My feelings move towards the ultimate responsibility is on society (all of us) for not creating a better system. Though there are always going to be people that just don’t give a fuck.
My feelings move towards the ultimate responsibility is on society (all of us) for not creating a better system. Though there are always going to be people that just don’t give a fuck.
First - I’m presuming that determinism is false - that human beings possess meaningful agency (if determinism is true, then there can be no agency and thus “responsibility” is incoherent).
With that presumption, then the problem with this view is that regardless of the situation, there came a moment when the individual was faced with the choice between acting in a criminal manner or not acting in a criminal manner, and they chose to act in a criminal manner. So the individual does bear “ultimate” responsibility.
It would likely make more sense, for the issue you appear to be avtually trying to address, to frame it in terms of proportion - who bears the most responsibility?
At the extreme, it could well be the case that society bears literally all of the responsibility for every single thing that led up to the moment at which the individual chose to act in a criminal manner. But that still doesn’t change the fact that at that “ultimate” moment, the individual made that choice.
If you don’t have food, haven’t for several days, don’t have funds for it, and don’t have a job (because you don’t have a house because you don’t have a job) and you steal some food, I would not say you made a personal choice to commit a criminal act. External factors can absolutely remove your choice in the matter.
Furthermore, what if you’re gay or trans or an atheist and just happen to be born in a regressive society? You’ve not made a choice to be a criminal even though your existence is criminalized.
That’s not to say that ALL crimes are the fault of society. There will always be people doing illegal shit for the thrill of it (like the whole Kia car jacking thing) and there will always be people who act on their own selfish desires to a criminally fraudulent extreme (like Rick Scott overseeing the largest case of Medicare fraud in history).
And I would say that you rather have still made a choice.
It might be a constrained choice, but it is still a choice.
At the extreme, to illustrate my point: if you were to put a gun to my head and tell me that if I didn’t give you my money, you were going to shoot me, I still have a choice. Granted that it’s a severely limited choice between two bad options that exists solely because you’ve arranged matters to impose it on me, but it is still a choice.
And in philosophy, that kind of precision matters.
You need to check your privilege (the fact that you chose to reply to an example about taking food, with an example of you being given a gun and being told to shoot someone says it all, you’re not even looking to challenge your own bias and admit that you probably have no idea what starving, or being homeless, or otherwise persecuted by “the law” is like)
It is a choice to commit crimes instead of dying of starvation. I don’t blame them at all for doing so, it shouldn’t be a crime, and further it is the fault of society for criminalizing being poor and hungry instead of helping, which leads to these choices being made. In terms of who makes the choice I still contend it is the individual who does but I differ in that they bear total responsibility in what lead them to that need to make a choice between two awful options.
When humans create and enforce artificial “laws” they are responsible for turning the reasonable actions of others in to “crime”, which invalidates your point.
Framing someone as “committing a crime” if they take some available food when they’re starving, in a society designed to make them starve, and to punish them for trying to stay alive, is just upholding the oppressive fiction that is “legality”.