Brock Turner was unlikely to ever sexually assault a woman ever again after three months' jail time. But the perception that he was let off lightly could undermine faith in the justice system.
In a case like this, it may be that his victims need to see that he is punished so that they can have faith in their justice system. Whether or not that is the right call here, I don't know enough to make a judgement. But I don't think one can entirely ignore retribution as a purpose.
Presumably the child of a war criminal would also have suffered trauma in youth, but there would no consideration of mercy, or sympathetic longform articles for the 30something 2nd generation war criminal. They would be simply be treated as evil.
Well I'm glad that solutron from Hackernews has figured out the one true morality for everybody. Thanks solutron from hacker news!
I searched briefly but could not find this footage. Does anybody have access to it?
Processes are important for the simple reason that it's much easier to agree on a process than an outcome.
Processes are generally free of context and confounding factors. Mere mortals aren't capable of juding the entirety of one's life, let alone going back generations. So they simply evaluate the question before them about a particular crime.
Sure there are a few exceptions, like when someone is insane or lacks intent. But those are usually quite narrow.
So justice is following the process, not getting to the heart of a moral issue.