RE: Roanoke Shooter - but any situation with a perpetrator and a victim
I'm disturbed by the reactions some people are having to this murder in Roanoke. I get the emotion, and I have full forgiveness for people doing this thing that disturbs me. I don't dislike the people thinking it. Or even think less of them. My emotion is strictly on the idea - that a man who commits a crime "deserves" pain and punishment in return.
Not my cuppa tea. I don't think anyone "deserves" suffering. That's exactly the mindset that made this man do what he did. Exactly. He thought they did something bad and "deserved" what he was doing. And that's true of so many criminals Not all, of course, some do it for pleasure and those I think should be neutralized, still not "punished."
Not sure if I'm going to say something to the people saying these things. On one hand I would hope it would help people feel less pain sooner if they can step back from their pain into the comfort of "just" grief. On the other, perhaps they are not in a position to find that comforting.
But the "he should live [from his self-inflicted wound] so he can be made to suffer" or even the "he should die before he can confess so that he spends eternity in hell" are both deeply painful to me in EXACTLY the same way the murders themselves are.
The morality of not hurting others requires the morality of this being universal. IMHO.
You know what pisses me off even more?
That people have this reaction when the victim is white, but when the victim is black, they make up all kinds of excuses for why the murder victims deserved to be killed. If not that, then they show indifference to the suffering and death of African-Americans. Far too few of us seem to care as much about the deaths of non-whites as we do about the deaths of whites.
And we are supposed to believe this is a "post-racial society" in which racism doesn't exist anymore. Delusional thinking like this is why Trump is currently the front-runner.
As for the actual topic you brought up in the original post (sorry for the aside), no one deserves suffering. People who think that are just primitive savages who can't control their bloodlust.
Humans are a social species. Like most social species, our primary survival strategy is each other. If you work to improve the survival and well-being of others, then you make a tiny contribution to the survival and well-being of everyone in your society. If enough people do the same thing, then the overall improvement in survival and well-being of the whole society is very large even though the contributions of each individual is small.
To maximize this strategy, we need as many people as possible to do more good than harm. When someone does more harm than good, then this can have a large impact on the overall survival and well-being of the group.
It is possible that the Roanoke shooter would, after committing those murders, would then become a model citizen, in which case it would make sense to do nothing to him at all. However, we cannot predict the future. We are neither clairvoyant nor omniscient. Thus when someone commits a serious crime, we make a calculated guess that they will continue to do more harm than good in the future and remove them from society so that their tendency to do more harm than good cannot impact the survival and well-being of others. The more serious the crime, the longer we need to keep them removed from society.
Punishing people does nothing to improve the survival and well-being of society, not even as a preventative measure. Every single person who commits crimes such as murder genuinely believes they will get away with it, or is otherwise too emotionally or intellectually compromised to consider the consequences of their actions.
We should not think in terms of punishment, but simply about keeping potentially dangerous people separated from society. Doing this is simply a matter of self-interest for society.
If their crimes are such that they can expect to be released back into society, then we need to do what we can to ensure that they do more good than harm as a participant in society upon their release. Unfortunately, America does an extremely poor job of this right now. Ex-cons have an extremely difficult time finding jobs, which makes them more likely to to return to crime upon release. Further, incarceration tends to erode basic social and life skills needed to function in society, while reinforcing many negative traits.
