Wednesday, October 29, 2014

A Possible Disposition for Murder

Is it possible for a person to be born who is almost fated to commit a murder due to certain mental triggers or conditions? For example, we saw a movie about Adam Lanza, who perpetrated the Sandy Hook shootings. He could have been screened and put into a mental hospital before he went on a rampage. To take this idea to an extreme, imagine a technologically advanced society that can scan people's brains and determine their capacity to commit a crime instantly. Assuming this technological system has no flaws, every person in society could be scanned and their mental state would instantly be uploaded to a supercomputer which classifies people as harmless or dangerous. If Adam Lanza was scanned by this system, he would immediately be detained and held as a dangerous person. This system is obviously impossible in America with its current Constitution, but as a system it would certainly be flawed. We have seen a documentary about a man who has psychopathic tendencies but manages to live a normal life. This system would detect the man, flag him as dangerous, and he would be dealt with without being able to live a normal life as he does now. The question is: "Is it worth sacrificing the freedom of people with violent predispositions for the sake of a peaceful society?" I say that a system like this is a terrible idea for two main reasons. The first is that if humans can build and establish a system, humans can also find loopholes and ways to break the system down. The second is that people could also be unjustly detained when they have a possibility to lead perfectly normal lives despite certain warning flags in their brains. In a sense, somebody has to be removed from society. Either a few normal people via death by murder or thousands of "irregulars" via detention. Death is extremely dark and extremely cruel, but in the grand scheme of things, stripping the freedom of thousands of people just because of the way they were born is even more evil.

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