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To: D-fendr
Not to be at all confrontative, okay?

If you get drunk, you are certainly responsible for trashing your own judgment and reaction time and all.

But while drunk you get behind the wheel of a car and, as happened here, kill a baby in a baby carriage.

So, you didn't have a choice, not really; your faculty of choice was trashed, by John Walker or Monseigneur Courvoisier, or, ah, Mr. Night Train.

So how fair is it to lock you up for vehicular homicide when all you "really" did was DUI?

I mean it about it's being a serious question. I used to think we ought to lock up ALL DUIs for a long time no matter what happened, even if no one was hurt.

Now I'm thinking the REAL crime is renouncing what makes humans dignified, to wit: reason and a love of the good, however corrupt; and the law compliments us by ignoring our renunciation and holding us as responsible as if we weren't trashed.

Kolo is an attorney as well as a baklava-eating schismatic, so he may have a(nother) needed correction for me.

8,130 posted on 01/30/2007 6:46:52 PM PST by Mad Dawg ("It's our humility which makes us great." -- Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers)
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To: Mad Dawg
So, you didn't have a choice, not really; your faculty of choice was trashed..

Yes, in this case by the choice you made to get drunk.

I'm not saying we are totally free. We do each have capacities and we are also constricted by our conscience.

Neither are we completely determined.

Reality always lies in between completely determined and complete free. We are neither of these extremes. What I see as going off a wrong end is the on/off switch of free will/choice - believing that only saved Christians can choose to do good for example. And further that "saved" is always an instantaneous on/off, and even when some say on/off from birth.

At this extreme there is no true free will and therefor no responsibility for any of one's decisions.

8,139 posted on 01/31/2007 2:18:32 AM PST by D-fendr
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To: Mad Dawg

"Kolo is an attorney as well as a baklava-eating schismatic, so he may have a(nother) needed correction for me."

Huh? Must be the baklava. I haven't a clue what you're talking about! I am, after all, the simple grandson of simple Greek peasants! :)


8,140 posted on 01/31/2007 4:09:25 AM PST by Kolokotronis (Christ is Risen, and you, o death, are annihilated!)
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