My feelings move towards the ultimate responsibility is on society (all of us) for not creating a better system. Though there are always going to be people that just don’t give a fuck.
Laws are created by society. Therefore, crime is defined by society.
As a result, and in purely technical terms, society is completely responsible for crime.
Without society, there could be no crime.
I mean, we do have the phrase “Take justice into your own hands”
You can do wrong by someone that receives retribution, without a law being present for it.
Laws just make that much, much, much less murky.
Again, purely technically speaking, that may not actually be crime. It may be wrong and you may feel justified in revenge, but it’s not crime unless something defines it as crime.
This might be assuming there’s no such thing as natural law. I guess some might argue there is a natural law, but breaking it doesn’t amount to a crime. In either case it’s somewhat contested in moral and legal philosophy circles.
I agree. That’s why I tried to stick to “in technical terms.”
Philosophically, could it be seen as “criminal” to take a stranger’s food if everyone lived solitary lives apart from each other? Would the word “crime” even exist, or would there be an equivalent term unrelated to societal laws?
Additionally, language norms can unintentionally cloud meaning. Did OP mean “would it be considered wrong,” but say “crime” because that’s how they perceive the idea?
It’s too easy to infer all kinds of meaning from a few words. So, at least in this case, it seemed best to be as literal and specific as possible, based on how OP asked. Even if it didn’t make for a satisfying answer
wE LiVe In A sOcIeTy
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.
shit question. it’s a spectrum society provides broad trends and forces, which influence individual humans, but those individual humans are what make up an define society. it’s a feedback loop.
A society is defined by it’s individuals, as are it’s laws.
Ideally, the laws of a society represent the will of all it’s individuals, since that is impossible, we have to go for the best case instead, meaning that the laws of a society represent the will of the vast majority of it’s individuals at best.
So we have society creating laws that fits most people, but not everyone.
This means that some people will break the laws, we can generalize those people into two groups:
A. Those who break the law because they want to.
B. Those who break the law because they need to.
Regarding group A, I’d mostly see them as responsible for their own actions, but as with other incidents, an investigation to the root cause of why the person broke the law, and if the law is fair and just.
Regarding group B, if someone needs to break the law, then it is a failiure of society as it has failed to give the person proper support to give the person an option other than to break the law.
A little bit of each. Society ultimately structures how we interact with each other, it creates the motivations and incentives that we work under. We all want money because that’s what society has told us we need in order to live the kinds of lives that society tells us are worth living. This creates the incentive that money is more important than almost anything else in life, it can be worth more than other people’s lives. Then the individual makes these sorts of decisions everyday, “What am I willing to do to get more money?” You’ve got some people willing to injure, kill, and/or destroy in order to get more money to live lives of luxury. You’ve got billionaires and executives willing to make thousands/millions of peoples’ lives horrible and suck up every available dollar just so they can increase the digits on their net worth in their eternal pissing match with each other.
Ultimately it’s “society”, but who decides what “society” will prioritize? We’re all wrapped up in all of this, but we’re also all prisoners to it as well, so I’m not sure how you can separate out the individual from society. Certainly the people at the top play a big part in the whole thing, and they don’t really have much incentive to change anything, since it’s all working pretty well from their point of view.
I don’t want money because of some illusion about what others expect my life to resemble; I want it because it’s the most effective way to meet my basic needs of food, housing, and healthcare.
I like this viewpoint. Out of curiosity what would your response be if someone asserted that individuals shape a society and as such crime is the fault of individual for either failing to align with society or failing to influence society to change thus making the crime unnecessary/or non-existent?
Individuals shape society to a degree, but alot of society has been imposed on us from the get-go. We were born into this world and our morals are drilled into us by our families, our schools, our churches, and our social circles. An individual can attempt to contradict that, but they’re facing a steep hill to climb to affect change. Society changes super slowly and it kind of just moves on its own from sheer historical inertia at this point, so just because an individual wants to change something doesn’t mean they’ll ever be able to get enough momentum going to get it changed. There’s definitely alot of crimes that should be unnecessary, like “vice crimes” where it’s mostly just people enjoying themselves. I was just reading another thread where somebody had asked about “How would you survive if you were homeless with no job, family, or means of support?” or something similar. And one of the best comments was from someone who went through listing alot of the survival tips they had for what you needed to do to live as a homeless person in America. Some of the tips seemed to rely on crime (shoplifting), people in extreme situations like that have to do whatever they can to survive. I think without a proper support system, we as a society are forcing people into situations like that where they don’t feel like they have an option. If people have to choose between committing a crime and eating or starving, they will do what they need to and that’s more society’s fault there.
That’s in extreme cases (though not as extreme a case anymore as the price of living has gotten so much more expensive lately). For other crimes, like spouses murdering each other or high-income executives committing fraud or politicians doing bribes or whatever, those crimes may be more on the individual. Certainly society influences these things (like high-stakes marriage relationships or company stock prices or whatever the crime is about), but often people in those situations probably have actual choices in the matter, they’ve specifically chosen to do a crime with full knowledge of what the consequences are.
Well put! Thanks for the thoughtful comments
I believe in free will, so the individual. There’s plenty of nuance to it though, what kind of crime, why they did it, etc. But ultimately it’s the person’s choice to do it.
That depends on what you consider a choice, “Steal food or starve to death”, “Be in debt or kill yourself” are “choices” too but they are a far cry from a rational, realistic choice. The way you phrase it made it seem like any choice of crime, no matter how ridiculous the alternative is, a fault of the person.
If that is the case, I would have to disagree. Sometimes it is truly the fault of the society for not Providing any rational alternatives or ways to attain it without crime. The two primary choices that come to mind are food and medicine.
Trying to pin ultimate responsibility for crimes onto either individuals or society seems like a false dichotomy.
Individuals are responsible for individual crimes, society is responsible for crime.
I’d say it depends on the crime
Some crimes are committed due to lack of options (or opportunities) some are interpersonal crimes for any number of reasons
It’s an incredibly complex topic that really must be faced on a per crime basis and hell even a per individual commiting the crime
It depends on the perspective from which you’re asking the question.
Here’s a question from a sociological perspective:
What laws, policies, and programs would lead to fewer people developing drug addictions and engaging in theft to obtain drugs?
There are answers to those questions. We know people with stable housing, good jobs, strong social networks, and mental health care are less likely to get addicted to drugs and commit crimes to fuel their addiction.
Here’s a question from an individual perspective:
Should Johnny be punished for cutting catalytic converters off other peoples’ cars to fund his meth habit?
I think most of us would say yes, even if he wouldn’t have developed the meth habit if his life didn’t suck due to factors beyond his control.
He shouldn’t be punished vengefully, he should be rehabilitated and helped to overcome his addiction and get better life circumstances.
Since slavery was legal, and the holocaust was legal, and so many other abhorrent things were legal, I give very little weight to the concept of “legality”, and therefore “criminality”.
They are tools to keep poor and otherwise marginalised people “in line”, created by those who also put themselves above these rules.
This is an important thing for people to understand.
“Crime” doesn’t always equate to “wrongdoing.”
Freeing a slave may sometimes be illegal, but it’s always the right thing to do.
Exactly
Both, and random chance!
There’s a lot of research demonstrating that external factors have a pretty major impact on criminal behavior (nutrition, socialization, etc during developmental years, as examples). So society plays a role.
If you’re interest in reading, Robert Sapolsky’s Behave is pretty long and a little heavy, but a great, reasonably broad view of the things that make us tick from a bunch of different lenses. It’s tied-ish with Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow as my favorite non-fiction, and looks more at social factors like the example above. I haven’t read Determined yet, and really doubt it’s going to convince me not to believe in free will, but his underlying base of knowledge is legit.
Some of both, and depending massively on the crime. On one hand, if someone is stealing food to survive, thats on the society. On the other hand, if someone randomly decides to murder and eat a person, with no prior history, theres not much a society can do to prevent it. In general, for the sorts of crime that first come to mind with the word, I’d say its far more society’s responsibly (or at least that of those ruling) as the average crime is usually victumless or only impacts those who won’t feel it, and more extreme crimes are usually preventable with proper systems. That said, a lot of political and white collar crime is more the responsibility of the individual as there is rarely any need for it aside from unrestrained greed or cruelty.
In a way, yes to both. If a society goes into a recession that causes people to be unable to eat (or does a murderous rampage of starvation like under Stalin or Mao) and people steal to eat that’s directly caused by society.
But, if you have free will and the mental capacity to make your own decisions, especially here in a Western society that generally doesn’t require you to steal to eat, it’s on the individual.
Responsibility occurs in proportion to the ability to stop or control a thing. Individuals are responsible for most of their crimes but not all. Society is to blame for some crime but not all.
