The Myth Of A Debt To Society

If good and evil exist, and if an act like theft is evil, and if this act deserves a legal penalty (whatever it is), there could still be no such thing as a debt to society unless a theft somehow involved directly stealing from the society as a whole.  All three of the ideas introduced by "if" can only be assumed by humans because epistemological limitations prevent us from proving that they are true, but setting aside this important fact, an action like many forms of theft only victimizes the victims, not any unrelated party.  Even if there are repercussions for people far removed from the actual victim in a given case, the offense is not against them.  And anyone else in the community/nation who is not impacted whatsoever could not possibly be owed a debt of any literal or figurative kind by the perpetrator who did not target or impact them.

Sometimes, an offense would directly affect a secondary figure.  An invested spouse or dependent child of a murder victim would absolutely be impacted in a much more indirect way, though they were neither killed nor (possibly/probably) the intended victim.  However, murder is still a deed done against the particular person whose life is prematurely ended by the murderer.  Many acts which qualify as crimes under American or Biblical law do not necessarily victimize anyone else past the offended party.  Whenever this is the case, even if all three ultimately unverifiable factors mentioned in the first paragraph apply, the very concept of all crime incurring a debt to society is utterly false.

Whoever is not victimized directly or indirectly could not be owed a debt of any kind, whether one of literal restitution/damages or some sort of nonliteral debt that can only be paid by some other penalty.  Some logically possible actions could genuinely victimize an entire society, but this only entails extremely specific acts in very particular circumstances.  The idea that crime creates some automatic moral debt to society is a philosphical myth, and not just because a community criminalizing something does not mean it is morally correct to make it illegal or impose a punishment.  The rest of society beyond the victim(s) is purely irrelevant.

According to American legal/ethical philosophy, crime itself does incur a debt to society that can only be paid by, in many instances, spending time incarcerated.  How does the moral need for incarceration follow from the concept of a debt to society, as illogical as the latter concept already is?  It absolutely does not follow, not in itself, and thus anyone who believes in the justice of incarceration could only do so on the basis of cultural conditioning, sheer personal preference, or some asinine epistemological leap they legitimately find philosophically persuasive past simply preferring that it would be true.  What a delusional person!  Of course, this position is very mainstream in the United States.  The idea that locking someone away from the public, perhaps in very dangerous conditions, somehow repays or could repay a nonexistent debt to an entire nation is not exactly unpopular (how would this fulfill the repayment to those outside the jail/prison anyway?).

The non sequitur of imprisonment being the way to resolve the alleged debt to society aside, American law is, as in various other ways, based on philosophical delusions.  It does not even matter if good and evil exist; no one could owe a debt to someone for what the former did to a truly unrelated party.  Living in the same city, state, or nation as a victim of a crime does not make someone else a victim by extension due to geographical proximity, shared citizenship, or symbolic association.  Only the victim could be owed a debt if some actions warrant repayment, whether literal or otherwise.  This really is quite easy to demonstrate.