Look at the Norse model. Incarceration there is potentially indefinite. I don't see anyone calling Norwegians monsters. Maybe reevaluate your position.
I don't see the Norwegians actually keeping people in prison longer than they deserve. The people they've subjected to indefinite preventive detention are generally murderers and rapists. Whether Norwegians are monsters is not determined by how they choose to
label their penal practices.
At any rate I answered your inane questions in my discussions targeted at RS, with respect to what is the best outcome. Perhaps you should go back and actually read some of those posts,
I actually read them; the reason you're accusing me of not actually reading them is because you have no moral compunctions about libeling your outgroup.
And no, those discussions didn't answer my inane questions -- you did not supply any reason to think your selection of ethical premises isn't based on "aroused emotional drive". Here are some selections from your posts targeted at RS:
So, there's been a lot of discussion about is/ought. There is, in my estimation one way to get there: adding goals.
If I AM on one side of a wall, AND it IS my goal to use the least energy to reach the other side, ... I ought do that thing (it is the solution to the problem).
That's an equivocation fallacy. "Ought" has two meanings -- instrumental and moral -- corresponding to what Kant called hypothetical imperatives and categorical imperatives. Adding goals gets you from an "is" to an instrumental "ought", not to a moral "ought".
If the goal is "achieving personal goals", this creates a metagoal: survive long enough, in a state capable of achieving those goals. It is a goal we must accept for everyone to the extent we accept it for ourselves.
That's a non sequitur. And it should be painfully obvious to you that it's a non sequitur since if you lock someone up indefinitely in preventive detention -- not a state capable of achieving his personal goals -- you aren't accepting the metagoal for him.
Really, you have to ask, is it a valid goal to pursue the least negative outcome for yourself that makes your own behavior non-destructive with respect to the necessary meta-goals for general goal seeking? If this is true, then it cannot possibly be true that you have a right to impose more harm than is absolutely necessary (punishment, infliction of suffering, etc), because of the requirement for non-contradiction.
There's no contradiction between those. Have you been influenced by Randroids? Those guys imagine whatever they dislike violates the non-contradiction principle.
My thought is that it is absolutely NOT ok to go ham on someone once they've been bad. It's one of the most basic tests of an ethical framework: does it permit doing unto others that which you would not have done into you?
Jesus said it; you believe it; that settles it? The Golden Rule is a rough rule of thumb that is often helpful, but it leads to absurdity in some situations and it's always ambiguous, due to the inherent ambiguity in the phrase "that which". You wouldn't want to be sued, would you? Well then you should never sue anyone. You wouldn't want to be imprisoned, would you? Well then you should never imprison anyone. Sure, you can game that problem away by redefining "that which" you do to be different from "that which" you don't want done to you; you can always claim what you don't want is to be imprisoned "unnecessarily". But the same game is available to retributionists; we don't want to be imprisoned "undeservedly".
I mean, speaking in terms of a specific goal for the derivation of general "oughts" is a losing battle. There is no specific goal. There is the possibility, though, of discussing a meta-goal to derive general oughts.
To me, that goal is "to have all that is necessary to do X" where X does not deprived anyone else of the same.
That's a special-pleading fallacy -- you sound like that philosopher who spent the first half of his book proving all moral claims are errors and the second half making moral claims. "To have all that is necessary to do X where X does not deprive anyone else of the same." is a specific goal. Just calling it a "meta-goal" doesn't make your attempt to derive general "oughts" from it a winning battle.
Of course we live in a probabilistic universe, and in a universe where there are zero-sum situations, so we need to account for these two things: by having a common agreement and expectation of what risks are to be accepted, and a mechanism to determine disposition of limited resources.
But we don't have a common agreement. People disagree. People are going to disagree. Why would we agree, when we have incompatible beliefs, goals and emotional drives? You haven't even offered us a reason to agree, just a bunch of fallacies.
(And even if you could construct a common agreement that was a genuine contract -- a rule people
actually agree to, as opposed to the rules social contract theorists keep agreeing to on other people's behalf -- it wouldn't deliver a rational ethical foundation. All it would do is help us feel self-righteous about acting on our aroused emotional drive to force others to keep their promises. Social contract theory is logically incapable of delivering that which it exists for the purpose of delivering.)
I can easily identify that if I wish to have my meta-goal stay as intact as possible, I must respect the meta-goals of others as much as possible. Punishment for the sake of vengeance rather than only as a last resort in behavior modification fits right into "unnecessary", almost trivially so.
Some people's meta-goal is to have justice done. If you abolish retributive punishment you are trivially not respecting those people's meta-goal as much as possible.
That'll do as a sampling of your earlier attempts; if you think one of the arguments I skipped was better than those, feel free to point it out. Moving on...
but the gist of it is that there is a metagoal that can be defined such that "maximizing the ability to pursue the goals you wish to pursue" wherein goals that are unilaterally/mutually exclusive get rejected (ie "Gary wants to kill Bob; Bob has goals that require being alive", Gary's goal is invalidated), where a certain probability of damage at a certain extent to the metagoal is deemed acceptable through social consensus, and where the disposition of limited resources is agreed on through some mechanism of allocation.
Uh huh. So Gary wants to go to synagogue on Saturday and work on Sunday; Bob has goals that require everyone to work on Saturday and go to church on Sunday. Through social consensus it's agreed to damage Gary's metagoal of satisfying his own religious obligations, because his unilateral goal is mutually exclusive with the deemed-acceptable metagoal of the social consensus, which is to have as many people as possible be saved through knowing Jesus, so Gary's goal gets rejected.
Of course you wouldn't rule that way -- you'd no doubt say it's Bob's goal that should get rejected, and you'd no doubt have an excellent argument to that effect -- but that's immaterial, because as soon as you uttered the magical phrase "social consensus", that meant it's not up to you and your arguments to determine whose right to an unbroken nose ends at whose swinging fist.
In this way it is not about what I, personally, want. Instead it is about determining the limit of which of my wants are justifiable generally,
And you appear to be trying to establish "justifiable" on the basis of symmetry -- Gary and Bob can both be alive; they can't both be alive while the other's dead. Your "It is a goal we must accept for everyone to the extent we accept it for ourselves.", your "X does not deprived anyone else of the same" and your invocation of the Golden Rule likewise are appeals to symmetry. But you haven't shown what's good about symmetry; you're just taking that for granted. Clearly what's going on here is you picked symmetry as your ethical premise, due to an aroused emotional drive. You transparently have a symmetry boner.
Punishing is by definition harming the goals of others, as a goal in and of itself, agnostic to other effects. It is trivially evil.
Stomping the bread into the ground so you could both die is by definition harming the goals of others, as a goal in and of itself. What makes you think you aren't trivially evil? Wait, don't tell me, I know the answer to this one...
...everyone is the hero of their own story and people will jump through all kinds of hoops to prove it to themselves.