No. You finally answered after several pages of refusing to say what letting the guilty escape punishment teaches. Until then, you kept evading the actual point by answering what should happen, rather than what such allowance teaches, and only at the end admitting that it ‘would set a bad precedent.’ Even now, your denial is just more evasion meant to distract from the issue.
‘Sufficient development’ sounds neat until you actually try to explain what it means and where the line is. Sufficient to know what one is doing? Sufficient to know it is wrong? Sufficient to grasp every consequence? In reality, it is an arbitrary standard with no clear grounding in the real world. It is the kind of idealistic abstraction that does not survive contact with reality.
And reality is precisely the problem. Criminals do not politely respect your abstractions. They exploit them. They will either use others who fall below the threshold as tools, or try to present themselves as falling below it in order to evade serious punishment.
That is exactly what happens once accountability becomes a sliding scale: the threshold stops functioning as a principle and starts functioning as a loophole.
Which, once again, is not the point in dispute. The question was never merely whether someone should get away with crime, but what is taught to the offender and to society when they do.
And you have now finally answered it, at least in part: letting the guilty escape punishment sets a bad precedent.
The answer should have followed immediately from the question. The point is that you refused to give the obvious answer for several pages, and only at the end conceded it.
Your position does not actually remain constant at all. What remains constant is only your desire for a standard flexible enough to bend around your emotional reactions. That is exactly why you keep reaching for phrases like ‘sufficient development’: they sound principled, but in practice they let you move the line whenever a case feels too uncomfortable.
And that is the most literal appeal to authority imaginable. Current law is one of the very things under dispute, so citing it settles nothing. The fact that current law says something does not make it just, wise, or good.
No. The fact that current law says it does not prove the law is rational rather than emotive. Law can be shaped by sentiment just as easily as by reason, and invoking ‘neuroscience’ afterward does not change that.
No. That is just a reductio ad absurdum. My example was an extreme but plausible edge case meant to test the principle at the margins. Your jump to newborns is not a serious extension of that; it is an absurd caricature dragged in to provoke revulsion instead of thought.
Nor should it take any sort of leap of imagination to see that your discomfort with the hard case does nothing to erase the point you already conceded: that letting the guilty escape punishment sets a bad precedent.
The strength of your reaction does not determine whether your conclusion is true.
And a singular case is enough to test a principle. The law is not only there to react after something becomes common, but to establish boundaries before rare evils become normalized.
The fact that it is not the norm is not a refutation of my position. It is, if anything, evidence of the stabilizing moral and legal inheritance of Christianity, which treated murder with the seriousness it deserves and helped produce the sort of ordered society you now take for granted.
And your statement also ignores places where this kind of criminality is already far closer to normal, Britain being an obvious example. Rape gangs were allowed to operate for years because authorities lacked the will to enforce justice consistently. That is what happens when law becomes selective, cowardly, and subordinate to social pressure.
By the time such things become common, the foundations have already been eaten away.
It supports my position by showing that the hard case is not imaginary, and that your attempt to dismiss it as absurd was premature.
Yes, because to do otherwise would set a bad precedent, as you already admitted it would.
And that is the part you keep trying to run away from. Once you admit that letting the guilty escape punishment sets a bad precedent, then your whole case becomes a plea for an exception, not a refutation of the rule.
Emotional revulsion at a hard case does not refute the principle of equal justice.
Not fully understanding what one has done and its ramifications does not make the case better. If anything, it makes it worse, because it shows how little moral foundation stands between that person and grave evil.
That is part of what the law is for. As Paul says, the law is a tutor. It teaches people where the lines are, and it teaches them that certain acts have certain consequences.
But once the law becomes vague enough, people stop learning clear moral boundaries and start learning that accountability is negotiable.
And when you stop punishing grave crimes appropriately, the law stops teaching restraint and starts teaching lawlessness.
Or, as you finally admitted, it sets a bad precedent.
That's just a string of assertions, not a demonstration of how or why. If the position were truly illogical and indefensible, you would show where the logic fails instead of just piling on adjectives. So far, all you have actually done is concede the very principle you were resisting: that letting the guilty escape punishment sets a bad precedent.
You have moved from arguing the issue to insinuating that anyone who disagrees with you must be emotionally deficient.
In other words, just more evasion to distract from the issue.
