My feelings move towards the ultimate responsibility is on society (all of us) for not creating a better system. Though there are always going to be people that just don’t give a fuck.
A society is defined by it’s individuals, as are it’s laws.
Ideally, the laws of a society represent the will of all it’s individuals, since that is impossible, we have to go for the best case instead, meaning that the laws of a society represent the will of the vast majority of it’s individuals at best.
So we have society creating laws that fits most people, but not everyone.
This means that some people will break the laws, we can generalize those people into two groups:
A. Those who break the law because they want to.
B. Those who break the law because they need to.
Regarding group A, I’d mostly see them as responsible for their own actions, but as with other incidents, an investigation to the root cause of why the person broke the law, and if the law is fair and just.
Regarding group B, if someone needs to break the law, then it is a failiure of society as it has failed to give the person proper support to give the person an option other than to break the law.
Responsibility occurs in proportion to the ability to stop or control a thing. Individuals are responsible for most of their crimes but not all. Society is to blame for some crime but not all.
Individuals are responsible for individual crimes, society is responsible for crime.
Many individuals are, but not the whole society. That would be too big of a generalization.
In a way, yes to both. If a society goes into a recession that causes people to be unable to eat (or does a murderous rampage of starvation like under Stalin or Mao) and people steal to eat that’s directly caused by society.
But, if you have free will and the mental capacity to make your own decisions, especially here in a Western society that generally doesn’t require you to steal to eat, it’s on the individual.
Some of both, and depending massively on the crime. On one hand, if someone is stealing food to survive, thats on the society. On the other hand, if someone randomly decides to murder and eat a person, with no prior history, theres not much a society can do to prevent it. In general, for the sorts of crime that first come to mind with the word, I’d say its far more society’s responsibly (or at least that of those ruling) as the average crime is usually victumless or only impacts those who won’t feel it, and more extreme crimes are usually preventable with proper systems. That said, a lot of political and white collar crime is more the responsibility of the individual as there is rarely any need for it aside from unrestrained greed or cruelty.
It depends on the perspective from which you’re asking the question.
Here’s a question from a sociological perspective:
What laws, policies, and programs would lead to fewer people developing drug addictions and engaging in theft to obtain drugs?
There are answers to those questions. We know people with stable housing, good jobs, strong social networks, and mental health care are less likely to get addicted to drugs and commit crimes to fuel their addiction.
Here’s a question from an individual perspective:
Should Johnny be punished for cutting catalytic converters off other peoples’ cars to fund his meth habit?
I think most of us would say yes, even if he wouldn’t have developed the meth habit if his life didn’t suck due to factors beyond his control.
Depends on the crime.
My feelings move towards the ultimate responsibility is on society (all of us) for not creating a better system.
First - I’m presuming that determinism is false - that human beings possess meaningful agency (if determinism is true, then there can be no agency and thus “responsibility” is incoherent).
With that presumption, then the problem with this view is that regardless of the situation, there came a moment when the individual was faced with the choice between acting in a criminal manner or not acting in a criminal manner, and they chose to act in a criminal manner. So the individual does bear “ultimate” responsibility.
It would likely make more sense, for the issue you appear to be avtually trying to address, to frame it in terms of proportion - who bears the most responsibility?
At the extreme, it could well be the case that society bears literally all of the responsibility for every single thing that led up to the moment at which the individual chose to act in a criminal manner. But that still doesn’t change the fact that at that “ultimate” moment, the individual made that choice.
When humans create and enforce artificial “laws” they are responsible for turning the reasonable actions of others in to “crime”, which invalidates your point.
Framing someone as “committing a crime” if they take some available food when they’re starving, in a society designed to make them starve, and to punish them for trying to stay alive, is just upholding the oppressive fiction that is “legality”.
If you don’t have food, haven’t for several days, don’t have funds for it, and don’t have a job (because you don’t have a house because you don’t have a job) and you steal some food, I would not say you made a personal choice to commit a criminal act. External factors can absolutely remove your choice in the matter.
Furthermore, what if you’re gay or trans or an atheist and just happen to be born in a regressive society? You’ve not made a choice to be a criminal even though your existence is criminalized.
That’s not to say that ALL crimes are the fault of society. There will always be people doing illegal shit for the thrill of it (like the whole Kia car jacking thing) and there will always be people who act on their own selfish desires to a criminally fraudulent extreme (like Rick Scott overseeing the largest case of Medicare fraud in history).
If you don’t have food, haven’t for several days, don’t have funds for it, and don’t have a job (because you don’t have a house because you don’t have a job) and you steal some food, I would not say you made a personal choice to commit a criminal act.
And I would say that you rather have still made a choice.
It might be a constrained choice, but it is still a choice.
At the extreme, to illustrate my point: if you were to put a gun to my head and tell me that if I didn’t give you my money, you were going to shoot me, I still have a choice. Granted that it’s a severely limited choice between two bad options that exists solely because you’ve arranged matters to impose it on me, but it is still a choice.
And in philosophy, that kind of precision matters.
And I would say that you rather have still made a choice.
You need to check your privilege (the fact that you chose to reply to an example about taking food, with an example of you being given a gun and being told to shoot someone says it all, you’re not even looking to challenge your own bias and admit that you probably have no idea what starving, or being homeless, or otherwise persecuted by “the law” is like)
It is a choice to commit crimes instead of dying of starvation. I don’t blame them at all for doing so, it shouldn’t be a crime, and further it is the fault of society for criminalizing being poor and hungry instead of helping, which leads to these choices being made. In terms of who makes the choice I still contend it is the individual who does but I differ in that they bear total responsibility in what lead them to that need to make a choice between two awful options.
Depends on the crime. Although technically speaking no-one has free will so neither and it’s predestined fate of the universe.
The fact that it’s inevitable doesn’t mean that cause and effect are nullified.
Well then it’s
The big bang > society > individual > crime
But you can’t really pin the blame on a specific step of that causal chain.
Nah I’m blaming it on the Big Bang, if all that uppity nothing didn’t decide to become something we wouldn’t have any of these problems.
A little bit of each. Society ultimately structures how we interact with each other, it creates the motivations and incentives that we work under. We all want money because that’s what society has told us we need in order to live the kinds of lives that society tells us are worth living. This creates the incentive that money is more important than almost anything else in life, it can be worth more than other people’s lives. Then the individual makes these sorts of decisions everyday, “What am I willing to do to get more money?” You’ve got some people willing to injure, kill, and/or destroy in order to get more money to live lives of luxury. You’ve got billionaires and executives willing to make thousands/millions of peoples’ lives horrible and suck up every available dollar just so they can increase the digits on their net worth in their eternal pissing match with each other.
Ultimately it’s “society”, but who decides what “society” will prioritize? We’re all wrapped up in all of this, but we’re also all prisoners to it as well, so I’m not sure how you can separate out the individual from society. Certainly the people at the top play a big part in the whole thing, and they don’t really have much incentive to change anything, since it’s all working pretty well from their point of view.
I don’t want money because of some illusion about what others expect my life to resemble: I want it because it’s the most effective way to meet my basic needs of food, housing, and healthcare.
I like this viewpoint. Out of curiosity what would your response be if someone asserted that individuals shape a society and as such crime is the fault of individual for either failing to align with society or failing to influence society to change thus making the crime unnecessary/or non-existent?
Individuals shape society to a degree, but alot of society has been imposed on us from the get-go. We were born into this world and our morals are drilled into us by our families, our schools, our churches, and our social circles. An individual can attempt to contradict that, but they’re facing a steep hill to climb to affect change. Society changes super slowly and it kind of just moves on its own from sheer historical inertia at this point, so just because an individual wants to change something doesn’t mean they’ll ever be able to get enough momentum going to get it changed. There’s definitely alot of crimes that should be unnecessary, like “vice crimes” where it’s mostly just people enjoying themselves. I was just reading another thread where somebody had asked about “How would you survive if you were homeless with no job, family, or means of support?” or something similar. And one of the best comments was from someone who went through listing alot of the survival tips they had for what you needed to do to live as a homeless person in America. Some of the tips seemed to rely on crime (shoplifting), people in extreme situations like that have to do whatever they can to survive. I think without a proper support system, we as a society are forcing people into situations like that where they don’t feel like they have an option. If people have to choose between committing a crime and eating or starving, they will do what they need to and that’s more society’s fault there.
That’s in extreme cases (though not as extreme a case anymore as the price of living has gotten so much more expensive lately). For other crimes, like spouses murdering each other or high-income executives committing fraud or politicians doing bribes or whatever, those crimes may be more on the individual. Certainly society influences these things (like high-stakes marriage relationships or company stock prices or whatever the crime is about), but often people in those situations probably have actual choices in the matter, they’ve specifically chosen to do a crime with full knowledge of what the consequences are.
Both, and random chance!
shit question. it’s a spectrum society provides broad trends and forces, which influence individual humans, but those individual humans are what make up an define society. it’s a feedback loop.
Since slavery was legal, and the holocaust was legal, and so many other abhorrent things were legal, I give very little weight to the concept of “legality”, and therefore “criminality”.
They are tools to keep poor and otherwise marginalised people “in line”, created by those who also put themselves above these rules.
This is an important thing for people to understand.
“Crime” doesn’t always equate to “wrongdoing.”
Freeing a slave may sometimes be illegal, but it’s always the right thing to do.
Exactly
There’s a lot of research demonstrating that external factors have a pretty major impact on criminal behavior (nutrition, socialization, etc during developmental years, as examples). So society plays a role.
If you’re interest in reading, Robert Sapolsky’s Behave is pretty long and a little heavy, but a great, reasonably broad view of the things that make us tick from a bunch of different lenses. It’s tied-ish with Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow as my favorite non-fiction, and looks more at social factors like the example above. I haven’t read Determined yet, and really doubt it’s going to convince me not to believe in free will, but his underlying base of knowledge is legit.
