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No Pardon For Turing
mikejuk writes "A petition signed by over 21,000 people asked the UK Government to grant a pardon to Alan Turing. That request has now been declined. A statement in the House of Lords explained the reasoning: 'A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence. He would have known that his offence was against the law and that he would be prosecuted. It is tragic that Alan Turing was convicted of an offence which now seems both cruel and absurd-particularly poignant given his outstanding contribution to the war effort. However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times.'"
ensure instead that we never again return to those times
Then perhaps pardoning him would be a step in the right direction?
Summation 2
They are actually spot on with this. What entitles Alan Turing to a pardon above all others that endured the same fate? The statement is clear and regrettable, and effectively a pardon to all rather than a select few - it's just not a formal pardon. If they had to do it with every past law that was deemed unfair by modern standards they would waste a lot of time, especially in the United Kingdom.
rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times
This train of thought is not so stupid at all. "Pardoning" Turing would help no one, and would not increase his glory. The glory he has, he has in our minds.
QFD
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Yes, because a posthumous pardon would sort out his soul.
It is a sensible and consistent approach in the UK justice system that pardons are not issued if the person in question was fairly convicted by the laws of the time. Pardoning him would not undo what was done, he's long dead and unlikely to get better, the government has already apologised for the way he was treated and all this would really do is help to assuage our guilt.
The government owes Turing's family and the rest of the country, even the rest of the world an enormous apology.
Already done
Really, I think that's all the government can do. I suppose a pardon might make us feel better but it's not going to do much to help. I propose we simply recognise him as a pioneer and as an important part of the codebreaking at Bletchley Park.
Instead of retroactively correcting the injustices of the past, how about we look at who is suffering injustice today? What are we doing today that future generations will be appalled at? We still persecute people for making harmless personal choices. Let's stop.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
to judge people from a different age. Values change over time. Would it be just to posthumously find Thomas Jefferson guilty of slavery when it was legal in his time? There's probably something each of us is doing today that in 100 years will be looked back on as a hideous crime (keeping pets? Scolding our kids?) and there are things we consider crimes now that in 100 years they won't believe anyone was ever so primitive as to believe it's a crime (drug use? Assisted suicide?).
Sometimes I think if pedophiles will be accepted by society and people will remember this time as persecuting them. So I would not judge the laws and the people of that time. Things change, what was once common (ancient Greece) becomes unlawful and then becomes normal again.
And if reddit/atheism and Dawkins are anything to go by its adherents are basically the same rabid bigots that in the past would have been running the Inquisition in Spain "because we KNOW we're right!"
Fundamenal Christianity and Rabid Atheists in the mold of Dawkins have basically the same mind set. Closed minded, intolerant of difference and utter certainty that they are right and that if you disagree with them then you are in some sense damned.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
The term "pardon" means forgiveness of a crime, so the fact that Turing was properly convicted under the law back then isn't an obstacle to a pardon it is a requirement; if he hadn't been convicted, he couldn't be pardoned now.
Furthermore, you pardon someone when you find that his positive contributions have outweighed the harm he has caused. For Turing, that is true not only because of his immense positive contributions, but because what he was punished for then is now not even considered worthy of punishment.
If anybody ever was deserving of a pardon, it is Alan Turing. And you really have to wonder about the motivation of the UK government for denying it.
It's a lack of belief system.
Unlikely. As has been pointed out in about a thousand places every time there a comparison between homosexuality and pedophilia, two homosexual men (or women) are adults capable of informed consent. A child is not and never will be able to provide informed consent, so there is unlikely to ever be a situation where children are seen as acceptable sexual partners. There's nothing wrong with homosexuality unless you accept that the only purpose of sex is procreation. Anyone who has ever had sex with another consenting adult outside of marriage and without the purpose of reproduction has done the functional equivalent of homosexual sex. Only rapists have done the function equivalent of child sex.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
This topic is an obvious cheerleading piece for political correctness.
We all know what we're "supposed" to say.
As a result, it is not only boring, but works as a form of oppression to exclude any opinion which does not agree with the "correct" one.
This is in contrast to science, where we explore experimental results, make tentative conclusions, and explore those through a heuristic process.
Sure, it's no longer as popular to hate on homosexual people as it was in the past, but we have all new forms of hatred and intolerance which our modern society deems acceptable, and which will be just as subject to the next generation's ridicule and derision.
Atheism is the new red-headed step-child.
Hold on, hating on religion is popular, not hating on not-religion. Grow up.
Pardon's have been granted to soldiers shot for cowardice during WWI. Why is that an acceptable correction of an injustice, but this not? Cowardice was just as illegal as 'gross indecency' at the time, yet that was overlooked in favour of righting a grievous wrong.
What a bloody disgrace.
Make public domain all his works. And I don't mean his manuscripts which are poorly catalogued and barely readable (and unpractical to read, as they are scanned as bitmaps). What I mean is, make public domain his published papers - all of them. It's a damn shame that in 2012 we still can't access his last paper "Solvable and unsolvable problems", published in Penguin Science News 31, in 1954!
And for those who don't know, "Solvable and unsolvable problems" may be Turing's most important work, one that casts a dark cloud over our misplaced certainties.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
In law, respect for the process is paramount, even when the process produces results that are obviously absurd or unjust. There was no procedural problem with Turing's abuse by the system, so there is nothing to change.
In science, respect for results is paramount. If there is a reproducible result that shows the textbooks to be wrong, they will eventually be changed.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Instead of re-writing history, perhaps the crown could officially acknowledge the tragedy and point to the laws involved. We should never forget what happened to Turing. In this way, perhaps Turing's experiences will not have been for naught, and we can say a prayer for the closeted-bigoted-homophobic-christian-neanderthal-fagots.
Presentism is a bad thing. We should never forget where we came from. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, we accrued to knowledge we have today at a tremendous cost to our ancestors.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Doesn't Turing represent a flaw in your logic?
Being homosexual, he is still responsible for some of the greatest advances in recent human history. Thus he, by default, has done more and benefited humanity more despite his "notable handicap" than most of the straightest of men. This is in contrast to, say, (oh Godwin strike me where I stand) Hitler, a heterosexual enough man who has managed to actually thin the human herd quite a bit through systematic execution and warmongering.
Or, if we need an example of a person who HAD children, why not Joseph Stalin or Kim Jong Il? Or Mary, Queen of Scots? Baby Doc? People who were trusted in positions of extreme political power and preferred the company of the opposite sex have still managed to do spectacular damage.
I'm not saying that homosexuals are beyond such cruelty, but perhaps child-rearing is not as effective a primary motivator for human compassion as you would believe. Your absolutist philosophy on the subject has a lot of gaping, horrible flaws in it... maybe it would actually be a net benefit for the world if you too did not have children.