On Fri, 1 Oct 1999, Michael S. Lorrey wrote:
> Spike Jones wrote:
> >
> > YES! I have long advocated freezing murderers and rapists.
> > Then we can thaw them whenever we get the technology to
> > cure whatever is wrong with their bioware that caused the
> > crime to start with. spike
>
> What about those criminals who had nothing of any significance wrong
> with their internal bioware, but the wrongness was in the government,
> culture, etc. that put them there.....
>
Mike, please note that Spike said "murderers and rapists". Those crimes are crimes of violence against people. I started the thread with the assumption that analysis of the criminal DNA database(s), could yield the presence of genes that may be significantly different from the average person in the population (let us call these violence predisposition genes).
This thread is about the fundamental questions of is there such a thing as innate (bio-defective) induced violence or even a predisposition for such tendencies. Further it is about whether correcting those predispositions would be a "good" or a "bad" thing.
Do you have a "right" to be violent and hurt people? Do you say, it is ok to let the blind people stay blind or the deaf people stay deaf, but *not* to let the violent people stay violent?
To make sure the thread doesn't get polluted -- THIS THREAD IS ABOUT A HYPOTHETICAL UNIVERSE IN WHICH GUNPOWDER DOESN'T EXPLODE AND PROJECTILE WEAPONS HAVEN'T BEEN INVENTED.
So, say we have a person with violence predisposition genes who *also* happens to be a martial arts master. Should I have to spend years of my life studying martial arts just so I can defend myself against this person who may assault me for no reason other than the fact that I've got a red car and s/he hates the color red? Should not the members of the society be able to band together and collectively say -- "This person is a threat to the peace and prosperity of our community and as a result their violence predisposition must be corrected".
If you legally *mandate* correcting violent tendences (or as was suggested, perhaps somebody's stupidity), doesn't that put you on the slippery slope for *mandating* the correction of anything the majority views as "unacceptable".
You can argue that there may be strong influences on the genetic makeup by government, society, etc. but we are fundamentally talking about people "programmed" (through no choice of their own) to have predispositions that express themselves as violence against society.
Now, your point may be well taken in that if one does agree that correcting violence predispositions is allowable (just as we agree that imprisonment or in some cases execution is allowable), then we had better be *very* careful about using hard scientific evidence that that is really the case.
Robert