LogFAQs > #889646945

TheCyborgNinja posted...

anyone who deviates from acceptable behaviour in terms of infringing on the wellbeing of another has forfeited their rights as they were provided a fair opportunity for success

But do you know that they were ever given a fair opportunity for success? What if that wife beater was raised in a shitty home in an economically depressed area, with no family support and no real opportunity to succeed in life? Does that constitute a "fair opportunity"?

I've worked with kids from bad neighbourhoods before. Far more frequently than you'd think the "wife beater" behaviour is a learned one. I've seen boys who hit girls because it's what they see at home and girls who don't bother to say anything because they also see it at home and both of them assume that's just how things are supposed to work. I've seen kids who were flat out stunned - sometimes seeming insulted or hurt - when they got in trouble for doing things like that, because they were never told that it was wrong.

That's my personal suspicion on why prison models that focus on education, rehabilitation, and actually treating the prisoners with respect and decency do so well compared to those that punish - because a lot of the people who wind up there have never had that sort of behaviour modeled for them and, when actually given an opportunity to advance and succeed the way most people get from birth, they thrive. Few people are born criminals; it's no coincidence that crime and poverty so often go hand in hand.

But there's no way for the vigilante cop in your story to know that. That's what makes his behaviour so awful. Because instead of doing the moral thing and recognizing that violence is wrong, you're basically perpetrating the message that violence is OK, as long as you find the target acceptable (which, incidentally, is exactly what the wife beater thinks, so you haven't taught him anything new, just temporarily put him on the other side of the equation and made him eager to get back to being the beater rather than the beaten).
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