Criminal Behavior Theories
Identify the strengths and weaknesses of the criminal behavior theories. Which theory do you think is most applicable to the cause of criminal behavior today and why? Support your answer.
Criminal Behavior Theory
When crime is truly the product of rational choice, the offender commits the act for reasons of personal gain or gratification. His or her behavior is under his or her complete control. How and to what degree, however, might other factors intrude on and compromise his or her ability to exercise free will? The response to this question has come in the form of innumerable theories, each purporting to explain criminal behavior in terms of specific factors. Broadly speaking, criminal behavior theories involve three categories of factors: psychological, biological, and social. In fact, human behavior is the product of complex interactions among many factors.
he discussion on God’s existence has been a very controversial topic throughout our the history of mankind. In order to fully understand God’s existence, we must first have a wide range of knowledge and understanding on the way of being and existence. The study of metaphysics has allowed us to understand and think about the first principles of things and how they came to be and exist. Some philosophers who discussed their opinions and reasoning for the support on the existence of God were Rene Descartes and Saint Thomas Aquinas.
It is important that we demonstrate the existence of God because if we did not attempt to establish his existence, he would exist only in our minds. In this essay, I will be writing about how the philosophers Rene Descartes and Saint Thomas Aquinas proves the existence of God.
Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician and scientist. He believed in Dualism which means that the body and mind works together as one. He believed that the body and mind work like a machine and that the pineal gland was the connecting point between the body and the mind. He believed in materialism which is the belief that all things work like machines. He used something called “the method of doubt”. This means that he wanted to find a foundation of knowledge that is so secure it could stand up against the doubts of the strongest skepticism. In his book, “First Meditations on Philosophy”, he employs a dialogue between a person employing common sense and a skeptic. The person relying on common sense believes that there are various reliable sources of knowledge while the skeptic claims there is no secure foundation for knowledge. The two sources of knowledge that he writes about are from the senses and the intellect. Descartes presents the question: are the senses a reliable source of knowledge? This brings us to Descartes argument from Dreaming. In this theory, you compare your dreaming state with your waking state. When we are dreaming, we are not aware that we are dreaming. Things that later strike us as fuzzy, incoherent, far-fetched, or impossible, don’t seem so far within the dream. So that brings up the question: how can we be certain that the experiences we have now are reliable? However, it is worth noting that this is not Descartes own position. His own position is stated in the 6th meditation where he suggests that there are marks present in one’s waking experience in which we can distinguish waking from sleeping. The dream images we imagine are drawn from waking experience. For example, like painting, w