Helge! It’s been a while.

Just for personal taxonomy (I know these aren’t the generally accepted definitions, but I use them just to make the distinction clearer in conversation), I usually use “ethics” to denote a rationally determined system of utilitarian “rules of the road” for a functioning society; they usually prioritize fairness and justice or loyalty and patronage because a principle-based system of ethics is easier to understand and maintain than having an arbitrary rule for every discrete situation. That, I think, maps well to what you describe in your last paragraph. “Morality,” by contrast, I use to denote the non-rationalized concepts of “good” and “evil.”

The kind of axiomatic moral determinations Gould uses — that some things are at their core EVIL, not just unjust or inequitable — certainly looks like a different beast. If all he meant were the kind of generally agreed-upon social standards that you describe in your last paragraph, then he would have no cause to say that the generally agreed-upon social standards of another social milieu which diverge from his own — trophy-hunting in the 1700s, racism in the American South, etc. — are illegitimate or wrong, because that definition of utilitarian moral/ethical construction can’t privilege one sufficient structure over another.

I don’t know that I ever said, or even implied, that religion CREATES moral beliefs, if by that you mean that either a person’s specific moral standards, or more importantly the entire concept of moral value itself, are downstream from imposed (external to the person) moral dogma. In fact, I think the opposite is implicitly true, and it certainly seems to be the unexamined subtext of Gould’s own writings: That he accepted morality (the idea of there being actual good and actual evil, the substrate to judging any particular act or idea as itself good or evil) as an objective reality, which nevertheless cannot be accounted for in the strict materialism which was his conscious worldview.

I haven’t read Dworkin, but from how you described his framework, it doesn’t appear to be the kind of structure that animated Gould’s moral sense. One cannot rationally construct one’s own free-floating moral framework, and then judge people in another cultural milieu two centuries before against it.

Dworkin demonstrates how he builds a self consistent axiomatic framework of moral beliefs. As you say, its foundations are sort of free-floating, detached from an externally imposed edict, because of Hume’s Guillotine: You cannot get from is to ought.

I don’t believe that you’re correct in crediting religion with creating moral beliefs. People need moral beliefs to live together, and when you get enough people in one place someone has to write the moral beliefs down in case someone disagrees. It’s as simple as that.

It is better missed.

Can you think of a situation in which properly using the three criteria above would leave the need for punishment (the state taking vengeance) unfulfilled?

Okay, that’s fair enough. But I don’t think we can leave punishment ENTIRELY out of the equation. Less important than protecting the public, but I think it still needs to be a recognized goal.

I don’t dispute that. However, deciding what “proper” punishment is for an infraction (or whether a punishment is even proper — insert the lyrics for “Only a Lad” here) is increasing hard in a pluralistic society; there isn’t a schedule of weregild that we can all agree upon.

I think as well that there ISN’T an instance (certainly not one I can conceive of) in which “someone is highly unlikely to commit another crime, and punishing them wouldn’t stop any third parties from committing similar crimes.” Those people who would commit a one-off crime for a specific circumstance that’s not likely to ever come up again (I’m now having flashbacks to ALL of the Columbo TV-movies) are the most likely to be deterred by the awareness of a severe penalty if they’re caught.

Let me be clear: I have as strong a visceral urge to feed vile monsters into a slow woodchipper feet-first as much as the next guy, and as I indicated, I have no problem with the death penalty as such. But if we concentrate on punishment as the PRIME motivation for criminal penalties, we’ll always get caught up in questions of ultimate culpability vs. societal influence, mental health, etc. Whereas if we were to privilege the principles above in making decisions about criminal penalties, then the issue of punishment would largely take care of itself, either by being fulfilled in a penalty prescribed by adherence to those principles, or by having the action requiring the punishment curtailed in the first place.

For instance: Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr., the piece of human excrement who killed Iryna Zarutska at random, was walking free because he was released with a pinky promise by a judge who had relied entirely on whether “punishment” was warranted for previous infractions and whether someone with his mental problems was truly culpable. Whereas if she had used the criteria above in rendering her judgment, it’s very likely that Brown simply would not have been at liberty to to what he did. And if his current committed to a federal medical facility (due to being adjudged as incompetent to stand trial) were committed first and foremost not to the stated goal “restoring his competency” but of protecting of the innocent at large, then the odds of him every being able to commit further atrocities would be greatly reduced.

Of course, the problem of getting from where we are the the adoption of the principles above is gargantuan enough to render the thought experiment almost entirely hypothetical with the application of a flux capacitor. But even in cases where there’s no reasonable means to effect a societal change, we should still devote thought to formulating what a more perfect society would look like, so that we can recognize incremental changes in that direction.

It’s not necessarily a noble goal or a logical goal, but there’s something in us that demands, “When one among you harms another, he must be punished.” A big part of what makes society works and keeps it from devolving into feuds and vendettas is the bargain that, if someone is wronged, the state will take vengeance on that individual’s behalf.

Even if it’s someone is highly unlikely to commit another crime, and punishing them wouldn’t stop any third parties from committing similar crimes, I doubt anyone personally involved would be satisfied with, “Oh, well. You get your one free murder. As long as you don’t do it again, you can go through life happily.” That would likely lead to a lot of crimes having a de-facto death penalty, as the victim or someone close to him decides that it’s time to make use of HIS free murder…