Oftentimes, understanding a criminal's reasoning seems to be a difficult challenge for the average citizen, as opposed to the simple cases where kids pilfer candy or breaks public property. Those minor criminal actions are easily explained through the kid's innocence, and poor upbringing from their parents who failed to teach it what is right and what is wrong. It may also be explained through the kid's lack of reasoning abilities - that it fail to understand the possible consequences of its actions.

This does not exclusively apply to kids though. If a poor and/or homeless person steal food from a store, it is fairly easy to sympathize with its actions, which will not be condemned by the average citizen in the same way as, for instance, murder would. The reason to this is because the reasoning is obvious, and the only person who can't see it (or simply choose to ignore it) would possibly be the owner of the store.

There are exceptions regarding murder as well though. If a woman is being held prisoner in a man's house (which, as we know, actually has happened on several occasions) for years, it would be no struggle to figure out why she would eventually murder him, even if she was able to escape without doing so. In fact, it may not even be considered a criminal action because of the reasoning which is as obvious as it possibly can be. I mean, in this case (where murder is not necessary, which it isn't in almost all cases), she is willing to break the laws in order to make peace in her mind. Because the awareness of him being alive would make her depressed and frustrated for the rest of her life.

The average citizen sympathize with her for perfectly understandable reasons, but what they fail to do is to sympathize with the man who held her captured. In the end, they are both criminals. Yet, only one of them receives sympathy from the public. The reason? People can only understand her reasoning, but not his. Instead, people say "He was free to do what ever he wanted, yet he chose to held her captured? This action cannot be defended."

Her reasoning makes sense to the masses, the poor/homeless thief's reasoning makes sense to the masses and the kid's resoning or lack of reasoning makes sense to the masses. When it comes to the man who held her captured though, the outbreak from the masses becomes massive once the court has confirmed that he is not mentally ill. He will be hated throughout the rest of his life, while she and the poor thieves are heroes who dare to break the laws.

Here is what the masses fail to see: The man had a horrible upbringing with parents who never played- or spent time with him, and did not even let him go to his friend(s) houses out of fear that he may tell them about their drug abuse. He had to go to school on his own, while his friends used their bikes. In school, he was constantly bullied because of his smelling clothes who also happened to be too small. And his teachers kept yelling at him in front of the whole class for arriving one hour too late, when all he wanted was some extra sleep from everything regarding life. He eventually pulled through all necessary education to get a decent job, but the scars from his childhood never healed, and he kept hating himself for reasons that he couldn't explain. One day though, he finally met the dream girl of his life. The relationship lasted for a few months, but after a while she started feeling uncomfortable around him and wanted to break up. At that point he was terrified. Losing her would result in the greatest depression of his life, and probably suicide. To stop this from happening, he did what he had to do in order to maintain control of his life (sounds familiar?), and what he did should be obvious at this point.

He saved his own life, she eventually restored peace in her mind and the thieves got food on their tables. Yet, he is the only one hated by the masses who probably wanted to see him dead anyway.

Moral: There is reasoning behind every criminal's actions. We should feel sorry for all of them no matter how severe their crimes may be, and we should be nothing but equally sorry for their victims. There are two kinds of people: Fortunate, and unfortunate. And the fact that they cannot will as they wills is what they have in common.

Bottom line according to you: morals don't exist since everything is pre-determined (EDIT: or alternatively; morals don't exist since human's have no free will). There is always a legit reason for any action, no matter how positive or how negative.

I'm not totally against that position (because I think free will is very small in individuals) but I want to remind people of the consequences from such a position (and this is where sociologists, left wingers and all-good-bringers typically fail):

morals simply cease to exist, from which follows that you should not just feel sorry for criminals, you should feel sorry for everybody, and never condemn anybody for anything.

Me too. Im not totally against your position.

Because I think if I was in the same mindset and same conditions as that person. Theres a high probability that I would have done the same thing. And I think, in the criminal's eyes, the crime he commited was justifiable in HIS perspective and HIS perspective only. I respect that. 

But life is not predetermined as "possible futures" do exists. However, since we dont live in a perfect world but in a very human world instead, the consequences of each other's decisions do often decrease the possible "good" futures and increases the possibility of "bad"futures or vice versa. The consequences from the decisions made by other people might be so great that the "person", no matter what he does, is destined to go in to only one certain possible future.

No, I never said that. My OP applies to a non-determined universe as well.

Change it to "there is no free will" instead of "everything is pre-determined". The implication is still the same.

Just because there is no free will that doesn't mean that the world must be pre-determined.

A person cannot choose what to want, even if the world is random.

No, we shouldn't. If you are correct and no one is responsible for his choices and everyone is just a product of what society and his upbringing made him, then it is all the more important for society to revile - not sympathize with - such people so as to discourage other people from taking that path. Once society begins to sympathize with those actions, it is inevitable that those actions will become increasingly seen as somehow legitimate.

I don't think so. Just because we are encouraged to feel sorry for bullies at school that doesn't make their actions legitimate.

Large groups of people, such as protest groups and certainly society as a whole, don't do nuance as well as you seem to think. If people come to see a bully as just as much of a victim as his victims, then we will have school administrations spending time trying to get inside the bully's head and all of this nonsense instead of punishing their actions out of hand as we should so that we can get back to the business of teaching kids (or not teaching kids, whatever it is that goes on in schools these days).

IIIIITheOneIIII, as much as you have thought and meditated on these things, I thought you would be familiar with the potential confusions associated.

My point was obviously that human's have no free will (according to the logic you presented in the OP among other threads).

Nearly all philosophical discussions on the topic of free will also touch the topic of determination, so it's not that strange that I happened to (mistakenly) use the determinism approach instead of the free-will angle. But in this particular case it doesn't change anything (because morals cease to exist from lack of free will as well as from determinism). My point still stands.