Diminished responsibility

An article in the news today (link) made me question what the writer's assumptions are.

The basic assumption he makes is that there is a baseline level at which human beings are responsible for their actions. Go beyond the line and you become "mad", but stay below it and you're fine.

This is an absurd idea. Surely the mental capacity of humans varies according to type and on a continuous scale. To choose a dividing line between those who are mad and those who are not is plainly wrong.

What about temporary "madness". Someone can be completely sane most of the time, but occasionally flip out and do something completely mad. How does one judge their responsibility to their behaviour? Are they allowed to diminish their responsibility for specific periods or should their sane selves control their behaviour all the time.

Even those who inhabit the "sane" areas of behaviour are occasionally "mad". What about the person who is violent at a football match. They may well have a day job and responsibility, but somehow they lose their sense sometimes. Of course their behaviour is controlled by the law (if they cause physical violence and are caught then there are penalties (pardon the pun!)), but could they not claim diminished responsibility, either through alcohol abuse or sport-related euphoria?

The only fair way to deal with this is to treat everyone the same. The punishment should fit the crime so, for example, if a murder is committed then (unless completely accidental) the punishment should be the same for everyone regardless of their mental state. This gives an added responsibility on society to protect those susceptible to bouts of violence (for example) form hurting others.

The bigger issue for me is how to deal with the concept of free will. There is still a belief that humans act under their own volition - a kind of spiritual being who controls the body. This is nonsense and it's obvious to me that we are no more than a collection of cells which interact in immensely complicated ways to create the behaviour we experience.

If this is the case then it is arguable that we all have diminished responsibility. There is not one of us alive who can claim that it wasn't their biological structure that dictated their behaviour.

This line of thought quite quickly leads to ideas like eugenics and existentialism, however it's not one which should be shied away from. I readily accept that everything I do is in response to biological reactions cause by yet more complex biological reactions and interactions.

Unfortunately this argument is theoretical and, since I don't think it would benefit many of us if our society were to change into one which fully recognised this theory, is unlikely to be made real until the average intelligence of society increases substantially. In contrast, however, our society would benefit if it were to change into one in which its members were respected along humanist lines rather than capitalist, tribalist or religious lines.

For now there is another person's life wrecked (Kerry Barker) simply because our society (the morons who govern and administer us) cannot get its act together (or is too selfish to really want to).