I am not saying murderers and insanely violent people have a right to live as they want, in complete freedom. I am saying we should create them, then jail them.
The last thing we should want is to be a society that has eradicated these monsters. Specifically, we should never want the surest death of all -homostasis. If we somehow intervened in everyone's upbringing and had uniformly great outcomes for all, that would be a society that had cutoff the non-linear dynamism needed for evolution and iterative adaptation. It would mean certain jeopardy for that society. They would be uniformily healthy and happy as seen from within, and easily crushed by an external society capable of novel mutations.
In essence - homeostasis is terminal.
We are successfully producing our murderers and other monsters through, essentially, freedom. By this I mean the solitary lives we in the USA have made possible. With this solitude comes the ability to devise deeply personal perspectives on the meaning of life, and what is a proper pursuit of happiness. With this many people coming up with their unique internal self, the variety is staggering, and scary.
We don't want the scary ones, but they are byproduct of creating the totally original ones that are useful.
So we should accept that the monsters are steadily going to be produced, and accept that we have only two choices: they are left to be free and pursue their goals, or stop them from having their freedom through incarceration or death.
We seem to currently have a third way of dealing with the monsters, by desiring to intervene and convert them to another kind of person. Reform. This impulse goes back thousands of years, to religions as diverse as Christianity and Taoism.
This is wrong. There is no right to convert people, to change their current deep seated goals. It is right to stop them, but not right to change their internal selves.
Our laws are not discovered absolute truths. They are not operating within a moral plane, or aiding a moral agenda. They should be a constellation of rules that output a society that has a coherent sustaining organization with power over its environment, and power to project goals and control over ever more territory (such as outer space), and power to project goals and control into the future.
We have missplaced relativism. The proper place to allow relativism is allowing that a person with violent designs is a perfectly functioning person. Where we should have less relativism is in the belief in our wider social enterprise....this sustaining organization of people, materials, machines and infrastructure that projects power over the environment and the future. We should be unflinching in liking its power, and seeing this power as a better thing, and not having that power as a worse thing.
We only jail the monsters because of their threat to the rest of us who want to exist for some time in this sustained culture, not because the monsters are psychologically wrong.
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