Minority Report: Eradicating Culpability and the Burden of Moral Training from Society

The deceptively named Minority Report movie, a classic by the way, is one of those movies that addresses sin (and its potential eradication) in society. What if we could technologically (with some mystical help) eliminate murder or very serious crimes? In the film, with the help of special humans with precognitive abilities, we are able to foresee certain crimes, and have empowered agents of the department of pre-crime to intervene before the crime occurs. The premise is that these precog humans see the future, not a possible future. Thus, the commission of the actual crime is a given.

Of course, this raises all sorts of moral questions, including the question of human autonomy and some form of determinism. Is it not possible that people can change their minds at the last moment in process of commiting a potential crime? On the other hand, why risk only assigning culpability when it's too late? If we knew for a fact that someone was more than likely going to commit murder then, given the consequences, shouldn't we err on the side of preventing crime?

Worthwhile ethical discussion, but there's also the broader issue. Our primary natural quest is to optimize our flourishing in a society that is structured with the right balance of restrictions and constraints that sets condition for the most people flourishing. (Certainly not our supernatural or spiritual quest.) And in so doing are we not muting or undermining the very faculty that would enable us to rise to a greater consciousness of good and freedom? If society takes away the burden of self-regulation and attainment of the good, and, instead, sets up structures that relieves us of the moral training that comes from understanding the world (raw and brutal) as it is, and learning to eventually rise above it, then do we not remain moral infants?

Perhaps this is too weirdly Hegelian in the sense that the coincidence of theses and antitheses yield a new equilibrium that introduces a new stage of human development and consciousness. And it perhaps ignores the pesky little detail that is original sin and our inability to do the good we know to do because of sin that reigns in us. Or it might diminish the role of grace that signals that in our wretchedness, the power to be actualized comes from beyond, from God through the cross of Christ.

Yes, I grant all that. Still, it stands to reason that there is a sense of moral good and evil that is/can be trained and can habituate us to seek and cherish the good. The analogy works in many other sphere's of life. If we never knew danger, suffering, death, pain, we wouldn't learn to avoid them, innovate around them, cooperate to avoid them, etc. 

Now, this may be the paradox of civilized society. It builds a city for us, gives us comforts, and dulls our senses, ultimately rendering us impotent and dependent on cultural technology. We grow in one sense, but diminish in the most important sense of all. Perhaps this is why Babel had to be destroyed.