A somewhat analogous issue has been pointed out with the juvenile justice system in the US. Ostensibly, these "softer" courts allow for a less formal approach that will help young offenders; in reality, that lack basic due process protections, hurting the innocent and helping only the guilty. Really, it's the same as any other argument for fewer protections against government: these hassles get in the way, so just get rid of them and trust us more.

> What results is an environment where boundaries are blurred and children accused of crimes are made to believe that everyone in the courtroom is there to “help” them when, in reality, defense attorneys are the only parties obligated to advocate on their behalf.

- The Marshall Project, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/05/15/give-juveniles...

But it seems wrong to put a mentally ill person in jail for crimes a lot of the time because it isn't necessarily within their control and/or they lack mens rhea.

So either we have 2 tracks or we continue to fill jails with the mentally ill even though it is obviously an incorrect application of justice.

Here we go again with the FUD: "mentally ill people often behave in ... dangerous ways". This kind of claim is harmful to the mentally ill as a group, because it is just not true. The vast majority of mentally ill people are not dangerous.

You seem to be arguing also that it is only the mentally ill who often behave in "unexpected, illogical and dangerous ways". The reality is that humans in general sometimes do that, whether or not they have a clinical mental health problem. The way your comment insinuates that the mentally ill are sub-human is repellent, but I suppose you might not even realize that you are doing that.

You may think of yourself as a model of logical, predictable and safe behaviour. I'm so tired of engineers who deny that there is any irrational element in their makeup. It is a naive thing to claim and a lame kind of deluded bid for superiority. "Others might be irrational, but not me!" Spare us. That attitude is the curse of HN and YC.

My brother was hospitalized several times because of psychosis. While he didn't actually do any physical harm to us, he did threaten verbally, wave a knife and even grabbed me by the neck. In the small town my parents live in, a person I know also has delusional thoughts, he is now in jail for stabbing his father (while sleeping). Another kid in a nearby town stabbed his mother not long ago, also with mental problems. So, I don't know what my brother is capable of, but I don't think we really need to find out and I think he is grateful that nothing bad had happened during his several episodes. One note though, every hospitalization was voluntary. They gave him a form to sign and he did. I don't know if he understood what he was singing though, but tricking people into hospitalization is somehow better for respecting human rights than forcing it.

>The vast majority of mentally ill people are not dangerous.

Now can you talk about the minority who are dangerous to themselves and others around them and what should be done about them?

> Also, the comment you're replying to did nothing to indicate that the mentally ill are subhuman.

Probably the scare-quotes around "human rights" in the first sentence when in the context of the mentally ill, and talking about protecting humans from them as if they weren't human, too.

I suppose it's ambiguous, but it's not hard to interpret it like that.

I don't believe in human rights. But about the second part: by "humans" I also meant the mentally ill. (By helping them, you're protecting them from themselves, too.)

Yes, I figured. What do you mean about not believing in human rights, though? I'm intrigued.

I mean you can't be saying you don't believe they exist, because they're a human invention. Are you saying you don't believe they should exist?

Not sure about parent commenter, but it's not that uncommon in ethical theories. A good example is Act Utilitarianism, which holds that the moral value of an act is solely based on its consequences, specifically its increase on net happiness (how to quantify that, of course, is the big problem).

Thus, a scenario could be developed, however unlikely, in which any particular action would be moral or immoral if the world was defined so that it would increase or decrease net happiness. For example, suppose we knew with certainty that one of three individuals halfway around the world was about to initiate a nuclear launch, but we had no reasonable way to find out which in the next few seconds. AU would clearly support launching a drone strike against all three--against the human right of due process--we would make two families sad, but certainly prevent millions of people around the world from being very sad.

Human rights are a fundamentally deontologist concept (as opposed to Utilitarianism, which is a consequentialist theory), basing the morality of an action on its compliance with certain standards and not on its consequences. For example, you might argue that someone has an inherent/inalienable right to do X, even though it would cause great harm or make many people unhappy. For example, you might argue someone had the right to publish classified information that would almost certainly lead to the start of a war.

Also, you say that human rights are a human inventions--some philosophers would argue that they are inherent (either from god(s), by virtue of reason, or some other external source). This is the position the US Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence take, informed by the Enlightenment tradition. They claim that certain rights are not granted by the government or society but intrinsically exist and thus must not be infringed (taking a Deist position, they cite a generic "Creator" as their source). A consequentialist could support a lesser, human-sourced set of rights that made a general rule, but not an inviolable one.

The concept of human rights says that every human who is born is entitled to this list of rights. I think that's silly for many reasons. Most important is that that list of rights is completely skewed to a Western, liberal view of the world. It's basically imperialism.