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Quote by Robert G Ingersoll

“All nations seem to have had supreme confidence in the deterrent power of threatened and inflicted pain. They have regarded punishment as the shortest road to reformation...nations have relied on confiscation and degradation, on maimings, whippings, brandings, and exposure to public ridicule and contempt...Curiously enough, the fact is that, no matter how severe the punishments were, the crimes increased.”

Quote by Robert G Ingersoll

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Robert G Ingersoll

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“Is it not true that the criminal is a natural product, and that society unconsciously produces these children of vice? Can we not safely take another step, and say that the criminal is a victim, as the diseased and deformed and insane are victims? We do not think of punishing a man because he is afflicted with disease--our desire is to find a cure. We send him, not to the penitentiary, but to the hospital, to an asylum...instead of punishing, we pity. If there are diseases of the mind...as there are diseases of the body...and if these deformities produce what we call vice, why should we punish the criminal, and pity those who are physically diseased?”

HumanitarianismCriminal JusticeCriminal Justice Reform
Author:Robert G Ingersoll
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“Geist is Hegel’s counterpart to what figures in Aristotle as the kind of soul that is characteristic of rational animals. It is human beings whom Aristotle defines as rational animals; that corresponds to Hegel’s implicit identification of the philosophy of Geist with the philosophy of the human. On this account, then, Geist is the formally distinctive way of being a living being that characterizes human beings: in Aristotelian terms, the form of a living human being qua living human being. Kinds of soul in Aristotle’s account are not kinds of substance. Souls are not material substances; the only relevant material substances are living beings. And one would miss the point of Aristotle’s conception of the form of a living being qua living if one conceived souls as immaterial substances. So Geist in particular is not a substance, material or immaterial. The idea of Geist is the idea of a distinctive way of living a life; often it is better to speak of Geistigkeit, as the defining characteristic of that distinctive form of life and thereby of the living beings that live it.”

HumanityHegelAristotleGeistMcdowellRational Animals
Author:John Henry McDowell
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