This is completely fucked up!

Joe, Don't even know what to say.

wow, how can a mother show this sample to her kids and furthermore have them participate in a murder??

Stopped reading it after a couple sentences.. makes me a way too sick to focus on such poor individuals.. hope they rot in hell and get what they deserve!!!

wow as right, holy fuck

Dorothy Dixon ate what she could forage from the refrigerator upstairs, where housemates used her for target practice with BBs, burned her with a glue gun and doused her with scalding liquid that peeled away her skin.

They torched what few clothes she had, so she walked around naked. They often pummeled her with an aluminum bat or metal handle.

...and thats enough reading material for me.... is there a death penalty in miss.? I certainly hope so - people who laugh in the face of brutality should get the same treatment.

wow thats wow. wow.

this is what the death sentence is for...people like this have no place in society

I support death sentence.

They are worthless shit to me. Hang these motherfuckers high so we can throw them rocks.

Which law are against them in Illinois?

Looking at the people who did this, it's pretty obvious that they're inbred, borderline retarded crackheads.



Little more than animals.

Shocking. I would like to have some time alone with those people

damn... some peeps are just fucked and beyond help

my thoughts

Jesus,wtf is the matter with people..fuckin animals

fucked up shit

Burn them alive...

I hope they get death all of them.

that really made me sick.. I don't even know what to think or say.

I couldn't finish reading that.. fucking assholes.

fuckin' a.

Those people have obviously proven that they cannot handle the responsibilities that come with freedom.

People are fucked, sometimes.

I don't understand the merits of the case against the 12 year old kid tho. A kid that age will naturally do what his parents and older siblings do, and should.

Unless we're willing to you know, convict the entire human population on Milgram experiment charges, the kid should count as a victim.

100% agreed. That kid needs some serious therapy.

neither could i, wtf is wrong with some people

The same goes for almost all children that commit serious crimes, though - either they don't realize what they did, or they were created by their environment.

The problem is that without serious intervention, kids like this one are almost certain to commit crimes later in life, too. The legal system recognizes this, which is why young kids (<15) usually do not get sentenced to juvenile institutions in which they are simply locked up, but are placed in controlled environments and given fairly extensive treatment.

A larger problem with your line of reasoning is that, while it is correct, the same can be said for a vast majority of criminals. Child abusers were usually abused as children themselves, violent murderers usually suffer from mental disorders, robbers and muggers usually grew up in crime-infested environments themselves, etc.

Few people are willing to recognize it, but while free will allows us to do choose our actions freely, it does not allow us to choose the factors controlling our choices. Genes and environment create identities, and choices are made by these identities. Identities themselves are condemned for criminal acts.

Given these things, environmental influences would not be a reason to absolve this child of blame. Rather, the reason not to treat this child like an adult criminal would be that the child's identity is not fully formed yet, and thus still might prove susceptible to positive influences. With adults, whose identities have fully crystallized, chances of change are virtually non-existent.

Can I say CRACK HOUSE?

That is so sad it makes me sick

There is a very serious difference at play here, imo.

On one hand, a kid that steals his dads gun, and shoots someone, or a kid that runs off from school during hours, gets drunk, and gets in a car crash, or in general, a kid acting out of his own volition, outside the house/school/controlled environment.

Then, the merit I can see, and the reason to suspect they will commit crimes later in life I see too.

However, on this other hand we have here, is a kid that did what he saw his mother do, for years, and what he saw a good chunk of all the other adults in his life do, for years.

You can't expect there's some sort of innate, automatic, right-and-wrong sense in a 12 year old. Or 10 year old, when the stuff started. He just does what he sees done.

I don't see that there's anything wrong with that. There's something wrong with a kid living in that environment, but the kid is not guilty of anything.

Holy crap damn...

fucked up world :-/

While you certainly make a strong case, let's not forget that the kid who steals his father's gun and kills his classmates also got it from somewhere. An abusive home, bad role models, a mental disorder - whatever. One's own volition is created by genes and environment, and behaves accordingly.

As for this kid, certainly, he did not have an innate right-and-wrong sense. He accepted the moral guidelines of certain extremely bad role models. These are likely to have become part of his personality by now, though.

For the past 12 years, his personality been shaped by a thoroughly sadistic and sociopathic woman. That is what he is, right now. Treatment has a chance of changing that, although not a very large one.

I agree and they should make it as painfull as possible

I don't think this has any merit at all.

If we don't accept that one's own volition is outside, before, and above, any genetic or environmental consideration, then there's no need for freedom, there's no need for the first, second, or any further ammendments, there's in fact no need for civil liberties at all.

And people are no longer people, but machines, robots, running better or worse code, in better or worse environments.

I can't prove this isn't the case, and quite frankly I don't even care if it is or not. I'll happily die with the counterthesis around my neck before I'll even consider this.

Wow........ sometimes it is hard to comprehend the darkness that is inside some people.

I am drunk by now, so excuse me if my reply sounds a bit odd.

If we do accept that one's own volition is outside, before, and above, we essentially need a non-material soul that interacts with the material role.

This is a problem. First, we would need to accept that there is in fact a non-material soul-like thing that, being non-material, cannot be observed, investigated, proven or falsified. Obviously, giving any reasonable, testable argument for the existence for such a thing would be pretty much impossible.

Second, we face an even bigger problem. How would such a non-material soul-like thing interact with the physical? Any answer to that question would require us to abandon the very concept of material causality. After all, somehow, in between sensory stimulation and tangible action, the activation of the neurons in our nervous system would actually have to depart from the material, interact with our non-material soul-like thing, come back to the material, and fire up the neurons needed to initiate physical action.

Moreover, if we were to accept all that - a rather big leap into the unknown, in my opinion - we would still be faced with the problem of defining free will in our soul-like things. After all, decisions come from what one is, one's identity or personality, which raises the question where that identity or personality came from in the first place. Surely we can not simply assume that one chooses ones own personality, since this leads to infinite regression. Therefore, even positing a soul or soul-like thing, that supposedly has entirely free will, would not solve the problem that one did not, in fact, choose the tendencies and reactions of that soul or soul-like thing, and therefore in fact had no choice whatsoever in what that thing would choose to do.

Paraphrasing a famous philosopher, whose name unfortunately eludes me in my current drunken state: People are free to do what they want, but not to decide what they want to do. In other words, one can choose his own actions, but not the considerations he will make in deciding on which actions to take, nor the impulses and desires that drive him towards certain actions.

Take, for example, sociopaths, who do not feel any significant form of empathy. Certainly, they never decided not to feel this. Yet for people like you and me, it is impossible not to feel it, and empathy is one of the major sources for our moral choices. Can we blame them for not possessing this fundamental source of ethical behavior?

Now, as for your conclusions on the implications my view would have on civil liberties and such... I vehemently disagree with those.

First, since certain moral standards are shared among a vast majority of people (perhaps because of genetics?), the community at large can decide to enforce those. After all, even if they do not have some sort of metaphysical, objective basis, they are a large part of the subjective experiences of most people by far, and are therefore actually "real" in the sense that they are experienced and observed by a majority of people.

Second, liberty is essential even if we lack a metaphysical form of "free will" simply because we, as individuals, are most likely to have a good understanding of the things that we, as individuals, consider valuable in life. If we were to accept that value is not an intrinsic property of things, but instead is granted to things by people, it follows that we should allow people to choose for themselves what they consider valuable, and pursue those things.

Of course, there should be a limit to the ways in which they can pursue those things. Namely, the extent to which their pursuit of the things they consider valuable is compatible to the values, goals and freedom of others. So, basically, people should be given the maximum amount of freedom that is compatible with the maximum amount of freedom for all other people.

Also, I can not agree with your assertion that people would no longer be people if they didn't have some non-causal quality driving their actions. With causality being fundamental to deliberate action, I'd argue that the very causality in human life -as well as in existence in general- is fundamental to the very notion of people as free, independent actors.

The only thing we really have to abandon is the thought that there is some higher, non-material, soul-like thing that drives us, and accept instead that our identities, shaped by genes, environment and the decisions that follow from those, are wat drive us. Since we do not know the future, every choice still requires our careful deliberation. I would say that our humanity lies in that deliberation, and ou ignorance of the future, not in some vaguely defined notion of a free will that is entirely independent of the material world.

But anyway, like I said, I'm drunk, so meh.

thats a sad story.... unfortunately, i think stories like this are only going to become more common...

Sad to say, but I think you are right...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdYas_8EDZM

Hey Libertine - thanks for the reply. I have no idea how much alcohol there needs to have been imbibed between the two of us to turn the gofuckyourself board into a wittgenstainesque ethics seminar, but I imagine a lot.

Only if we insist to understand the problem in terms of material determinism. This may or may not be what we want, but it is at any rate bias. Just like there's no guarantee that the behaviour of photons can be understood in terms of billiard balls, just so there's no guarantee that the universe can be explained in terms of material interaction.

While I agree the issue is a problem, it's not our problem. It doesn't matter, for our purpose, if there needs or not to be a soul, if it needs or not to be so-or-so, or if it has or has not a reasonably, or materially, or otherwise explainable path of interaction with matter, or all that.

We merely need to observe that the role of the state can never exceed the material, and as such, anything outside of that, be it a soul or not, so-or-so, or otherwise, with or without conceivable method to influence the material is, remains, should be, should remain, outside the purvey of the state (understood, in this sense, in the widest sense, as any application of any social contract).

On the further point of free will, I'm willing to cut the gordian knot the following way : We presume it exists, because of the above reasons. The fact that we may or may not understand what it is or how it works has no bearing. Just like we presume legally supoena'd individuals have been given constructive notice, just so we presume acting individuals are employing their free will.

This is a necessary plug for our statal system in the face of the complexity of the universe, and says nothing about said complexity, merely something about our limits, what we can and can't do.

Youy will have to prove that this thing you label "sociopaths" in itself is something else from you and me. I suspect it is, like "terrorist" or "free will", or "constructive notice", merely a term of art, there to supplant a failure of our statal theory, rather than to positively describe anything.

I note your intelligent argumentation in favour of liberty, civil and otherwise, on material grounds - economical, foremost, who best to know what to spend our money on, with the broader expanse built on that, who best to know.

This is true, but in my eyes it has a flaw. It describes knowledge, not action. Who best to know ? Us, obviously. But who best to do ?

Ethics is about action. What should be done and what should not be done. It's not a matter of what should, or rather, in the case of your argument, could, be known. So, I agree with your intelligent argumentation, and look forward to you supplanting the one little crack in it, which unfortunately runs squarely in between knowledge and action.

This is an argument I wqould very much like to hear, especially the part where such casuality driven people would succeed in passing Turing tests, and thus prove themselves not approximable by machine-code.

Unfortunately, I fail to grasp how "genes, environment" are different, or not a case of, "higher, non-material, soul-like" things in your argumentation.

Cheers.

That's not quite fair.

I for one would value an animals life - any animal - far above that of these pieces of shit.

With any luck Mississippi does have a death penalty.

Whoops.

I meant Illinois not Mississippi

Holy S....................!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What crazy fuckers, KILL THEM ALL!

wtf