Julina I think we had this discussion before. Then I pointed to Marx's New York tribune article in which after preferring the free will thoery of punishment to the utilitarian one, he comes down on the side of fatalism; only a change of society can get rid of the constant supply of criminals. Chris A >In a message some weeks ago [#6239] Paul C wrote: > >"... relating to Lawson's argument that the reality of free human >choice implies that we can expect to see few if any regularities in the >social realm. > >"It strikes me that were this objection to be true, then it would not apply >to the social realm alone. At a microscopic level, quantum indeterminacy >implies that particles can chose which path to follow in an >non-deterministic >fashion. This would apparently rule out the detection of regularities in >the physical realm. Of course this turns out not to be the case: although >individual events are unpredictable, the mean rate of such events can >exhibit remarkable regularities." > >and then quoted Quetelet: > > One of the facts which appears to have excited the greatest > alarm, out of all pointed to in my work, is >naturally that relating > to the constancy with which crime is committed. >>From the > examination of numbers, I believed myself >justified in inferring, > as a natural consequence, that, in given >circumstances, and > under the influence of the same causes, we may >reckon upon > witnessing the repetition of the same effects, >the reproduction > of the same crimes, and the same convictions. > >Quetelet may not be the most reliable support for the standpoint that Paul >advocates (rightly so, I think). > > On other occasions he went further than his assertion here that given >social conditions produce given statistical regularities, and appeared to >suggest that statistical regularities undermined the notion of free will: > > It is society that prepares the crime; the guilty person is >only the > instrument who executes it. The victim on the scaffold is in >a > certain way the expiatory victim of society. His crime is >the fruit > of the circumstance in which he finds himself. > >There was a major 19th debate over this kind of so-called statistical >fatalism. The interesting fact about it, if one believes Hacking's account >in his "The Taming of Chance", is that belief in statistical fatalism had a >well-nigh 100 per cent correlation with Manchester-style liberalism (hence >was most popular in England and France). The defenders of free will had >their headquarters in the offices of the Prussian statistical service. > >His acid test is the career of Adolf Wagner, who started out as a liberal >and fatalist; when he converted to the professorial sort of socialism he >also recanted his fatalism (Hacking, page 130). > >Julian > 17 Bristol Road, Brighton, BN2 1AP, England
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