The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law
Chapter 7: Axes of Evil
Page 2: Responsibility
It’s purely intentional theft, so on the mens rea scale the kid is as culpable as can be. And yet few would agree that the toddler committed a crime.
It’s not so much a question of culpability as it is one of RESPONSIBILITY.
Society doesn’t want the State to punish a child who could not have known what society’s rules were in the first place.
The State speaking to reader, holding her big freaking hammer
THE STATE
The parents can discipline the kid all they want, however. (Within reason)
Well, yes, the parents can punish their child, but they shouldn´t. Since we have established that the child could not have known better, it won´t understand why it is being punished. Thus, any punishment would be, in effect, purely arbitrary.
It depends. You could say a scolding is punishment. The kid is told that what they did is bad, and it embeds a feeling of guilt in them. Things like a quick slap or a spanking also help ingrain that they shouldn’t do this by connecting the action with a feeling of pain
Or arguably teach them that getting caught is painful so don’t get caught.
Or, again arguably, teach them that you can make people do what you want by hurting them.
OR teach the kid that anyone they know may spontaneously decide to hurt them!
Trust issues, wheeeeeee!
Please see Professor Pavlov for further reading after class…
So you’re going on record saying that parents shouldn’t try to teach their kids not to steal, then?
A dog doesn’t comprehend right or wrong, but reward and punishment work on dogs anyway. For small children, it’s purely Pavlovian. The temporal proximity of their action to the response is enough to create a mental image of causality by the time the infant is old enough to even be able to grab something off a store shelf.
Pavlovian implies classical conditioning and it definitely has limits. It only really works for adaptable but unthinking kinds of responses – think emotional responses or reflexive responses – by chaining them to a repeated stimulus, positive or negative.
Emotional responses such as fear of the person administering punishment or reflexive ones such as automatically checking that you aren’t observed before doing something for which you might be punished are more likely to occur than any sort of understanding of right or wrong or desire to do right rather than wrong.
Also if all you’re trying to do with classical conditioning is train out is a reflex to grab things unthinkingly, a loud or unpleasant noise (telling off for example) would do just as well as a smack.
I think that you mean operant conditioning, not Pavlovian conditioning. Pavlovian conditioning is when you condition the subject to have certain emotional reactions to certain stimuli. Operant conditioning is when you condition the subject to act a certain way in response to certain stimuli.