Reform and Representation

I'm watching Thursday's Question Time from Glasgow. Among other stuff, they're talking about lobbying and how there are seemingly agencies who, for a fee, will set up meetings with politicians and their "clients". I imagine clients would be those captains of business who need and introduction to someone with power and stuff like that.

Anyway, this all got me thinking. We live in a democracy (let's not be cynical about whether or not it's actually an elective dictatorship or anything). More specifically, we live in a representative democracy, which means those who take part in the decision making do so by means of representing those who vote, the electorate. Their job is to translate the vote of the people in their constituency into a vote in Parliament (which is why I'm not big on party politics).

The politicians are choosing a life of representation which means they cannot pursue a career or maybe have to give up a career in the private sector. Since they cannot get a wage elsewhere it seems reasonable they should be compensated and given an appropriate salary, resembling what they would be earning for roles of similar responsibility and ability in the private sector.

Now think of the non-rigid way we would think of "the MP for Cathcart" versus the rigid "Tom Harris", things paid to the MP for Cathcart should be treated differently to the way we treat those things paid to Tom Harris. Tom Harris is to be compensated for giving up the prospect of a career in the private sector, the MP for Cathcart has made no such sacrifices and here we can start to really see the distinction (I'm using Tom Harris/Cathcart as an arbitrary example, nothing should be taken as directed at Tom Harris specifically). I would make the argument that they should be treated differently based on the fact that the MP for Cathcart is contingently Tom Harris, it is not necessary that they are the same thing.

The office of MP for Cathcart is an office constituted of at least two things; the people who vote for their representative and the actual representative. Tom Harris is constituted of only himself. It seems clear to me then, that is money paid to Tom Harris goes directly to the constituents of Tom Harris then the money and gifts paid to the office of the MP for Cathcart should go directly and equally to the constituents of the office of the MP for Cathcart, namely Tom Harris and the people who elected him.

How this would be implemented, I've not really considered. But it's a nice thought when we're thinking about constitutional reform.

The age of (criminal) consent.

Unavoidably, this case has brought a lot of tension out into the public sphere.

I was just about to go to bed after finishing all my essays, and thought I'd check the news before I went to sleep. I decided to check out the "Have Your Say" bit on the BBC News website over the Children's Commissioner's comments about raising the legal age of responsibility. It's obviously quite an emotive issue, but reading some of the comments people have left on the Have Your Say blog has left me considering a few things.

First:

It looks like a lot of the people posting are guilty of using synonymy in an argument (and using it badly) and as a result equivocation. There's quite a few people who are using the words "know" and "understand" as if they are actually synonymous. Never mind that you can't use synonymy in an argument (here's why I think so). Let's consider for a moment what "know" and "understand" actually mean.

It doesn't take a lot to know something. When I was 5 I knew 1 + 1 gave the result 2. Before I ever even thought of going to school I knew if I let go of something, say a crayon, it would hit the floor. If you are told that "X is right" and "Y is wrong" often enough you will come to know these things (epistemology questions aside, lets just say its a justified true belief).

I don't know when I actually started to think about numbers as an abstraction, or when I learned why the crayon hit the ground, but I know it wasn't until I had this extra information that I really understood why I will have two tokens of that type of thing when I take one of one thing and another of the same type of thing. It wasn't until I learned about gravity that I really understood why the crayon wouldn't just hit the ground, but the ground would hit my crayon.

A 10 year old might know what they are doing is wrong, but they're also told that not washing their hands after they go to the toilet is wrong, that lying is wrong and that it's bad to drink dad's beer. I think it's a really big shout to say that most, never mind all, 10 year olds actually understand why what they know to be wrong is wrong.

Second:

It's cool to be right-wing these days. I'm probably more right-leaning on things like justice than most of my friends. I think punishment should be punishment, and there's no excuse for the leniency in modern prisons. I'm not saying we go back to turning a crank for 12 hours a day or anything, but lights out is lights out. It's good enough for the army boys it's more than good enough for prisoners.

Back on topic, though. Some of the right-leaning posts (most of the posts) seem to forget what the justice system actually is. It is not a system for revenge. In all honesty, what the victim feels about it is absolutely irrelevant. It is a system for punishment, deterrence and rehabilitation. We're doing okish in one of those three.

If we based the justice system on revenge we'd be no better than organised crime syndicates. Victims of crime have two roles after the crime, to report it and to give honest testimony so the nature of the crime can be objectively judged by peers and (obviously) a judge. Victims have rights so far as they shouldn't be subjected to further trauma - hence giving evidence via video link etc. The only time the emotions of the victim or their family actually matter as regards justice is to ensure they are made to suffer no more than they already have.

A victim's feelings can vary wildly from victim to victim and depend on the crime and offender. You might judge a person unreasonably harshly because of some unsultry, unadmitted racist, sexist or other bigoted disposition. You might decide "he looks like a right manky, jakey bastard, give him 2 years", maybe all he done was steal the £3.50 bus fare you were counting out on the street and knocked you over unintentionally when running away. This is all because he has been homeless since his house burned down and he has no insurance and lost everything and was an otherwise upstanding citizen. There are worse examples.

Our continental cousins (who suffer few of the problems we do with our youth) have ages of between 12 and 14 for criminal responsibility. Could we not take a lesson from them? A point worth noting though, in Scotland it is being moved to twelve from eight.

Third:

Let's be analytical here and look at what those against this change in the law are committed to saying.

If, universally, a child as young as 10 is old enough to reliably and consistently make moral judgements, then due to the often complex nature of these judgements they are also capable of making relatively simpler judgements. They are old enough, then, to assess things like a war and so those opposed to a change in the law are committed to also supporting the use of child soldiers.

If, universally, a child as young as 10 is old enough to reliably and consistently make moral judgements then those opposed to a change in the law are committed to a lowering of the age of consent. Perhaps Argentinian or Mexican consent laws are more to your taste.

If, universally, a child as young as 10 is old enough to reliably and consistently make moral judgements then they are old enough to leave school, get a job and emigrate. But aren't we all in such an apologetic mood recently regarding child migrants.

Lastly:

There was one post I liked, by a user called "sparradic"

"I think the age of criminal responsibility is too variable per individual child to pen down to a specific age.

Some children are aware of their actions at 10 and others, quite simply, are not. When I was a child I would have said 14 was a more realistic age because the world, for children, was a more innocent place back then.

There are also other factors, some children are not aware they are doing wrong because of the environment they have been brought up in whereas others know they are doing wrong and continue to do so anyway".

Maybe we should think about sparradic's last line, a challenge for the naysayers of criminal responsibility law reform:

"It is difficult but surely there is some means of validating the age of criminal responsibility on an individual case by case basis."

The Religious Problem

Not wrote in a while. Put that down to a certain Immanuel Kant and his dire attempt at explaining moral motivation. Writing ethics essays has had me involved in thinking about what Michael Smith calls "The Moral Problem".

There seems to be two distinct features morality, that moral judgements are both motivating and objective. We often do things because they are the right thing to do, it's why most of us don't commit murder. We seem as well to think that things like murder or rape are universally wrong, that they are objectively wrong (However, that these things are subjectively wrong yet universal is only improbable, rather than impossible). A third inconsistency rises from David Hume's proposition that beliefs cannot motivate on their own and that we require an accompanying desire. This is all superfluous though, I'm concerned with a different inconsistent relationship.

My problem is with the relationship between free will and what some people would call destiny. Destiny, when not being used in whimsical Hollywood productions is most commonly found in religion. I don't pick a particular religion, they're all equally guilty of taking a fancy for God's plan. Although some atheists might think that if we could trace the path of every subatomic particle we might be able to predict exactly the choices you, I or they might make at any given time, this is not what I am concerned with - although my argument might be of use to those opposed to the calculating atheist.

It seems a common feature of religion (at least the Abrahamic faiths) that we ascribe free will to humans - it's why we got kicked out of the Garden after all. It seems just as common that those same religions explain bad things by saying it's all part of God's plan. Actually, saying bad things are God's plan seems like a pretty good defence in the face of the problem of evil and, rather topically, the problem of natural disasters. Some might say that natural disasters are the result of the best possible way the world we know and love could be constructed, I find this argument weak - isn't God supposed to be all knowing and infinitely capable of using his knowledge. He made the physical laws, so if he couldn't create a perfectly disasterless world because of those laws he could just change them.

Let us consider then the problem of God's plan. If God has a plan which he believes in enough to end the lives of those caught in natural disasters, and God is rational, God will have made the world in such a way that his plan comes to fruition. If you accept the contingencies of the butterfly effect (chaos theory, not the movie) then every little decision matters and will have to be planned for in such a way as to promote the outcomes desired as part of the afore mentioned plan.

If we have free will on the other hand, then God's plan is redundant. If God's plan involves person P dying in natural disaster N at time T, then having free will contradicts God's plan. P might use their free will to go to the place of N at a time earlier than T, or delays it and subsequently cancels after realising they would have died in N.

We can try to reconcile this, maybe God plans for our choices. God knows what choices we will make. Like an awesome psychiatrist, God is supposed to know us better than we know ourselves. But a religious person who maintains we have either free will or that God has a plan cannot reasonably submit to this position. If God plans for our choices in advance, if that is the only possible outcome, then we have to admit we have no free will. If God can see our choices in advance when creating the world and creates it in such a manner to coincide with both his plan and what we see as choice then it is not really choice at all and merely an illusion.

What is the religious person to do - give up free will or give up God's plan? Giving up free will would most likely be easier for religion. Giving up on God's plan leaves the religious person seeking a new answer to difficult questions like natural disasters. To atheists, and myself, it seemed like a cheap get out of jail free card the whole time anyway, but now I can put my finger on why.