Personal Responsibility

[MoonShadow]

If you are an advocate of personal responsibility why are you using bitcoin? It relies on everyone working together and trusting eachother to do so in order to function, almost the exact opposite of personal responsibility.

I do not have to trust you at all.  I think you don't understand bitcoin.

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[NghtRppr]

Are you saying that outside influence have no impact on the choices that a person does?

How did we go to talking about from responsibility to influence? If your friends dare you to throw a rock through a window are you no longer responsible for your actions?

And what if you didn't get lower IQ, just high agression from the lead poisoning? Then what? Still fully responsible?

Of course, unless you have some form of mental defect that makes you compulsively act out on your aggression. I covered that already.

[JA37]

No, he is saying that outside influences have no bearing on the morality of the choices, and thus little to no bearing on the type of response from society's justice systems.  Having a mental dysfunction is already a consideration in the modern concept of justice and morality, it's just not an excuse.  If you ate lead paint as a child, and then go out a do crazy things as an adult, is that cause and effect?  Clearly it is not, considering the large number of people who were also exposed to lead as children who did not grow up to be clockwork orange characters.  And the excuse about the kind of family one is born into is just as faulty, for all of the upstanding and generally successful people who came from broken, criminal and dysfunctional family influences.

No matter what kind of devil made you do it, you are still responsible for the consequences of your actions.  That is the very definition of adulthood.

So all humans are created identical and there's no way that a certain thing can influence a person more than another?
While I agree in principle, it's still argumentation I would expect from a person with a very black and white view of the world. A young, and/or very naive person.

[MoonShadow]

No, he is saying that outside influences have no bearing on the morality of the choices, and thus little to no bearing on the type of response from society's justice systems.  Having a mental dysfunction is already a consideration in the modern concept of justice and morality, it's just not an excuse.  If you ate lead paint as a child, and then go out a do crazy things as an adult, is that cause and effect?  Clearly it is not, considering the large number of people who were also exposed to lead as children who did not grow up to be clockwork orange characters.  And the excuse about the kind of family one is born into is just as faulty, for all of the upstanding and generally successful people who came from broken, criminal and dysfunctional family influences.

No matter what kind of devil made you do it, you are still responsible for the consequences of your actions.  That is the very definition of adulthood.

So all humans are created identical and there's no way that a certain thing can influence a person more than another?
While I agree in principle, it's still argumentation I would expect from a person with a very black and white view of the world. A young, and/or very naive person.

Fortunately for me, that isn't an argument that I made.  I can't even see how you came to the conclusion above by distortions of what I said, unless you just didn't bother to read them and just jumped in.  I would agree that all humans are equal under the law, but certainly not identical.  Again, it's not relevant that one person can be more influenced than another.  It's a prerequisite of an adult that s/he be able to rationally control their own deviant tendencies regardless of whether those tendencies are the result of nature or nurture.

[JA37]

Fortunately for me, that isn't an argument that I made.  I can't even see how you came to the conclusion above by distortions of what I said, unless you just didn't bother to read them and just jumped in.  I would agree that all humans are equal under the law, but certainly not identical.  Again, it's not relevant that one person can be more influenced than another.  It's a prerequisite of an adult that s/he be able to rationally control their own deviant tendencies regardless of whether those tendencies are the result of nature or nurture.

If you ate lead paint as a child, and then go out a do crazy things as an adult, is that cause and effect?  Clearly it is not ...

That's what I took issue with. It can absolutely be cause and effect for one person but not for another.
Are you responsible for your own actions? Yes.
Can blame for bad actions be shared with an enabler of those actions? Absolutely.

[MoonShadow]

Fortunately for me, that isn't an argument that I made.  I can't even see how you came to the conclusion above by distortions of what I said, unless you just didn't bother to read them and just jumped in.  I would agree that all humans are equal under the law, but certainly not identical.  Again, it's not relevant that one person can be more influenced than another.  It's a prerequisite of an adult that s/he be able to rationally control their own deviant tendencies regardless of whether those tendencies are the result of nature or nurture.

If you ate lead paint as a child, and then go out a do crazy things as an adult, is that cause and effect?  Clearly it is not ...

That's what I took issue with. It can absolutely be cause and effect for one person but not for another.
Are you responsible for your own actions? Yes.
Can blame for bad actions be shared with an enabler of those actions? Absolutely.

Another may be responsible for letting you eat lead paint as a child, but then they are primarily responsible to you, not for you.  It is not, in any capacity, the liability of society and civilization at large for your heavy metal poisoning or it's associated effects.  If society wishes to take such into consideration in the collective punishment (normally called 'justice' although it tends to be far from that) imposed upon you for your actions, society can choose to do that.  However, that in no way implies that society is at fault for your condition, nor responsible in any way for your actions.  The primary goal of modern justice systems isn't either restitution of the wronged nor even punishment of the wrongdoer.  The primary goal is to limit the liberties (both in time and scope) of the wrongdoer in order to limit the further harm to society in general that the wrongdoer can commit.  If it benefits society to commit resources to 'reform' the wrongdoer so that said wrongdoer can be released and support himself, that will happen to the greatest extent that it's actually possible.  If it's not possible, and particularly if the wrongdoer is of particular risk to the public (such as a serial murderer) then reform is dropped in favor of simply indefinite incarceration.  If someone (successfully) uses the mental incapacity defense to evade a conviction, the justice system still commits them to the care and incarceration of a state mental hospital; because anyone who has a history of causing harm and lacks the capacity of self-regulation, they are even a greater threat to society at large than the career criminal.  The nutter cannot be reformed, but the mobster commits crimes due to the pursuit of profit and the belief in his own capacity of evading the police.  If he can be convinced that the profit doesn't justify the risks, the mobster can be reformed.

[MoonShadow]

strict internalism = invalid

argumentless opinion = meritless noise

[Hawker]

strict internalism = invalid

argumentless opinion = meritless noise

QFT

[JA37]

strict internalism = invalid

argumentless opinion = meritless noise

I think the argument were in the PDF which was DL;DR.

[ansible adams]

Are you saying that outside influence have no impact on the choices that a person does?

How did we go to talking about from responsibility to influence? If your friends dare you to throw a rock through a window are you no longer responsible for your actions?

And what if you didn't get lower IQ, just high agression from the lead poisoning? Then what? Still fully responsible?

Of course, unless you have some form of mental defect that makes you compulsively act out on your aggression. I covered that already.

Environmental factors do give rise to mental defects. It's not just lead poisoning, though that is one of the most obvious. It's also malnutrition, fetal drug/alcohol exposure, even chronic harassment or witnessing violence. You were the first one to bring up influence in the OP, when you said "what anyone else does has absolutely nothing to do with your behavior." This can be taken two ways: as an empirical statement about reality or as a normative statement of your moral attitudes. On the first count it is false. On the second count, just like any normative statement it cannot be proven or falsified, but I disagree vigorously. Many crimes and disasters have multiple causes. We localize responsibility on one or a handful of people for criminal justice purposes because it's impractical to do otherwise, but that isn't the end of the story.

I think that you're trying too hard to atomize responsibility. There can be more than one party responsible for a problem. If an arsonist sets fire to a night club whose fire doors were chained shut to discourage cover charge avoidance, there are several parties responsible for the ensuing deaths. Ordered by (my opinion) level of culpability: the arsonist, the club operator who disabled safety features, the local enforcement agency who failed to catch the safety violation, and the cheapskate patrons who used working fire doors to dodge payment.

If we wish to minimize bad behavior rather than simply condemn it after the fact, it takes collective action: agencies to fund epidemiological research and uncover significant but non-obvious links between environmental factors and health/behavior. An EPA and FDA to ensure that people aren't unwillingly breathing, eating, and drinking chronic poisons. Social services to ensure that children are being fed and not abused. If you think that equivalent services have been and will be provided in the absence of government action, I will happily discuss examples.