Legal Theory and Criminal Law is getting me woozy half the time, I must be falling ill from reading...but nonetheless, I shall survive all these. (well hopefully, still in one piece by the time we're done with the exams.)
And let me clarify my thoughts a little. (Bear with me, yeah.)
Subjectivity vs Objectivity
Obviously the whole purpose of the exercise here is to determine which approach is actually better so that we don't end up netting all the fish in the sea, while innocent or guilty or that we dont get anything at all, meaning anarchy.
Objective standards are pro-state and pro-interests of the majority. Subjective standards focus on the offender's actual thinking itself. Personally I prefer the objective standard ( that is till the day I become the offender haha.) because it makes more sense to secure public interests than defend a person who is tainted with criminal acts.(Frankly and bluntly speaking, I am not too concerned with how tainted or untainted the person is; once one decides to deal in shady business, they better be prepared for the worse possible results.)
Besides if there is to be a subjective standard applied, then there might as well be no code of punishment for crimes because the individual standards of rights and wrongs are too different to form a common standard. While carnibalism may seem horrific to us, some man-eating tribesman in some unknown part of the world(I wouldn't want to find out where.) may think it a normal act of their lives. Even in one society itself, especially since in the modern world, the society is usually a pural one, there are bound to be markedly different standards between groups of people. Are we then supposed to judge them seperately? Hmmm.
Then there is the problem of enforcement if we were to take the subjective approach. It is not easy to find out what one truly thinks or knows unless one chooses to tell/confess.But in most cases, criminals are not your everyday-mr-nice-guy types who will get guilt trips and end up confessing whatever they have done. In such cases, we would be letting the criminal off without punishment just because the smart guy refuses to admit to his crimes, wouldn't we?
And then finally, all these subjectivity and freedom of the individual nonsense are western imports. "But so is our entire legal system." you say. True enough, but that does not reverse the fact that we are asian and therefore have our own set of standards. We may import the system of the west because it has its merits of efficency and so on, but if we do not apply our own standards to that system then our jurisidiction would be like the car imported from freezing Siberia for use in sunny Singapore - looks like it can be used, but will blow up during actual usage.
In our part of the world, interests of the society are always more important than that of the individual. This is not to say that we are all oppressed people, in fact the promotion of the greater good will in turn benefit ourselves, will it not? Besides the bad points that come with excessive freedom given to pple in the west has been clearly shown - they have no solid standards of moral behaviour (just look at the way they treat marriage and divorce.) and there can be no general safety of the public (campus- shootings and the crime rates.)
Quoting a teacher of mine from long ago, "freedom does not equate to license". We may have the freedom to do whatever we want untill that freedom results in harm of another person. Therefore, objectivity is the best way to go :)
oh my, can't believe I was crapping so much.
Anyway, back to work...
