touchmystuffIkillyou

When you say "work in a nightclub", what do you do there? What kind of night club?

When you say "the seeds of sin are sown early in life"... by whom? The statement suggests you're not talking about something biological, but rather environmental. So, if you mean say, the parents for example... should that lead us to punish the parents (as identifiable "sowers") in stead of/ in addition to the perpetrator?

In the context of neurological or biological determinism, what are examples of crimes that are avoidable vs. unavoidable and how should they be punished differently?

How is Pakistan likely to change if/when Sharif takes over?

Interesting, thanks.

I might suggest that if we were to decide it's desirable to punish the "sowers" it could only be after we'd developed clear understandings of the influential behaviors that lead to crime. In other words, parents have to know which behaviors are known to influence their children to crime so they can have knowledge that they are committing a possible crime themselves. Perhaps it's your science to develop and prove that knowledge.

Example: If science determines that physical abuse is a major determinant of future violent crime, then it can be established under contemporary law that when a parent abuses a child, the parent is guilty of the contemporary crime of abuse, and may also be found guilty in the future of the crime of creating the conditions for the child to be predisposed to violence and culpable for a specific act of violence by the child. A problem arises when the scientific link is not strong, and not all children who are abused grow up to commit violence. If there were a 100% link between abuse and future violence then we could punish the parents under a contemporary crime. Does any of the scientific research suggest we're even heading in the direction of such strong provable determinism?

I don't know about society, but I'd be willing to say that if one knew that physical abuse to a child resulted in the child committing subsequent violent crimes in say, 70% of cases, compared to 10% among the non-abused population, that the physical abuse is linked "enough" to warrant a charge to the abusive parent. If a parent knows that child abuse is linked (under the law) to a 7-fold increase in their child's likelihood to commit violent crime, then they are being negligent to this fact when they abuse the child.

In practice, this would likely start with the most severe cases of violence where the cause-effect relationship science is the strongest.