Have you not seen Robocop? Probably something like that. Just speculation though.

Anyway, this isn't the gun control thread or the chillrob depression page. Let's get back to the child rapists. I say send them to prison with a big R on their uniform.

im gonna diddle u

No. Wait until they're adults, and then execute them.

Serious answer? Also no. Don't execute anyone. Fairly easy ethical line.

+1 to what Bubble_Balls says. I'm totally against even in a good justice system. The idea of allowing it within the USA justice system is hideous

More interesting question imo is who would support releasing a child rapist if neuro technology can 'correct' them and they have served enough time to maximise the deterrent effect

like a lobotomy?

I would be for this. In fact, I think it would be cruel not to. I’m not so sure about jailing people we can instantly cure for the sake of deterrence. That also seems cruel. Do we deny them treatment for a condition that they aren’t to blame for and that would render them “innocent” so we can feel good about jailing the evil one for deterrence or do we cure them immediately and keep someone imprisoned that effectively isn’t the guilty party. I guess you could say it is cruel, but a necessary cruelty.

I think I might be more in favor of preemptive treatment, depending on the risks involved. Everybody or everybody identified as having the defect gets a pedo vaccine of sorts so no child is ever abused and no one ever needs to be jailed for it.

I doubt it would be a vaccine. It would more likely be pills or shots that have to be taken regularly and like bi-polar medication people will eventually avoid taking it (because most mental medications affect people in other ways as well like with lethargy or a lack of other feelings or impulses). And once anyone avoids taking it we will have a rapist who was let out of jail early start raping children again. Which would end the let them out of jail early thing.

I dont think we want people committing such damaging crimes until they get caught. Not if they would be deterred by the thought of the consequences.

If it provides an incentive for them to seek treatment instead of committing the crimes then that's a massive win.

I meant vaccine as a metaphor. I was imagining some perfect scenario where we knew exactly what combination of genes caused such behavior and could shut them off once and for all with one treatment when identified.

I'm not sure I'm following who is people in this sentence and which crime it is that they are committing. Are you saying that the treatment itself is a crime or are you saying something else about child abuse?

?

Raping children is the crime. If prison deters then I think we have to use imprisonment even if there's an effective treatment.

Alright, then I don't follow what you meant by not committing the crime until they get caught. How does one get caught before committing the crime?

I am imagining that having a treatment means we know what causes pedophilic impulses. If we can identify that, why wait until the crime has been committed to nullify that impulse? Why not check every embryo or child or adult, at whatever time it's possible like you would for a disease, and destroy the impulse before they ever commit the crime? Why wait until a crime has been committed? That seems unnecessarily cruel to everyone.

If the treatment is not free from danger than you'd have to weigh the chance of harm from it against the harm created by not treating it until after a crime is committed. If you don't want to force people into treatment before a crime (and maybe being identified as having the risk factor doesn't mean 100% that you will commit a crime) than you could say if you're not willing to be scanned and treated than your rights are somewhat curtailed. You can't have a job that would put you in close proximity to children or your communications will be monitored or something along those lines. Things like that seem like a lesser infringement on freedom than jailing someone we could instantly render impossible to reoffend.

Highly unlikely that genes play any more than a mild factor in predicting who turns out to be a diddler or not.

Is prison an effective deterrent in any regards?

Whatever the cause, there has to be something physical which means it could be possible to alter it. Even if it is emergent behavior from a combination of the right “settings” of various things it should be theoretically possible to identify what those are.

The idea of a deterrent is to put people off before they a crime they would otherwise commit. If there's a treatment available but no deterent then those who would have been deterred by a deterrent can just keep offending until they get caught.

Compulsory testing and treatment for all before any crime is committed is another ballgame altogther. This is an ethical nightmare world even if possible. I dont think it is plausible either - an individual beign examined and treated specifically is very different to some general test and treatment for all. Even with an individual, (100% success isn't plausible either so deterrent may still have value)


I thnk there will be staggering advances in proper science based neural techniques. I doubt genetics plays much part except in very general ways that aren't going to help much with preventative treatments - being a man for example.

I dont know. I'd want to rely on expert.

Instinctively In general, I think a short sentence does all the heavy lifting when it comes to deterrence for first timers.

'Theoretically' is doing a huge amount of lifting there. The problem is that the system you're f*cking with is extraordinarily resistant to change and forms somewhat of a fundamental part of us: sexuality. I'm certainly not an expert but as far as I know there is no 'cure' for paedophilia. One either acts on one's urges, or one doesn't. So the closest we can reasonably come to a cure is the realisation of the harm done and integration into the values of society.

Also, that there is something physical within the system representing that facet of sexuality is kinda up for debate, but that's a nebulous debate, so I'll just make the point that just because something can in theory be changed doesn't mean it can be changed in isolation to other parts.

If prison were an effective deterrent, would we see prisons bulging at the seams? The deterrent part is and always has been social excommunication; prison does not do that, it merely transfers you to a different part of society.

I don't have the data but I've been led to believe it's been shown that capital punishment is not an effective deterrent either. In fact, the language of incentive and deterrent is one that in general is used primarily and utterly abused by libertarian economists, who fail to recognise human factors such as dignity as explaining why their models basically never work. Even if we were purely rational beings, financial incentives and punishment deterrents would not be enough in and of themselves to explain why people do the things we do.

urges must correspond to some part of the brains neural net activiating. It must be possible in prniciple to detect the specific activity and modify that part of the net it. It's very plausible that would then remove the urge. Not quite with todays tech but maybe coming real soon.

I wonder how many would support not punishing perpetrators (beyind any deterrent effect). That was the question I was posing.

I dont think that follows. Prisons are bulging because deterrent isn't close to sufficient and we (particularly the USA) loves putting people in prison for a long time.

I totally agree that other measures would be massively more effective than deterrents can ever be.

My argument is not that they're not a deterrent, but rather that they're not an effective deterrent, in the sense that many, many other interventions have the capacity to be more effective deterrents.

If you compare it to code, the most complicated of which will still pale in complexity to that of the human brain, if you change a single variable, a ton of other parts will stop functioning properly. It's not as simple as finding the bit of the brain that activates paedophilia and going 'oh, here's your problem, someone set this thing to evil' and then flipping a switch. Tempting though it is to reduce all problems of human society to a single, manipulable variable.

The only purpose of punishment is deterrent, whether you're in the game theory sphere or morality sphere or practical world sphere, any sphere you care to inhabit. So if you remove the deterrent aspect, there are precisely 0 punishments I support. Of course, there are other practical reasons for things like imprisonment, or exile, beyond deterrent, simply that society arguably cannot afford to have those people in it. That part, where we start to cross over into paradox of tolerance arguments, is the only way I can get behind imprisonment.

Thanks for clarifying what you meant. I understand the concept of a deterrent it just wasn't clear to me that that's what you were talking about from the way you phrased things.

The reason I brought this up is because I think jailing someone for something we could instantly cure is also not without ethical pitfalls. They are no longer the person that committed the crime once cured. They are now in some sense an "innocent" person being confined even if the former personality in that same body committed the crime. I don't see how this is ethically much different from choosing a random person to serve the sentence. It's just optics. We're forcing this harmless person to lose their freedom for some period of time for the sake of deterrence. This deterrence isn't guaranteed either. We'll still have child abuse after we've been jailing people who would never commit this crime after treatment. On the other hand, we could consider attempting to eradicate the impulse before hand. That's not free of ethical concerns, as you point out, but I don't know that it's necessarily a worse trade-off for potentially never having child abuse again and never imprisoning people just to be symbols for deterrence.

If we determined that there was no other way to get such a large net gain in harm reduction and cooperation for humanity but to stop producing men, but the species could still be continued artificially, I think that's something that we shouldn't automatically disregard.

Yes, genetics will likely play some mild part in predictive tech, but in terms of changing bits of the brain, neural techniques are liable to come on in leaps and bounds over the next 50 years, if there is a next 50 years, that is.

Yes, I completely agree theoretically is doing a lot here. This is just a thought experiment to counter the idea of imprisoning people we could cure and render harmless. That being said, there's no cure for pedophilia that we know of so far, but it doesn't mean that can't change in the future.


Like I said, I'm in no way saying I have any idea of how this manifests but the source has to be physical, even if it's emergent behavior. I also completely agree it may not be possible to change something like this without affecting other behavior in ways we wouldn't intend. That's something that would have to be considered when weighing the harms.