> To be clear, I oppose family punishment. Why? Because I am a retributivist. That’s right, I think that inflicting suffering on vicious wrong-doers is morally praiseworthy even in the absence of any deterrent effect.
He is using family punishment as a strawman. If you say he is bad because he thinks it's morally praiseworthy to inflict suffering, he will argue that if you like deterrence so much then why don't you inflict suffering on families that should deter them even more lol
A strawman would be a weak version of his opponent's position. This is different. This is his pointing out a contradiction in (a nice strong version) his opponent's position.
That argument is about as strong as "oh you like retribution? That means you support <vile torture / mutilation>!"
Deliberately confounding "reasoning for choice of punishment" and "severity/extremeness of punishment" and "other moral guidelines outside the 'punishment-reason-axis' that inform the option-space of punishment" is obvious rhetorical trolling, who cares what the precise "fallacy-name" is for this sort of behavior.
Now that I think about it from the other end, I don't see how "hurting their family" is excluded from "retributive justice" solely by the definition of "retributive" either. It's been treated as a perfectly valid act of retribution in many cultures across history (and the present day, probably) - see every story about feuding clans killing each others members; they don't do that because they think it's going to dissuade the other clan from enacting their own vengeance in turn.
But it is a weak version of his opponents position, empowered by the fact his argument is pathetic: "unless you commit to maximal deterrence then you don't really believe in deterrence".
It's a slippery slope fallacy variant: "if you have laws to deter actions by individuals, then why not have laws which might create greater deterrence" - and then simply assumes all other considerations can be handwaved away.
If the argument: "the psychological harm of knowing there is famine is bad, therefore we should simply kill all people suffering from famine..." sounds ridiculous to you, then so should this person's argument because it's doing the exact same trick.
That's not withstanding the utterly absurd "opposite" he constructs his position as: "I believe in creating suffering as a morally noble goal" is not some sort of counter-argument, it's just him arguing for his own sociopathy in pretty-prose.
But he's right, it is morally praiseworthy to make wrongdoers suffer. Humans have known this for millenia, we know it deep in our bones. Murderers, rapists, thieves all deserve to suffer.
I’m not sure where I come down on the topic but I’m absolutely not convinced by “we know it deep in our bones” as reasoning. For millennia people have known the existence of God(s) deep in their bones, does that mean atheists are wrong?
Problem is that disgust can also be rationalized using that argument for bigotry and discrimination. Also, what does torturing a wrongdoer do for us? Hitler washes up on an island and you do the most heinous possible things you can imagine. What kind of person are you after that?
There is the argument that making bad people suffer ruins our morality. If we're better than them, then we don't want people to inflict suffering.
I heard/read this before, and I'm convinced by it: torturing someone does something not only to the victim, but to the torturer as well.
The act of torturing someone does something bad to you, regardless of whatever other effect. The kind of person who would torture someone in cold blood is not someone I want next to me.
I think punishing families would probably work very well for deterrence, but that comes with impairment of individualism, since families will be incentivized to be monitoring the behavior of their relatives. Overall I would say it doesn't pass the cost-benefit analysis, mainly because there are other methods of deterrence available.
> I think punishing families would probably work very well for deterrence,
Why?
This is not even a slightly obvious statement. In fact it broadly fails because most individual punishments already, due to the nature of familial relations, do punish families both directly and indirectly.
> it broadly fails because most individual punishments already, due to the nature of familial relations, do punish families both directly and indirectly.
it doesn't.
Familial punishment encourages the enforcement of the rules inside families, lest they get punished. But the rules must be acceptable to the broader family, otherwise it makes for rebellion against the authority (presumably the royalty or dictator in this case).
It only doesn't work under _today_'s laws, since families today, compared to the medieval times, is a lot less close and more like acquaintances than family (i'm including things like in-laws, uncles and aunts etc as family).
"Family" in medieval times was conceived much more broadly than today. So while back then the inner core of a family unit might have been much more dependent on each other and adhered to more of internally enforced rules, the actual family would have included many more people than you'd think of as "family" today with considerably less allegiance to those internally imposed rules. Also, back then power dynamics between generations and genders were different so i.e. the head of a household (oldest male in many societies) might not consider the happiness of a grand daughter relevant in his decision making.
I doubt that you can make a real comparison of the "utility" of family punishment between medieval times and today without diving deep into all these aspects.
E.g., something tells me "preventative" unreported domestic violence would rise. If the increase is high enough it could easily be argued that the tactic hasn't worked but instead just pushed crime out of the public eye. (Or potentially increasing overall violence.)
Edit: also, probably shifting the violence toward the youth as they don't have the same impulse control as the adults. Good luck, future generations!
Double edit: IIRC the vast majority of studies on corporal punishment state that it increases the likelihood of aggression in the child as they develop. So double good luck, future generations!!
If you had continued reading, you would have seen that the author opposes punishing families and is using this as an example case for a philosophical argument.
Yes, and you'd also learn what the author actually believes: that people who make others suffer should be made to suffer equally, even if doing so does not serve as a deterrent and leads to no useful or positive outcomes.
I think "go fuck yourself" is still the correct response to this essay.
> The party line is: “Making criminals suffer is, in itself, always bad. The only available moral justification is deterrence: The suffering you save must exceed the suffering you inflict.”
Huh? What if the local minima of inflicting some suffering to the perpetrator will lead to a better local maxima?
I don't know why the author seems to think that being a consequentialist or utilitirianism somehow precludes certain solutions/methods? The only truth is this: That actions have consequence, we live in a universe with cause and effect (even if some of that cause is random). If this is false then there is absolutely zero reason to have morality. The only "right" morality is to have one that attempts to map itself closest to reality (the propensity for man to believe in irrational things is also one such reality). A morality that demands certain methods without the ability to change in real time is just dogma.
This is why it is so confusing why people oppose Sam Harris so much. A world in which everyone thinks like him is not so much different than now. We would still have left/right wing debates and all that. The only difference is that belief no longer gets a pass. You can't say "doing X is right because it says so". When someone says "bro, believe me, we need to do this particular thing every other day or else we would suffer tremendously" then people would rightly question their belief. The calculus of "missing 1 prayer and suffer hell for ETERNITY" and living in modernity is entirely absurd. If you have such world view, then slaughtering apostate is entirely justified, because in your belief, apostates would have suffered in hell for ETERNITY. So the equation tips heavily towards doing whatever is necessary to prevent this.
>Right morality maps itself to reality... buuuut man believing irrational things is also 'one such' reality.
These statements either contradict, or open up too many possibilities. If irrational man is one reality, then what's the real reality, the second, true reality?
If you're going to sacrifice giving belief 'a pass', then it's really hard to draw a firm dividing line on whom-gets-a-pass and whom doesn't.
I'd always lean towards giving irrational people mercy.
Tying mercy solely to rationality and logic can become too reductive for humans to lead good lives.
And who defines what reality is? Sam Harris? Sabine Hossenfelder? Steve from Accounting?
>Right morality maps itself to reality... buuuut man believing irrational things is also 'one such' reality
How so? The fact that man believes in irrational things is a reality...How is that controversial? It is real that most of my family actually believes in a physical hell. Yes, in their mind, they actually believe that a fiery hall of flame actually exists somewhere and people will suffer in eternity, for ever and ever and ever and ever, with increasingly harsher suffering until...well, there's no until, it just goes on and on.
What modern western people refuses to accept is that people actually do believe this things. Its not just a coping mechanism for retribution or something crap like that. When people tell you, "we believe in X because Y says so". They actually do believe in that. They think that there's an actual Y that comes down to Earth and wrote those Xs.
And the fact that apes are prone to believe such a thing is also a reality. That is not to say that what they believe is real, just that their tendency is real. And this kind of belief have consequence. If they actually think that Y wrote down those Xs, and given that Y is omnipotent, well surely Xs is some divine scripture that we must follow?
A universe in which the scripture says that one should enter a house with the left foot vs the right foot is an entirely difference universe. If such benign belief could yield so much difference, why wouldn't everything else?
Saying that, I can completely willing to accept that human (or apes) need to have _some_ belief. That evolution have crafted us to rely on some belief that is believed at some societal level to operate and function. I am willing to accept that yet that doesn't mean that any of the beliefs are right.
>And who defines what reality is? Sam Harris? Sabine Hossenfelder? Steve from Accounting?
Wait a minute...do you think that your feelings, emotions and thoughts are not reality because they are an experience? What is real to you then? Atoms? Your "intuition" about physics or everything else is an experience too. Experience is all you have.
I actually appreciate this analysis. One of the things that is a pet peeve is when people tack on a consequentialist that isn't well supported to a different moral argument.
An example was after Sept 11, there was a lot of discussion about torture. Inevitably, an argument would come up where the person said torture was morally reprehensible, and it never worked anyway.
They never wanted to address in the cases where torture would likely work (for a current example - a passcode to unlock a iPhone that you could check on the spot), would you still be morally opposed?
In this article, the author addresses something that would likely be very effective, yet still condemns it as being immoral.
> They never wanted to address in the cases where torture would likely work (for a current example - a passcode to unlock a iPhone that you could check on the spot), would you still be morally opposed?
The good old car keys fallacy of torture: "if someone threatened to beat me with an iron bar unless I handed over my car keys, I'd give them my car keys"
Replace with: "someone threatens to beat you with an iron bar unless you give up the passcode to the strong-room protecting your family, so they can murder them". You still going to do it?
You've implicitly assigned a low value to the information you're willing to torture someone for, and ensured the information is easy to verify, therefore, obviously someone will just give up the information.
But why would you so desperately need low-value information in the first place? Why would specific torture be needed, but "mild inconvenience" would not work - given as how the information is apparently of no serious value to the person holding it. And of course, if it's high-value information you run into other problems like how beyond a certain point the person can't actually remember their name, or recall any complex information, so the idea you could "beat a passcode out of them" is highly questionable.
Proven by the practical methods by which Osama bin Laden was located by the CIA: the CIA fed a story to the makers of Zero Dark Thirty that they successfully tortured it out of a prisoner. They definitely tortured the prisoner...but all the useful information was obtained using regular interrogation techniques before they water-boarded him 100+ times.
Providing of course the secondary problem: if torture - in this case water-boarding - worked, why did 100+ efforts fail to yield any better information then what they already had?
What about the Jack Bauer 24 situation.
A terrorist attack is ongoing, like 9/11 or the Boston Bombing. You have one of the perpetrators of the attack in custody. You need to interrogate him and get information on other conspirators so that the terrorist attack ends your time table and not the plotters
You're going to be beaten with an iron bar until you tell your torturer the passcode to access the strong-room/safe/GPS coordinates of your family. If you give them the information, they will kill them all.
Are you going to do it?
That's the whole point: because you don't prioritize their objectives, you don't evaluate whether you think it would work in terms relevant to you. You don't believe in terrorist attacks, therefore you wouldn't protect a terrorist attack. But a terrorist would. The 9/11 hijackers embarked on their mission already expecting to die.
> Replace with: "someone threatens to beat you with an iron bar unless you give up the passcode to the strong-room protecting your family, so they can murder them". You still going to do it?
Actually replace with someone is asking you and then ripping out your fingernails one by one when you hesitate or give the wrong answer. What are the chances that you are able to resist, even if you obviously want to?
Some percentage of people, maybe even a large percentage are going to enter a point where the only focus will be on getting the pain to stop, no matter the consequences afterward.
Not some other person who you can construct to be weak to torture. What would you do in that situation?
Do you believe you'll somehow lose your mind so completely to pain that you'll somehow accurately understand and answer the question, yet be unaware of the consequences?
Family punishment of the sort he lays out in the article, i.e. mafia underworld tactics are disregarded not because of the effects but because of the intent of the parties involved.
There's a non strawman version of this practiced in most cultures across the world, familial shame. Averting shame from your family and inflicting shame on relatives is an important social function in many cultures. Western cultures have a unique aversion to it due to unusual levels of individualism, but it's not a challenge for consequentialism in general. It does indeed work, and it is widely practiced.
I'm not sure I understand why this is a problem for consequentialists any more than it is a problem for the author's own position.
The basic idea seems to be: In some cases it might prevent more harm to punish innocent people i.e. family members of criminals, therefore consequentialists should endorse punishing family members in those cases.
The author seems to think this logic doesn't apply to their own position because they believe that the reason to punish wrongdoers isn't to prevent further harm, but because the punishment of wrongdoers is justice which is good. The opposite side of this would be punishing innocent people, which would be injustice. This contrasts with pure consequentialism which doesn't care about justice vs. injustice, it only cares about the end result.
The key part is from the definition from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which says:
> 3. that it is morally impermissible intentionally to punish the innocent or to inflict disproportionately large punishments on wrongdoers.
But then, the author then goes on to say:
> What if harming Hitler’s baby was the only way to save the world? As a moderate deontologist, I reluctantly endorse this implication. But only in dire hypotheticals with little real-world relevance.
So it seems like the author also endorse harming the family members of wrongdoers, but for them it's ok because it's only in "dire hypotheticals". This feels like a bit of a cop out to me. It seems like you could just as easily call yourself a "moderate consequentialist" and say that punishing people is only good as a deterrent, but also punishing innocent people is wrong.
> The thing is, it doesn't seem to me like this precludes punishing family members for a better result.
Correct. The "system" if you can even call it that is not stemming coherently from any moral foundations.
1 and 2 are the same. To say a wrongdoer deserves punishment is to say it's good to punish. Deserves is language of morality. 3 is completely unrelated.
This article is nonsense.
Also from the article:
> My challenge for readers: Propose any alternative to retributivism that precludes family punishment.
I'm sorry but that is hilarious. Here's one off the top of my head, having literally never thought about this before.
1. Punishing the innocent is wrong.
2. Literally any ideas at all about crime and punishment that don't violate point 1.
That passes the author's sniff test anyway. Is there a bounty for such a challenge?
> That’s right, I think that inflicting suffering on vicious wrong-doers is morally praiseworthy even in the absence of any deterrent effect. Deterrence is a happy byproduct, but the fundamental point of punishment is to balance the scales of justice.
This is caveman levels of moral justification. What does it mean to balance the scales? If somebody is maimed, and we maim the maimer, does that count?
The first act worsened the victims life and the second act did nothing to help them. Doesn't feel like the scales are tipping correctly. It doesn't even seem that using analogies about scales is even useful to the conversation. It's almost like the issue is really complex and can't be summed up as a system in 2.5 bullet points by way of measuring scales.
The best argument about why and how governments punish people was.
If you consider the hoary old governments that implemented this stuff you find that contrary to what you might assume they can't even begin to care about a the guy that got in a fight and died. The farmer whose chickens were rustled. Life is cheap and the peasants lives are barely worth the paper to mark their existence.
What do they care about. The the system keeps functioning. Someone does something like beating a man do death in a drunken brawl, stole some chickens. That causes problems if unchecked.
So what do you do. You reserve retribution to you and you alone. So that exacting private retribution is a challenge to your authority. You also reserve truth, only you get to say a man is a badie or not. And once you've done so you force his community to accept him back.
If you accept the above punishing his family makes things worse not better. You gave him 20 lashes and he's butthurt about that, so what. Give his family 5 lashes each and they hate you not him.
I'm not sure where I fall in any of this. That said, two things stuck out to me:
First, and less importantly, I think "dire hypothetical" is a bad phrase for the Baby Hitler thought experiment. I suspect dire is used as a synonym for "presaging" rather than "extreme". The only point of the Baby Hitler example is to examine the philosophy under entirely unrealistic circumstances: what if we had perfect knowledge about the future? It is intended to emotionally prejudice people, typically towards ends-based philosophies.
The author concedes the imaginary hypothetical, but only those hypotheticals with unreal perfect knowledge. At that point, you could say that yes, the sky is green, but only in hypothetical worlds with green skies.
As for the rest, it is essentially the classic means versus ends debate.
Punishment of wrong doing as an intrinsic good, rather than as a deterrent, should obviously preclude punishing family members- if we were to also postulate that punishing wrongdoing is good, then punishing innocence is intrinsically wrong. Punishment itself would be wrongdoing.
Basically, this boils down to a simple means versus ends debate; "preventative" punishment cares only about results, while the author only cares that the "means" (the act) punishment is morally right.
> Basically, this boils down to a simple means versus ends debate; "preventative" punishment cares only about results, while the author only cares that the "means" (the act) punishment is morally right.
Yeah, after thinking about it some more I edited my comment slightly to emphasize the "means versus ends" idea that I think the author is getting at.
The part that still bugs me is that the author seems to be taking a middle ground where punishing the innocent is okay in arbitrarily extreme cases, but they don't accept that a consequentialist could just use the same trick to say that punishing family members is wrong.
Isn't "preventative" punishment basically the plot of Minority Report (story and movie)?
The problem is that, even if it worked, I wouldn't want to live in a world where people are punished or executed before they actually do anything wrong. In a sense, I think it's valid to "throw in the towel" and claim: if this is what it takes to minimize suffering, I don't want anything to do with it; to hell with it.
By preventative, I'm describing punishment being used for deterrence purposes, which is where the question of whether also punishing the family is justified comes in, as it might have a further deterrent effect.
Minority report is another "dire hypothetical". Like the author, I'm comfortable dismissing any hypothetical that relies on perfect future knowledge as unrealistic and unworthy of consideration. Unlike the author, I'm not taking a stance on either ends or means based philosophy. Just reacting a bit to what the parent post said.
In the baby Hitler experiment, what if you, instead of killing baby Hitler, took the baby out of the abusive family? And had him raised by nice emphatic people? We are talking about hypothetical where we have some supernatural abilities.
I don't know why you used two religious groups as your first examples of families, Sikh and Hindus.
Religious people often treat people who are not family, as family. It doesn't take Einstein to figure out that families should band together when they look over and see their peer-families get implicated for crimes they didn't commit.
The Hitler argument makes little sense because you kill him. Retributive justice works best when it's paired with Mercy. Punish then pardon. Otherwise it's just pointless punishment.
Get Hitler do some rebuilding of the land he destroyed, face the widows of the sons he ordered to die, shake the hand of a Jewish holocaust survivor. Throw him into a zoo enclosure with one-way glass, in a straight jacket, and allow him to hear the epitaths of the survivors as they walk past his cell.
Why retribution has to end in physical punishment and killing, is beyond me. There are realities worse than death, which have nothing to do with violence.
One man, once captured by the state and social opinion, cannot be allowed the easy way out, of death-by-retributive-revenge.
Can we move past Hitler, why am I carrying around his mistakes like it matters in today's cyberpunk world...
Religious people can treat members of their ingroup great. It's how they treat the outgroup that causes problems.
That's the difference between Muslims dealing with other Muslims, and Muslims dealing with Jews living in the state of Israel
I had to look these up, so I'll do folks like me some favors:
Consequentialism is an ethical theory that judges whether or not something is right by what its consequences are.
Retributive justice is a theory of punishment that maintains that wrongdoers deserve to be punished, in proportion to their crimes, as a matter of justice or right.
All of these seem to abandon the wider outlook that punishment in lieu of rehabilitation has had on society at least in the United States. A single punishment without rehabilitation is already generational. This also postures crime as some kind of primordial evil; there are certainly some crimes and specific natures of crime that I could see most people agreeing are "evil" but when we're talking the vast majority of crime worthy of punishment do people really believe that evil is what's at the center of it?
I see where youre coming from but I think first there needs to be an agreement on victimless crime and what constitutes such. Did Madoff have victims? Does a county worker failing to follow procedure in fixing a bridge (or doing what they were told) have victims? Some fault lies down the road and, of course, caveat emptor for all those going over poorly maintained bridges.
There is no victimless crime, you can practically always find someone directly or indirectly harmed by it.
The idea of rehabilitation is that victims may have the right to restitution or reparation (to be made whole, or at least approach that state) but not to retribution. The punishment of a criminal is supposed to provide the basis for his eventual rehabilitation, not be driven by the victim's or society's desire to make him suffer for his "evil" deeds.
I think the historical evidence is that this is the preferable approach to building a society and that OPs idea that social peace requires punishment is wrong.
I can see that, from the light reading I did on consequentialism it seemed to focus more on degrees of punishment, or even a binary of punishment, rather than a methodology.
What is evil and why does it differ from other wrongdoing? If it's supernatural in origin, then are humans the ones responsible? If it's natural, then we can come up with an explanation for why people acted badly. Cause and effect means there are always reasons for why people act the way they do. You can't just draw the line at consequences.
Thanks for sharing those definitions. I think you've nailed it in your last paragraph, especially:
> A single punishment without rehabilitation is already generational.
Many states and localities in the US is indeed a stark example of what sort of consequences a retributive system of justice has on society (for example, California 3-strikes, extraordinary sentences for minor crimes in the many states, etc). The damage it's had has been inordinate.
Most crime, indeed, doesn't have evil at the center of it. For example, drug and intellectual property law violations should really be civil offenses.
intellectual property law violations could obviously be civil offenses, because there is another party to bring suit, but who is going to bring suit if someone does drugs?
If you take the consequentialist point of view ("The suffering you save must exceed the suffering you inflict"), then isn't this trivially ruled out by his own admission that "What’s clear is that when rulers enforce family punishments, the ruled shiver with terror"? If on top of all the excess suffering caused by the collateral punishment, you add that the entire population lives under constant fear, then it seems difficult to imagine that you are "obviously" compensating for this by saving enough suffering to make it worthwhile. I certainly consider the psychological effect of living under such a system as suffering. This is without even getting into the disproportionate amount of "false positive" suffering from identifying the wrong criminal and punishing the wrong family vs. just punishing one incorrect person.
And of course the end result of all the knock on effects is impossible to compute. At best you can approximate it.
Which leads to two observations:
1, consequentialism is really hard, actually.
2, most other moral systems are really just varying approximations of consequentialism in disguise. "Follow my rules." "Why?" "Because the consequences of not following them would be disastrous!"
This is a good objection. The family punishment scenario must include the massive “background suffering” that is created solely by the policy existing.
And family pinishment is, for valid rwasons, illegal across the democratic world. No idea how people think re-implementing that would be a good idea...
If I contemplate some criminal act, various unpleasant potential consequences may occur to me, and I may decide against that act "for fear" that those consequences should come to pass. However, "fear" in this sense is rather different from say the fear I feel if I'm held at gunpoint during a robbery. The latter is real suffering in and of itself (as evidenced by the fact that if the "robber" turns out to be friends pulling a prank, one may rightfully be angry at the friend), the former arguably is not "suffering", at least not in any significant, weighty way.
In any case it's possible to generate much clearner counterexamples to consequentialism in the same vein as Kaplan's but without any knock-on societal effects. Imagine a man breaks into a woman's house while she's asleep, and sexually assaults her (1) without her awareness, (2) without causing any physical injury or giving her any disease (3) without her ever discovering that this had taken place. By stipulation, the act made no difference to her, physically or mentally, over her whole life. A consequentialist would be hard put to say why such an act would be wrong, given that it seems to cause no negative consequences, and often need to resort to saying some decidely non-consequentialist-sounding things, for example by making up abstract, symbolic 'consequences' (such as: "the act caused a violation of a moral norm") to yield the intuitively correct result.
> However, "fear" in this sense is rather different from say the fear I feel if I'm held at gunpoint during a robbery. The latter is real suffering in and of itself (as evidenced by the fact that if the "robber" turns out to be friends pulling a prank, one may rightfully be angry at the friend), the former arguably is not "suffering", at least not in any significant, weighty way.
This does not ring true to me at all. Also, the distinction is not really relevant. The both fears are exactly the same - the only difference is that the former one is "deserved" and the latter is "undeserved". But, there is not difference to think the subjective suffering is different.
Second, with family example, the family is in the "held at gunpoint during a robbery" situation. They risk being mistreated, but did not caused it and have no control over the situation. What this rule would do is that the abusive and criminal family members would had even more power within their families and more ability to mistreat family members. Because family members wont be able to turn them in. Once someone committed crime, everyone in the family would need to protect them just out of self interest.
Or a consequentialist could respond that they accept that the specific hypothetical isn't wrong, but it's so divorced from practical reality that it isn't useful as a thought experiment.
I've also seen people argue that perpetrators of harm like this are also harmed.
Aside from all that, I know the instinct is to draw up thought experiments that provoke emotion, but using such a charged example is potentially alienating. I'm not saying we shouldn't be able to talk about hard topics, but that maybe bringing up rape (and such a specifically gendered one) as your thought experiment example in such a trivial discussion is a bit extreme.
I get what you're saying, but making the example one about sexual assault is not gratutous but because it poses a unique problem for consequentialism: it's pretty much the only uncontroversial example of an act that is (1) widely agreed to be moral wrong (2) and to be so regardless of its effects on the victim.
Suppose the example had involved instead (say) theft. Then consequentialists would be able point to the fact that the act caused a reduction of the victim's assets as the "negative consequence" which renders the act morally wrong. Likewise if the example involved something as serious as murder, or as (relatively) trivial as property defacement. In all these cases, the wrongfulness of the act coexists with a negative difference (whether mental or physical) it makes to the victim. So they would not serve for the purpose of refuting the core consequentialist idea that an act is made wrong by its negative consequences (rather than say by its violation of moral rules).
If you can think of an example other than sexual assault that satisfies the twin desiderata above ((1) and (2)) equally well, I'm all ears.
My honest knee-jerk reaction to this is that it's not morally wrong for the exact reasons you gave. But then again it is a hypothetical that is all but impossible to occur in real life, as even the fact that the man is being judged would require that we (and thus the woman as well) know it happened.
I prefer your kind of bullet-biting consequentialism to the kind which tries to approximate the intuitively correct (imo) verdict by watering down the concept of consequence (e.g. by going for some version of rule-utilitarianism).
But I disagree with the second point. Consequentialism is a philosophical claim to the effect that an act is morally wrong if and only if such-and-such conditions obtain. If it's possible to imagine a situation, however recherche, involving a morally wrong act but in which "such-and-such conditions" do not obtain, that automatically refutes consequentialism and it either has to be revised or given up altogether.
The counter-intuitive finding here -- which is in favor of rule-utilitarianism -- is that everyone trying to optimize every difficult decision does reliably lead to unpredictable consequences that are worse than the "follow a rule that would lead to optimific outcomes if performed by 99% of the population" set of consequences.
That is, you can hold a belief that the optimal "decision criteria" for an act-consequentialist is actually a rule-consequentialist one, and this belief is fairly common.
Restated: being an act-consequentialist doesn't absolve you from having to determine act-consequentialism's best decision criteria, because if it did then you wouldn't be being act-consequentialist about it. It's recursive like that.
>If I contemplate some criminal act, various unpleasant potential consequences may occur to me, and I may decide against that act "for fear" that those consequences should come to pass.
Isn't the scenario here that if I have a member of my family that commits a particular crime then I have to fear the consequence?
Thus I should fear having children, stupid siblings, or parents who go off the deep end (probably children, but theoretically could have other familial relationships be in the graph of punishment)
At my kids' school we were reminded of the fact that if they don't attend school for x days without a doctor's note, several times that it can impact the amount of child support from the govt.
No idea that existed but always thought it would be a good means to make sure kids go to school instead of just hanging around being a nuisance during school hours. When mom & dad can feel it in their bank account they'll make damn sure the kid goes to school.
You as a parent is responsible for minor kid going to school. And you have control over it too. This is literally punishing the person who failed to do his job - the parent.
If we are imagining not just a society in which (1) people are punished for the crimes committed by their family members, but more specifically (2) a tyrannical society which criminalizes acts (blasphemy, lese-majesty, etc) most of us don't regard as morally wrong, so that even children can commit crimes through stupidity/thoughtlessness, then I agree most people would live in (genuine, suffering-inducing) fear that one of their family members might commit a crime. But IMO the fear in that case comes not so much from the mechanism of family punishment as it does from the tyrannical nature of the society itself (one would equally fear oneself accidentally committing lese-majesty by a slip of tongue, for example).
> Isn't the scenario here that if I have a member of my family that commits a particular crime then I have to fear the consequence?
> Thus I should fear having children, stupid siblings, or parents who go off the deep end
Interestingly, the culture that I am familiar with that has family punishment (see my other post in this thread) is also a culture that encourages many children. I could see how such things go hand in hand, for instance it puts a heavy burden on the family to ensure that they raise their children to respect society.
This would mean that turning in your abusive criminal uncle would had his innocent kids and your dad punished, so you will be less likely to do that. And being turned in by family or someone close to you is fairly standard way of being caught.
Yep, came here to leave exactly this comment. Terror is a form of suffering! That's the thing we're measuring and trying to avoid across the population!
It's remarkable how often these "ah hah, gotcha, answer that atheists"-style posts are triumphantly self-defeating within their own argument. It feels like so much bad faith arguing.
My running hypothetical scenario is saving acting President of a benevolent superpower vs a baby in a house fire. Saving the baby or "just anyone" is wrong; you should have saved the president instead.
Interesting post. A possible more general restatement would be "under consequentialism (or utilitarianism) everyone's happiness (including the crime perpetrators') is weighted equally. Should that be the case?"
I suspect that specifically "family punishment" fails the cost-benefit analysis due to practical reasons, but the question of "should we weigh the suffering of good people equally to the suffering of terrible people in our ethics system" is interesting to me, and I don't currently have answer.
Because suffering is suffering. If we distinguish suffering of good people from bad people then we have to expand this to a spectrum, the best people suffering is the worse, and worse people suffering is the best. But then it's all just relative, who is good, who is bad is your opinion. Most rational people would consider their own suffering to be the worse.
It shouldn't because of utility monsters. If you weight everybody's happiness equally - the greedier you are the more resources should be assigned to you. That's obviously wrong.
It doesn't have the same effect. If torturing someone made 3 billion people sightly happy, and 3 miserable (the tortured, his wife and his child), but still the total happiness supercede the total suffering. Positive utilitarism says 'do it'. Negative utilitarism says 'do not'.
I'm not a full utilitarist anymore as I don't think a good utility function exist, but it is a good way to evaluate quickly if an action I do is more likely to do good than bad: 'do I risk hurting someone?'.
I'm pretty sure this predate Omelas, it's an idea from Popper (that he didn't carry very far tbh).
I think almost everyone is utilitarist, you probably are too. If one time you spent money to buy flowers or a gift for no reason but make someone happy, or you told a white lie/didn't tell the truth to avoid hurting someone, you're one too.
But like I said, it's not a good moral philosophy. It's useful in short burst, to take quick judgment on concrete, temporary actions, but it fails on larger ideas.
Which is fine tbh. I need philosophy to carry me through concrete decisions too, not just through political choices. Utilitarism is useful for the former, less for the later (in the best case you end up believing Pinker's statistics).
Ah, I think we're at least partially on the same page. To me, considering the consequences of my actions is just good sense, that doesn't make me an utilitarian. Utility is subjective and ordinal, not cardinal. That means you can't do math with utility, and you can't even meaningfully compare it between individuals. That's more than enough for me to disqualify Utilitarianism from being taken seriously.
Possibly a tangent, but I'd suggest that happiness and suffering are not opposites, so aren't both "x" in your function.
Someone might choose to maximise their personal happiness even knowing that their personal suffering would also increase (or even be maximised). Trite example: prisoner released from jail who sets out to kill the person who double-crossed him, knowing that he'll be re-incarcerated or even executed.
Happiness and suffering might be related but they're (somewhat) independent.
Reconciling hypothetical scenarios with ideological positions seems like a job for an LLM, as it's not really an interesting exercise.
The consequential case is the strategy you use when you are in opposition, and the retributive case is the strategy you use when you are in power. The reason is that when you are in power, you don't need to prevent crime any more than is strictly necessary for you to maintain office - so catching a few here and there and restricting retributive punishment to them only is sufficient to keep your end of the bargain, but retributive justice doesn't involve you in too much complexity or commitment.
When you are an insurgent or faction, crime prevention is something you can promise to the coalitions who can swap you into power, and so imposing costs on criminals via decimation and grisly public examples is economical, mostly because the state isn't going to step in to protect them either. The economics of insurgent death squads are favorably quite cost effective and win-win, and they only become a political problem when they become too popular. Incumbent death squads just waste political capital and foment overthrow, so they're really only for kleptocrats who have an escape plan to another country, imo.
Do family punishments deter criminals enough that there's a net positive after sacrificing the innocent family members? (I assume no studies have been done)
Punishing a family inflicts definite harm on innocent people, for the chance to inflict less harm on society. This happens every time a family is punished, punishing one criminal's family wouldn't have much influence, so that is a lot of innocent sacrifices. Therefore you'd need a substantial amount of would-be criminals who don't care about their own suffering enough to be deterred, but do care about their family's. "substantial", "criminals", "don't care about their own suffering...but do care about their family's"...doesn't seem likely to me.
In contrast, I'm going by the reasoning that criminal's intrinsic value is much lower than an innocent person (although they still have value). So even if many criminals are punished and the deterrence only saves a few innocents, it's still worth it to punish criminals themselves. If many innocents are punished, the deterrence has to save many more innocents; there's a good argument that that's unlikely, which means consequentialism actually does have a good argument against punishing families.
There is no quantitative measure for the "net positive" you describe. The point is that through the consequentialist lens, there exists some cost/benefit ratio where family punishment becomes morally correct. This is in contrast to retributivists, whom according to Caplan believe that "...it is morally impermissible intentionally to punish the innocent..."
It's much easier to form coherent moral arguments when you identify clear boundaries for moral behavior versus the "ends justifying means" nature of consequentialism. Some might find that intellectually lazy, others might view it as a requirement for a consistent morality.
And no, the argument that family punishment doesn't work is not compelling when up against Caplan's historical examples of their efficacy. This is just back-rationalizing a morality not actually grounded in consequentialism. A consequentialist who isn't totally historically ignorant should at least be able to entertain the prospect of family punishment satisfying their moral framework, regardless of whether they fully buy in.
To me, the way you've characterized this (which rings quite true) is a great example of why a lot of philosophical arguing doesn't feel terribly relevant in the modern world. What practical person is going to constrain themselves to have no clear boundaries whatsoever, simply because they find it useful to frequently assess actions by their downstream effects instead of exclusively by initial conditions? Don't get me wrong, it can be useful to do thought experiments under these kinds of strict constraints, but only up to a point.
Under retributivism, family punishment could also be incredibly effective up until the point they declare "no punishing of the innocent." That it is a gotcha that consequentialists are prohibited for doing same is just silly.
People make allowances, exceptions, and put hard limits on otherwise open-ended systems in order to make them practicable. Why would consequentialism fall apart if you had to put a few sanity checks into it, such as "don't punish the innocent?"
For the sake of thought experiments, sure, see how each side plays out under very strict rules. But the real world is messy, doesn't fit nicely into one particular "ism" all the time. Your entire belief system shouldn't be predicated on thought experiments.. therefore there is no reason to get so dogmatic about building moral justifications from only one direction. Especially when a flexible or hybrid approach offers such obvious advantages.
> That’s right, I think that inflicting suffering on vicious wrong-doers is morally praiseworthy even in the absence of any deterrent effect.
Aside from the morals, it's essentially for a functioning society. The intrinsic urge to harm someone that has harmed you can't be allowed to happen. The state has to have a monopoly on violence to function.
If you are not allowed to inflict suffering on people that have wronged you, the state has to.
If the state doesn't, a large enough portion of people will do it themselves, and the state loses legitimacy.
And we go back to revenge killings and mob justice, which have been determined to be worse than a reasonably functioning state (North Korea and Nazis Germany not being considered reasonable).
The point is to avoid exactly that. If we can (mostly) agree that the state will punish someone sufficiently and appropriately, there's no need for vendettas.
Pardon my ignorance, but if utility is the test for determining what is good and bad, wouldn't having those labels provided as input cause a sort-of recursive formula where one needs to bootstrap the whole thing on some other ethical system?
How does the (in democratic societies) generally accepted principle in dubio pro reo fit into this? Your assumption would predict that societies that adhere to that standard can not function, because even if everyone is convinced of the guilt of an accused murderer, he can not be punished without formal proof and that might not be available.
I think this idea of required punishment to retain social stability is stupid and is not relevant in praxis. Prevention of crime and support for victims, as well as establishing the truth and encouraging sincere remorse from the perpetrator are much more powerful forces for social peace. In terms of practical social functioning, rehabilitation of criminals is much more valuable than punishment, which is why most democracies at least aspire to this ideal.
Rehabilitation basically doesn't happen, in the sense that interventions don't seem to reduce recidivism rates. Now there are a group of people who basically made one bad mistake due to negligence or other circumstances who don't go back, but this isn't generally what one would consider "reform" and it kinda ignores that we can't seem to do much for the people who continually return to prison after committing new crimes. That said, there may be some limited cases where we can do some good, such as identifying and treating people with pyschosis.
> I think this idea of required punishment to retain social stability is stupid and is not relevant in praxis.
You've never seen mom's brain matter staining the basement walls, or heard that her killer had grandma on same hit list that mom was crossed off of. If the state had not intervened, what do you think would have happened there?
> You've never seen mom's brain matter staining the basement walls […]
What? First, contract killing (which is what you seem to describe here) is exceptionally rare in most societies and second, rehabilitation does not preclude police from interfering with crime. Of course you stop a killing if you have prior knowledge of it, if necessary by restraining/incarcerating the alleged killer. Rehabilitation is implemented once guilt has been established to allow a convicted criminal to re-enter society as a productive individual as soon as possible while minimizing the risk to other members of society.
That was not a contract killing, rather it was a far more common type of murder. The list was something like an enemies list. I have no idea why he kept one, mind you, but the police showed it at trial and it freaked out grandma and some other family who were on there. I'd imagine his former boss wasn't any too happy to realize how easily it could've been him, either, for that matter.
I think you underestimate the revenge cycle that might occur if society wanted to be more lenient than life in prison, which was the result here. The state can't reasonably be more lenient than the average person, or the average person is going to decide that the cost of a few years is worth the revenge. You're already looking at a lifetime of pain for losing someone dear to you, what's a couple of years if you admit your guilt and surrender quietly? And that's before we get into "hey, this guy made a hit list with my name on it, and we have to take that seriously because the person at the top of the list was already murdered."
For the rest, one of your studies says "There was no evidence of significant differences on rearrest or reconviction. Moderator analysis showed no significant moderating effect for risk score, age, or sex." and "the results would be considered mixed, at best." Which... yeah, is pretty much what I've seen for the most part. Maybe I'm not communicating what I think accurately enough, but this sort of result pretty much exactly what I have in mind. You find studies with promising numbers that still turn out to be meh and don't leave you convinced that the intervention is actually changing what the people are capable of.
Importantly, I do not say that nothing shows some promise, or that we shouldn't keep trying, I'm just saying we don't have anything that looks like it can be scaled up to have big impact. And I get that it's hard to measure when plenty of people will do maybe one crime due to some big mistake and had no intention of doing more. I have some small hope that maybe intervening for psychosis could help with violent offenses, but that might assume too much about people taking their meds, unless they're willing and able to use long-lasting injections.
> I think you underestimate the revenge cycle that might occur if society wanted to be more lenient than life in prison, which was the result here. […]
My guess is you are writing from a U.S. point of view. You are severely underestimating how much of an outlier the U.S. is in terms of its justice system when compared to other democracies. Germany, not exactly known for its historical social cuddliness, for example doesn't even allow "life in prison" sentences. Our constitution guarantees the possibility for every convicted, no matter the crime, to regain their freedom. Even people convicted of multiple murders will get their first parole hearing after 15 years and while a court can order their detention beyond this, this is technically no longer a prison sentence and only allowable if there is a high likelihood that the person in question will cause additional harm if released. This assessment is checked every few years with the goal that no one will spend more time in prison than necessary.
This approach to criminal justice enjoys broad support in Germany and most western European societies. All of these societies are also considerably more safe than the U.S. and many other places that put an explicit emphasis on retributive justice. I'm not aware of notable cases of revenge violence due to this.
Retributive justice is an outdated philosophy that only sounds reasonable when you assume the worst in people and ignore the effects of the intergenerational trauma that it produces.
The problem with that is that when you have a situation where the punishment is known to be lenient and there's someone threatening your life, you might just be willing to pay the price for revenge.
Yes, I'm aware that some places don't do life in prison or such. I'm pointing out the harms of that.
What you are describing is the plot of a Liam Neeson action flick, and not how real life works. Revenge killings are not a thing or you’d read about them in societies with “lenient” punishments.
And if someone threatens your life in the moment you are entitled to reasonable measures of self defense, including killing the attacker if you can not avoid harm to yourself or others in another way, that is a completely separate issue.
It's weird to see you flip things like that, when you're the one talking with no actual experience with these things. Anyhow, I certainly have read about them and they have been common throughout history, with justice systems being created to displace such revenge cycles.
I can't help if you're not aware of even thing like the Hatfields & the McCoys, but I can push back when people want to head us back to the bad old days.
Jesus, I was talking about societies with modern justice systems focused on rehabilitation, not civil-war era wild west. Yes, of course absent a functioning justice system revenge cycles will occur. But the whole argument in this thread is about the relative merits of rehabilitation vs. punishment in modern society. And on that front the evidence on the outcome is pretty solid: Punishment-focused justice systems (like in the U.S.) result in more people in prison, are more costly and correlate with higher crime rates (not sure about the current evidence on causality, but I think it is pretty obvious that the trauma and stigma associated with a punishment-leaning justice system would tend to lead to more crime).
Studies quite consistently show that increasing the punishment for a given crime does not reduce the rate it is committed at, all other things being equal. Because guess what, criminals are either unaware that they are committing a crime/are committing a crime in a moment of passion (in which case the punishment is of no consequence) or they think that they won't be caught. Which is one of the many reasons the death penalty is so stupid. Catching criminals and bringing the to trial quickly is much more relevant than the severity of the punishment and the concept of rehabilitation is an extension of that: You find criminals quickly, you sentence them quickly and you invest in them leaving the justice system as quickly as possible to become productive members of society again. Why would I want to spend hundreds of thousands of Dollars on keeping someone behind bars for the rest of their life when I can also try spending a fraction of that on cognitive therapy, apprenticeships and social work to get them out of prison and into a stable life situation in which they have a decent chance of not committing a crime again?
It wouldn't be a problem if people would just stop advocating for going back to the bad old days. You don't know how it feels, but absolutely, if you lower the cost too much people are going to pay it.
The more we reduce this to some sort of transactional justice where everyone is supposed to pretend that nothing happened after a few years in a cage and everything is perfectly okay because people have "reformed" (never mind the people who keep going back...) the more you go back to the bad old days by making the justice system dysfunctional.
Also we can't very well make police more efficient because we don't really agree on the laws. Some people want all drugs to be legal (never mind the addicts who fall into a spiral where they rob others), some people want approximately no drugs to be legal (never mind the other costs). But there's yet to be any social consensus on whether we end up with the Tenderloin, Singapore or somewhere between.
Problem is that I think increasing leniency looks more or less like a phase change at some point. And nobody wants to acknowledge that historically, justice systems made society more peaceful via literal selection effects. Jail was not used so much in the past, there was more corporal punishment or death. Part of the problem is that jail only works while they're inside and imposes other costs, including moral ones.
> How does the (in democratic societies) generally accepted principle in dubio pro reo fit into this?
By creating a society that, on balance, trusts the state and it's institutions to enact justice (apply suffering, in context).
It will fail to be perfect, same as any other system. But it just needs to work well enough that a sufficient mass of citizens don't lose faith in it and try to enact their own forms of justice.
We can all point to cases where murderers got away with it, or someone who was ruled guilty received a sentence we think is wrong, but _overall_, we're ok with the state managing violence on our behalf.
> In terms of practical social functioning, rehabilitation of criminals is much more valuable than punishment, which is why most democracies at least aspire to this ideal.
There is little evidence that any rehabilitation schemes are particularly successful, with the gaps between the most- and least- effective not being particularly meaningful.
You prevent crimes by removing people that commit them from society.
Especially murderers seem to experience quite low recidivism rates, likely owing to the fact that murders tend to be highly personal affairs and/or highly dependent on the the availability of a significant motive and opportunity.
The lesson here seems to be that you prevent crime by limiting the situations that would give people the opportunity or require them to commit it. I.e. you provide a social safety net, limit access to firearms, require transparency in financial transactions, etc. And if someone commits a crime, you invest specifically in that person's ability and commitment to not engage in further crime in the future or put differently, you rehabilitate them. That will of course vary from person to person and for some a release back into society might not be an option. But putting people into prison without investing in rehabilitation will just create the conditions to put more (or the same) people into prison (again).
I don't think so. I'm not suggesting the use of violence as a deterrent[0]. My point is that the human urge to enact violence in response to wrongdoing has to be satisfied. If it's not satisfied by the state, it'll lead to mob justice and vigilantism.
[0] I think in many contexts it is, but that's distinct from my earlier post.
No, the alternative is to not apply retribution. To me anyone who applies retribution is nothing more than a thug, whether doing at the behest of the state or their own accord.
This is highly nuanced. There is certainly a case for punishing a family and its generations when the culture in that family is to do evil (example any crime family).
But to punish a family for the evil of one member who goes against the cultural aspect of that family? That is a different thing altogether.
There is also a spectrum between these two extremes as well. This is not an easy subject.
It would highly depend on when in 1945 Hitler showed up... if it were before the Surrender of Germany, he's toast... after, hold him for the war crimes tribunal.
Baby Hitler is easier... give his mom 2 tickets to America, arrange a stay with some distant relatives there, some money, and make sure they get on the boat. She'd be glad to get away from his father.
The Hitler example and Twitter poll seems poorly phrased.
If I'm stranded on a desert island with one other person, I'm going to want Man Adolf to help me knock down coconuts and build a house and just make conversation to stop me going insane. Retributive justice would be the last thing on my mind.
Perhaps the author's Twitter followers skew differently.
1. In “The origin of political order” Fukuyama takes the point of view that the emergence of the western state depended on suppression of extended family ties, since those formed an alternative power structure.
If one were to punish not only the individual but also his family, I would think that inner family loyalty would in the end be strengthened.
2. In to command and persuade Baldwin asserts that punishment is most effective if it is ( in principle ) accepted by the punished. In Modern society punishing the family lost likely would not be accepted.
Also interesting the wiki article ( English ) about the concept in German law.
To 2, for my part I would consider such a regime one it would be a moral imperative to overthrow by violence. It'd be repugnant and illegitimate to me. And the risk of being considered illegitimate enough to trigger armed resistance is something that would need to be considered.
Are there any examples of family member punishments deterring actual criminals from committing actual crimes? All those tyrannies use it to prevent good people from doing good things (or normal people doing normal things). People commit crimes because they don't have regard for others' well-being. I'm not convinced that a concern for their kin would stop a significant percentage of wrong-doers. Furthermore, for it to even have a chance to work, the harm you inflict on the family of the criminal must greatly exceed the harm of the crime (e.g. you steal a car and a car is taken away from your family member if you are caught - I can't imagine this making even the slightest dent in the criminal's motivation). Thus, even the straightforward consequentialist calculation isn't working.
> Are there any examples of family member punishments deterring actual criminals from committing actual crimes?
Denmark has this strange law that allows families to be kicked out of apartments in certain areas if their children continues to commit crimes (and let's be honest it's targeted at male immigrants from the middle east). So if a young man living at home is caught committing crime repeatably, then the family will get a warning letting them know that their sons activities can cause them to lose their apartment. The idea is that the parents will step in and take action where the government can't or fails.
Not sure if it deters crime, but it does help motivate families to step in.
I believe so, but I actually never seen any mention of age limits. If it's adult children there is of cause the option of "just" kicking out the person committing the crime.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 342 ms ] threadHe is using family punishment as a strawman. If you say he is bad because he thinks it's morally praiseworthy to inflict suffering, he will argue that if you like deterrence so much then why don't you inflict suffering on families that should deter them even more lol
Deliberately confounding "reasoning for choice of punishment" and "severity/extremeness of punishment" and "other moral guidelines outside the 'punishment-reason-axis' that inform the option-space of punishment" is obvious rhetorical trolling, who cares what the precise "fallacy-name" is for this sort of behavior.
Now that I think about it from the other end, I don't see how "hurting their family" is excluded from "retributive justice" solely by the definition of "retributive" either. It's been treated as a perfectly valid act of retribution in many cultures across history (and the present day, probably) - see every story about feuding clans killing each others members; they don't do that because they think it's going to dissuade the other clan from enacting their own vengeance in turn.
It's a slippery slope fallacy variant: "if you have laws to deter actions by individuals, then why not have laws which might create greater deterrence" - and then simply assumes all other considerations can be handwaved away.
If the argument: "the psychological harm of knowing there is famine is bad, therefore we should simply kill all people suffering from famine..." sounds ridiculous to you, then so should this person's argument because it's doing the exact same trick.
That's not withstanding the utterly absurd "opposite" he constructs his position as: "I believe in creating suffering as a morally noble goal" is not some sort of counter-argument, it's just him arguing for his own sociopathy in pretty-prose.
There is the argument that making bad people suffer ruins our morality. If we're better than them, then we don't want people to inflict suffering.
The act of torturing someone does something bad to you, regardless of whatever other effect. The kind of person who would torture someone in cold blood is not someone I want next to me.
Why?
This is not even a slightly obvious statement. In fact it broadly fails because most individual punishments already, due to the nature of familial relations, do punish families both directly and indirectly.
it doesn't.
Familial punishment encourages the enforcement of the rules inside families, lest they get punished. But the rules must be acceptable to the broader family, otherwise it makes for rebellion against the authority (presumably the royalty or dictator in this case).
It only doesn't work under _today_'s laws, since families today, compared to the medieval times, is a lot less close and more like acquaintances than family (i'm including things like in-laws, uncles and aunts etc as family).
I doubt that you can make a real comparison of the "utility" of family punishment between medieval times and today without diving deep into all these aspects.
I'd like to see a citation they do work.
E.g., something tells me "preventative" unreported domestic violence would rise. If the increase is high enough it could easily be argued that the tactic hasn't worked but instead just pushed crime out of the public eye. (Or potentially increasing overall violence.)
Edit: also, probably shifting the violence toward the youth as they don't have the same impulse control as the adults. Good luck, future generations!
Double edit: IIRC the vast majority of studies on corporal punishment state that it increases the likelihood of aggression in the child as they develop. So double good luck, future generations!!
I have to read to learn that ?
I’d better save my time and assume the same thing
I think "go fuck yourself" is still the correct response to this essay.
Huh? What if the local minima of inflicting some suffering to the perpetrator will lead to a better local maxima?
I don't know why the author seems to think that being a consequentialist or utilitirianism somehow precludes certain solutions/methods? The only truth is this: That actions have consequence, we live in a universe with cause and effect (even if some of that cause is random). If this is false then there is absolutely zero reason to have morality. The only "right" morality is to have one that attempts to map itself closest to reality (the propensity for man to believe in irrational things is also one such reality). A morality that demands certain methods without the ability to change in real time is just dogma.
This is why it is so confusing why people oppose Sam Harris so much. A world in which everyone thinks like him is not so much different than now. We would still have left/right wing debates and all that. The only difference is that belief no longer gets a pass. You can't say "doing X is right because it says so". When someone says "bro, believe me, we need to do this particular thing every other day or else we would suffer tremendously" then people would rightly question their belief. The calculus of "missing 1 prayer and suffer hell for ETERNITY" and living in modernity is entirely absurd. If you have such world view, then slaughtering apostate is entirely justified, because in your belief, apostates would have suffered in hell for ETERNITY. So the equation tips heavily towards doing whatever is necessary to prevent this.
>Right morality maps itself to reality... buuuut man believing irrational things is also 'one such' reality.
These statements either contradict, or open up too many possibilities. If irrational man is one reality, then what's the real reality, the second, true reality?
If you're going to sacrifice giving belief 'a pass', then it's really hard to draw a firm dividing line on whom-gets-a-pass and whom doesn't.
I'd always lean towards giving irrational people mercy.
Tying mercy solely to rationality and logic can become too reductive for humans to lead good lives.
And who defines what reality is? Sam Harris? Sabine Hossenfelder? Steve from Accounting?
How so? The fact that man believes in irrational things is a reality...How is that controversial? It is real that most of my family actually believes in a physical hell. Yes, in their mind, they actually believe that a fiery hall of flame actually exists somewhere and people will suffer in eternity, for ever and ever and ever and ever, with increasingly harsher suffering until...well, there's no until, it just goes on and on.
What modern western people refuses to accept is that people actually do believe this things. Its not just a coping mechanism for retribution or something crap like that. When people tell you, "we believe in X because Y says so". They actually do believe in that. They think that there's an actual Y that comes down to Earth and wrote those Xs.
And the fact that apes are prone to believe such a thing is also a reality. That is not to say that what they believe is real, just that their tendency is real. And this kind of belief have consequence. If they actually think that Y wrote down those Xs, and given that Y is omnipotent, well surely Xs is some divine scripture that we must follow?
A universe in which the scripture says that one should enter a house with the left foot vs the right foot is an entirely difference universe. If such benign belief could yield so much difference, why wouldn't everything else?
Saying that, I can completely willing to accept that human (or apes) need to have _some_ belief. That evolution have crafted us to rely on some belief that is believed at some societal level to operate and function. I am willing to accept that yet that doesn't mean that any of the beliefs are right.
>And who defines what reality is? Sam Harris? Sabine Hossenfelder? Steve from Accounting?
No one, reality is just whatever is.
I get why your logic is so muddled.
Good luck!
An example was after Sept 11, there was a lot of discussion about torture. Inevitably, an argument would come up where the person said torture was morally reprehensible, and it never worked anyway.
They never wanted to address in the cases where torture would likely work (for a current example - a passcode to unlock a iPhone that you could check on the spot), would you still be morally opposed?
In this article, the author addresses something that would likely be very effective, yet still condemns it as being immoral.
The good old car keys fallacy of torture: "if someone threatened to beat me with an iron bar unless I handed over my car keys, I'd give them my car keys"
Replace with: "someone threatens to beat you with an iron bar unless you give up the passcode to the strong-room protecting your family, so they can murder them". You still going to do it?
You've implicitly assigned a low value to the information you're willing to torture someone for, and ensured the information is easy to verify, therefore, obviously someone will just give up the information.
But why would you so desperately need low-value information in the first place? Why would specific torture be needed, but "mild inconvenience" would not work - given as how the information is apparently of no serious value to the person holding it. And of course, if it's high-value information you run into other problems like how beyond a certain point the person can't actually remember their name, or recall any complex information, so the idea you could "beat a passcode out of them" is highly questionable.
Proven by the practical methods by which Osama bin Laden was located by the CIA: the CIA fed a story to the makers of Zero Dark Thirty that they successfully tortured it out of a prisoner. They definitely tortured the prisoner...but all the useful information was obtained using regular interrogation techniques before they water-boarded him 100+ times.
Providing of course the secondary problem: if torture - in this case water-boarding - worked, why did 100+ efforts fail to yield any better information then what they already had?
You're going to be beaten with an iron bar until you tell your torturer the passcode to access the strong-room/safe/GPS coordinates of your family. If you give them the information, they will kill them all.
Are you going to do it?
That's the whole point: because you don't prioritize their objectives, you don't evaluate whether you think it would work in terms relevant to you. You don't believe in terrorist attacks, therefore you wouldn't protect a terrorist attack. But a terrorist would. The 9/11 hijackers embarked on their mission already expecting to die.
Actually replace with someone is asking you and then ripping out your fingernails one by one when you hesitate or give the wrong answer. What are the chances that you are able to resist, even if you obviously want to?
Some percentage of people, maybe even a large percentage are going to enter a point where the only focus will be on getting the pain to stop, no matter the consequences afterward.
Not some other person who you can construct to be weak to torture. What would you do in that situation?
Do you believe you'll somehow lose your mind so completely to pain that you'll somehow accurately understand and answer the question, yet be unaware of the consequences?
There's a non strawman version of this practiced in most cultures across the world, familial shame. Averting shame from your family and inflicting shame on relatives is an important social function in many cultures. Western cultures have a unique aversion to it due to unusual levels of individualism, but it's not a challenge for consequentialism in general. It does indeed work, and it is widely practiced.
The basic idea seems to be: In some cases it might prevent more harm to punish innocent people i.e. family members of criminals, therefore consequentialists should endorse punishing family members in those cases.
The author seems to think this logic doesn't apply to their own position because they believe that the reason to punish wrongdoers isn't to prevent further harm, but because the punishment of wrongdoers is justice which is good. The opposite side of this would be punishing innocent people, which would be injustice. This contrasts with pure consequentialism which doesn't care about justice vs. injustice, it only cares about the end result.
The key part is from the definition from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which says:
> 3. that it is morally impermissible intentionally to punish the innocent or to inflict disproportionately large punishments on wrongdoers.
But then, the author then goes on to say:
> What if harming Hitler’s baby was the only way to save the world? As a moderate deontologist, I reluctantly endorse this implication. But only in dire hypotheticals with little real-world relevance.
So it seems like the author also endorse harming the family members of wrongdoers, but for them it's ok because it's only in "dire hypotheticals". This feels like a bit of a cop out to me. It seems like you could just as easily call yourself a "moderate consequentialist" and say that punishing people is only good as a deterrent, but also punishing innocent people is wrong.
Correct. The "system" if you can even call it that is not stemming coherently from any moral foundations.
1 and 2 are the same. To say a wrongdoer deserves punishment is to say it's good to punish. Deserves is language of morality. 3 is completely unrelated.
This article is nonsense.
Also from the article:
> My challenge for readers: Propose any alternative to retributivism that precludes family punishment.
I'm sorry but that is hilarious. Here's one off the top of my head, having literally never thought about this before.
1. Punishing the innocent is wrong.
2. Literally any ideas at all about crime and punishment that don't violate point 1.
That passes the author's sniff test anyway. Is there a bounty for such a challenge?
> That’s right, I think that inflicting suffering on vicious wrong-doers is morally praiseworthy even in the absence of any deterrent effect. Deterrence is a happy byproduct, but the fundamental point of punishment is to balance the scales of justice.
This is caveman levels of moral justification. What does it mean to balance the scales? If somebody is maimed, and we maim the maimer, does that count?
The first act worsened the victims life and the second act did nothing to help them. Doesn't feel like the scales are tipping correctly. It doesn't even seem that using analogies about scales is even useful to the conversation. It's almost like the issue is really complex and can't be summed up as a system in 2.5 bullet points by way of measuring scales.
If you consider the hoary old governments that implemented this stuff you find that contrary to what you might assume they can't even begin to care about a the guy that got in a fight and died. The farmer whose chickens were rustled. Life is cheap and the peasants lives are barely worth the paper to mark their existence.
What do they care about. The the system keeps functioning. Someone does something like beating a man do death in a drunken brawl, stole some chickens. That causes problems if unchecked.
So what do you do. You reserve retribution to you and you alone. So that exacting private retribution is a challenge to your authority. You also reserve truth, only you get to say a man is a badie or not. And once you've done so you force his community to accept him back.
If you accept the above punishing his family makes things worse not better. You gave him 20 lashes and he's butthurt about that, so what. Give his family 5 lashes each and they hate you not him.
First, and less importantly, I think "dire hypothetical" is a bad phrase for the Baby Hitler thought experiment. I suspect dire is used as a synonym for "presaging" rather than "extreme". The only point of the Baby Hitler example is to examine the philosophy under entirely unrealistic circumstances: what if we had perfect knowledge about the future? It is intended to emotionally prejudice people, typically towards ends-based philosophies.
The author concedes the imaginary hypothetical, but only those hypotheticals with unreal perfect knowledge. At that point, you could say that yes, the sky is green, but only in hypothetical worlds with green skies.
As for the rest, it is essentially the classic means versus ends debate.
Punishment of wrong doing as an intrinsic good, rather than as a deterrent, should obviously preclude punishing family members- if we were to also postulate that punishing wrongdoing is good, then punishing innocence is intrinsically wrong. Punishment itself would be wrongdoing.
Basically, this boils down to a simple means versus ends debate; "preventative" punishment cares only about results, while the author only cares that the "means" (the act) punishment is morally right.
Yeah, after thinking about it some more I edited my comment slightly to emphasize the "means versus ends" idea that I think the author is getting at.
The part that still bugs me is that the author seems to be taking a middle ground where punishing the innocent is okay in arbitrarily extreme cases, but they don't accept that a consequentialist could just use the same trick to say that punishing family members is wrong.
The problem is that, even if it worked, I wouldn't want to live in a world where people are punished or executed before they actually do anything wrong. In a sense, I think it's valid to "throw in the towel" and claim: if this is what it takes to minimize suffering, I don't want anything to do with it; to hell with it.
Minority report is another "dire hypothetical". Like the author, I'm comfortable dismissing any hypothetical that relies on perfect future knowledge as unrealistic and unworthy of consideration. Unlike the author, I'm not taking a stance on either ends or means based philosophy. Just reacting a bit to what the parent post said.
Religious people often treat people who are not family, as family. It doesn't take Einstein to figure out that families should band together when they look over and see their peer-families get implicated for crimes they didn't commit.
The Hitler argument makes little sense because you kill him. Retributive justice works best when it's paired with Mercy. Punish then pardon. Otherwise it's just pointless punishment.
Get Hitler do some rebuilding of the land he destroyed, face the widows of the sons he ordered to die, shake the hand of a Jewish holocaust survivor. Throw him into a zoo enclosure with one-way glass, in a straight jacket, and allow him to hear the epitaths of the survivors as they walk past his cell.
Why retribution has to end in physical punishment and killing, is beyond me. There are realities worse than death, which have nothing to do with violence.
One man, once captured by the state and social opinion, cannot be allowed the easy way out, of death-by-retributive-revenge.
Can we move past Hitler, why am I carrying around his mistakes like it matters in today's cyberpunk world...
Also, what part of this article do you think has anything to do with Koch incentives?
Consequentialism is an ethical theory that judges whether or not something is right by what its consequences are.
Retributive justice is a theory of punishment that maintains that wrongdoers deserve to be punished, in proportion to their crimes, as a matter of justice or right.
All of these seem to abandon the wider outlook that punishment in lieu of rehabilitation has had on society at least in the United States. A single punishment without rehabilitation is already generational. This also postures crime as some kind of primordial evil; there are certainly some crimes and specific natures of crime that I could see most people agreeing are "evil" but when we're talking the vast majority of crime worthy of punishment do people really believe that evil is what's at the center of it?
The idea of rehabilitation is that victims may have the right to restitution or reparation (to be made whole, or at least approach that state) but not to retribution. The punishment of a criminal is supposed to provide the basis for his eventual rehabilitation, not be driven by the victim's or society's desire to make him suffer for his "evil" deeds.
I think the historical evidence is that this is the preferable approach to building a society and that OPs idea that social peace requires punishment is wrong.
> A single punishment without rehabilitation is already generational.
Many states and localities in the US is indeed a stark example of what sort of consequences a retributive system of justice has on society (for example, California 3-strikes, extraordinary sentences for minor crimes in the many states, etc). The damage it's had has been inordinate.
Most crime, indeed, doesn't have evil at the center of it. For example, drug and intellectual property law violations should really be civil offenses.
The public prosecutor (i.e. the state / "the people"). This is already the case for small traffic offenses.
Which leads to two observations:
1, consequentialism is really hard, actually. 2, most other moral systems are really just varying approximations of consequentialism in disguise. "Follow my rules." "Why?" "Because the consequences of not following them would be disastrous!"
In any case it's possible to generate much clearner counterexamples to consequentialism in the same vein as Kaplan's but without any knock-on societal effects. Imagine a man breaks into a woman's house while she's asleep, and sexually assaults her (1) without her awareness, (2) without causing any physical injury or giving her any disease (3) without her ever discovering that this had taken place. By stipulation, the act made no difference to her, physically or mentally, over her whole life. A consequentialist would be hard put to say why such an act would be wrong, given that it seems to cause no negative consequences, and often need to resort to saying some decidely non-consequentialist-sounding things, for example by making up abstract, symbolic 'consequences' (such as: "the act caused a violation of a moral norm") to yield the intuitively correct result.
This does not ring true to me at all. Also, the distinction is not really relevant. The both fears are exactly the same - the only difference is that the former one is "deserved" and the latter is "undeserved". But, there is not difference to think the subjective suffering is different.
Second, with family example, the family is in the "held at gunpoint during a robbery" situation. They risk being mistreated, but did not caused it and have no control over the situation. What this rule would do is that the abusive and criminal family members would had even more power within their families and more ability to mistreat family members. Because family members wont be able to turn them in. Once someone committed crime, everyone in the family would need to protect them just out of self interest.
I've also seen people argue that perpetrators of harm like this are also harmed.
Aside from all that, I know the instinct is to draw up thought experiments that provoke emotion, but using such a charged example is potentially alienating. I'm not saying we shouldn't be able to talk about hard topics, but that maybe bringing up rape (and such a specifically gendered one) as your thought experiment example in such a trivial discussion is a bit extreme.
Suppose the example had involved instead (say) theft. Then consequentialists would be able point to the fact that the act caused a reduction of the victim's assets as the "negative consequence" which renders the act morally wrong. Likewise if the example involved something as serious as murder, or as (relatively) trivial as property defacement. In all these cases, the wrongfulness of the act coexists with a negative difference (whether mental or physical) it makes to the victim. So they would not serve for the purpose of refuting the core consequentialist idea that an act is made wrong by its negative consequences (rather than say by its violation of moral rules).
If you can think of an example other than sexual assault that satisfies the twin desiderata above ((1) and (2)) equally well, I'm all ears.
But I disagree with the second point. Consequentialism is a philosophical claim to the effect that an act is morally wrong if and only if such-and-such conditions obtain. If it's possible to imagine a situation, however recherche, involving a morally wrong act but in which "such-and-such conditions" do not obtain, that automatically refutes consequentialism and it either has to be revised or given up altogether.
That is, you can hold a belief that the optimal "decision criteria" for an act-consequentialist is actually a rule-consequentialist one, and this belief is fairly common.
Restated: being an act-consequentialist doesn't absolve you from having to determine act-consequentialism's best decision criteria, because if it did then you wouldn't be being act-consequentialist about it. It's recursive like that.
Isn't the scenario here that if I have a member of my family that commits a particular crime then I have to fear the consequence?
Thus I should fear having children, stupid siblings, or parents who go off the deep end (probably children, but theoretically could have other familial relationships be in the graph of punishment)
No idea that existed but always thought it would be a good means to make sure kids go to school instead of just hanging around being a nuisance during school hours. When mom & dad can feel it in their bank account they'll make damn sure the kid goes to school.
It's remarkable how often these "ah hah, gotcha, answer that atheists"-style posts are triumphantly self-defeating within their own argument. It feels like so much bad faith arguing.
Speaking of Germany, what about their ancient and well established policy of group reprisals in military situations.
Lastly, it's funny which threads on HN are actually interesting and which run into the ditch. What's the difference? No direct politics?
[Edited for clarity]
I suspect that specifically "family punishment" fails the cost-benefit analysis due to practical reasons, but the question of "should we weigh the suffering of good people equally to the suffering of terrible people in our ethics system" is interesting to me, and I don't currently have answer.
I'm not a full utilitarist anymore as I don't think a good utility function exist, but it is a good way to evaluate quickly if an action I do is more likely to do good than bad: 'do I risk hurting someone?'.
I think almost everyone is utilitarist, you probably are too. If one time you spent money to buy flowers or a gift for no reason but make someone happy, or you told a white lie/didn't tell the truth to avoid hurting someone, you're one too.
But like I said, it's not a good moral philosophy. It's useful in short burst, to take quick judgment on concrete, temporary actions, but it fails on larger ideas.
Which is fine tbh. I need philosophy to carry me through concrete decisions too, not just through political choices. Utilitarism is useful for the former, less for the later (in the best case you end up believing Pinker's statistics).
Preference(person, one_thing, other_thing) and it returns -1, 0 or 1 depending on what that person prefers?
You can do math on this and try to optimize it, it's just more complicated than if utility was cardinal and objective.
Someone might choose to maximise their personal happiness even knowing that their personal suffering would also increase (or even be maximised). Trite example: prisoner released from jail who sets out to kill the person who double-crossed him, knowing that he'll be re-incarcerated or even executed.
Happiness and suffering might be related but they're (somewhat) independent.
θ(-f(x))*(-f(x)) vs max(0, -f(x))
The consequential case is the strategy you use when you are in opposition, and the retributive case is the strategy you use when you are in power. The reason is that when you are in power, you don't need to prevent crime any more than is strictly necessary for you to maintain office - so catching a few here and there and restricting retributive punishment to them only is sufficient to keep your end of the bargain, but retributive justice doesn't involve you in too much complexity or commitment.
When you are an insurgent or faction, crime prevention is something you can promise to the coalitions who can swap you into power, and so imposing costs on criminals via decimation and grisly public examples is economical, mostly because the state isn't going to step in to protect them either. The economics of insurgent death squads are favorably quite cost effective and win-win, and they only become a political problem when they become too popular. Incumbent death squads just waste political capital and foment overthrow, so they're really only for kleptocrats who have an escape plan to another country, imo.
Punishing a family inflicts definite harm on innocent people, for the chance to inflict less harm on society. This happens every time a family is punished, punishing one criminal's family wouldn't have much influence, so that is a lot of innocent sacrifices. Therefore you'd need a substantial amount of would-be criminals who don't care about their own suffering enough to be deterred, but do care about their family's. "substantial", "criminals", "don't care about their own suffering...but do care about their family's"...doesn't seem likely to me.
In contrast, I'm going by the reasoning that criminal's intrinsic value is much lower than an innocent person (although they still have value). So even if many criminals are punished and the deterrence only saves a few innocents, it's still worth it to punish criminals themselves. If many innocents are punished, the deterrence has to save many more innocents; there's a good argument that that's unlikely, which means consequentialism actually does have a good argument against punishing families.
It's much easier to form coherent moral arguments when you identify clear boundaries for moral behavior versus the "ends justifying means" nature of consequentialism. Some might find that intellectually lazy, others might view it as a requirement for a consistent morality.
And no, the argument that family punishment doesn't work is not compelling when up against Caplan's historical examples of their efficacy. This is just back-rationalizing a morality not actually grounded in consequentialism. A consequentialist who isn't totally historically ignorant should at least be able to entertain the prospect of family punishment satisfying their moral framework, regardless of whether they fully buy in.
Under retributivism, family punishment could also be incredibly effective up until the point they declare "no punishing of the innocent." That it is a gotcha that consequentialists are prohibited for doing same is just silly.
People make allowances, exceptions, and put hard limits on otherwise open-ended systems in order to make them practicable. Why would consequentialism fall apart if you had to put a few sanity checks into it, such as "don't punish the innocent?"
For the sake of thought experiments, sure, see how each side plays out under very strict rules. But the real world is messy, doesn't fit nicely into one particular "ism" all the time. Your entire belief system shouldn't be predicated on thought experiments.. therefore there is no reason to get so dogmatic about building moral justifications from only one direction. Especially when a flexible or hybrid approach offers such obvious advantages.
Aside from the morals, it's essentially for a functioning society. The intrinsic urge to harm someone that has harmed you can't be allowed to happen. The state has to have a monopoly on violence to function.
If you are not allowed to inflict suffering on people that have wronged you, the state has to.
If the state doesn't, a large enough portion of people will do it themselves, and the state loses legitimacy.
I think this idea of required punishment to retain social stability is stupid and is not relevant in praxis. Prevention of crime and support for victims, as well as establishing the truth and encouraging sincere remorse from the perpetrator are much more powerful forces for social peace. In terms of practical social functioning, rehabilitation of criminals is much more valuable than punishment, which is why most democracies at least aspire to this ideal.
> I think this idea of required punishment to retain social stability is stupid and is not relevant in praxis.
You've never seen mom's brain matter staining the basement walls, or heard that her killer had grandma on same hit list that mom was crossed off of. If the state had not intervened, what do you think would have happened there?
This is not a hypothetical situation.
Sources? Here are some that confirm the effectiveness of various interventions/approaches:
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11292-020-09420-3
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31548680/
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315907207_Reducing_...
> You've never seen mom's brain matter staining the basement walls […]
What? First, contract killing (which is what you seem to describe here) is exceptionally rare in most societies and second, rehabilitation does not preclude police from interfering with crime. Of course you stop a killing if you have prior knowledge of it, if necessary by restraining/incarcerating the alleged killer. Rehabilitation is implemented once guilt has been established to allow a convicted criminal to re-enter society as a productive individual as soon as possible while minimizing the risk to other members of society.
I think you underestimate the revenge cycle that might occur if society wanted to be more lenient than life in prison, which was the result here. The state can't reasonably be more lenient than the average person, or the average person is going to decide that the cost of a few years is worth the revenge. You're already looking at a lifetime of pain for losing someone dear to you, what's a couple of years if you admit your guilt and surrender quietly? And that's before we get into "hey, this guy made a hit list with my name on it, and we have to take that seriously because the person at the top of the list was already murdered."
For the rest, one of your studies says "There was no evidence of significant differences on rearrest or reconviction. Moderator analysis showed no significant moderating effect for risk score, age, or sex." and "the results would be considered mixed, at best." Which... yeah, is pretty much what I've seen for the most part. Maybe I'm not communicating what I think accurately enough, but this sort of result pretty much exactly what I have in mind. You find studies with promising numbers that still turn out to be meh and don't leave you convinced that the intervention is actually changing what the people are capable of.
Importantly, I do not say that nothing shows some promise, or that we shouldn't keep trying, I'm just saying we don't have anything that looks like it can be scaled up to have big impact. And I get that it's hard to measure when plenty of people will do maybe one crime due to some big mistake and had no intention of doing more. I have some small hope that maybe intervening for psychosis could help with violent offenses, but that might assume too much about people taking their meds, unless they're willing and able to use long-lasting injections.
My guess is you are writing from a U.S. point of view. You are severely underestimating how much of an outlier the U.S. is in terms of its justice system when compared to other democracies. Germany, not exactly known for its historical social cuddliness, for example doesn't even allow "life in prison" sentences. Our constitution guarantees the possibility for every convicted, no matter the crime, to regain their freedom. Even people convicted of multiple murders will get their first parole hearing after 15 years and while a court can order their detention beyond this, this is technically no longer a prison sentence and only allowable if there is a high likelihood that the person in question will cause additional harm if released. This assessment is checked every few years with the goal that no one will spend more time in prison than necessary.
This approach to criminal justice enjoys broad support in Germany and most western European societies. All of these societies are also considerably more safe than the U.S. and many other places that put an explicit emphasis on retributive justice. I'm not aware of notable cases of revenge violence due to this.
Retributive justice is an outdated philosophy that only sounds reasonable when you assume the worst in people and ignore the effects of the intergenerational trauma that it produces.
Yes, I'm aware that some places don't do life in prison or such. I'm pointing out the harms of that.
And if someone threatens your life in the moment you are entitled to reasonable measures of self defense, including killing the attacker if you can not avoid harm to yourself or others in another way, that is a completely separate issue.
I can't help if you're not aware of even thing like the Hatfields & the McCoys, but I can push back when people want to head us back to the bad old days.
Studies quite consistently show that increasing the punishment for a given crime does not reduce the rate it is committed at, all other things being equal. Because guess what, criminals are either unaware that they are committing a crime/are committing a crime in a moment of passion (in which case the punishment is of no consequence) or they think that they won't be caught. Which is one of the many reasons the death penalty is so stupid. Catching criminals and bringing the to trial quickly is much more relevant than the severity of the punishment and the concept of rehabilitation is an extension of that: You find criminals quickly, you sentence them quickly and you invest in them leaving the justice system as quickly as possible to become productive members of society again. Why would I want to spend hundreds of thousands of Dollars on keeping someone behind bars for the rest of their life when I can also try spending a fraction of that on cognitive therapy, apprenticeships and social work to get them out of prison and into a stable life situation in which they have a decent chance of not committing a crime again?
The more we reduce this to some sort of transactional justice where everyone is supposed to pretend that nothing happened after a few years in a cage and everything is perfectly okay because people have "reformed" (never mind the people who keep going back...) the more you go back to the bad old days by making the justice system dysfunctional.
Also we can't very well make police more efficient because we don't really agree on the laws. Some people want all drugs to be legal (never mind the addicts who fall into a spiral where they rob others), some people want approximately no drugs to be legal (never mind the other costs). But there's yet to be any social consensus on whether we end up with the Tenderloin, Singapore or somewhere between.
Problem is that I think increasing leniency looks more or less like a phase change at some point. And nobody wants to acknowledge that historically, justice systems made society more peaceful via literal selection effects. Jail was not used so much in the past, there was more corporal punishment or death. Part of the problem is that jail only works while they're inside and imposes other costs, including moral ones.
By creating a society that, on balance, trusts the state and it's institutions to enact justice (apply suffering, in context).
It will fail to be perfect, same as any other system. But it just needs to work well enough that a sufficient mass of citizens don't lose faith in it and try to enact their own forms of justice.
We can all point to cases where murderers got away with it, or someone who was ruled guilty received a sentence we think is wrong, but _overall_, we're ok with the state managing violence on our behalf.
> In terms of practical social functioning, rehabilitation of criminals is much more valuable than punishment, which is why most democracies at least aspire to this ideal.
There is little evidence that any rehabilitation schemes are particularly successful, with the gaps between the most- and least- effective not being particularly meaningful.
You prevent crimes by removing people that commit them from society.
By that logic the U.S. should be among the least crime-ridden societies in the world, having an incarceration rate of 531 people per 100,000 compared to 67 per 100,000 in i.e. Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
But in reality, Germany experiences significantly less crime than the U.S.: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/crime-rat...
In fact, only about a third of convicted criminals in Germany will be convicted again to a prison term after serving their sentence/paying their fines: https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/kriminalitaetsstudie-... This is similar in the U.S.: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/recidivis... A "removal from society" of people that engage in crime previously thus does not seem to be a prerequisite for preventing crime.
Especially murderers seem to experience quite low recidivism rates, likely owing to the fact that murders tend to be highly personal affairs and/or highly dependent on the the availability of a significant motive and opportunity.
The lesson here seems to be that you prevent crime by limiting the situations that would give people the opportunity or require them to commit it. I.e. you provide a social safety net, limit access to firearms, require transparency in financial transactions, etc. And if someone commits a crime, you invest specifically in that person's ability and commitment to not engage in further crime in the future or put differently, you rehabilitate them. That will of course vary from person to person and for some a release back into society might not be an option. But putting people into prison without investing in rehabilitation will just create the conditions to put more (or the same) people into prison (again).
i think your points fall into that deterrence bucket though.
[0] I think in many contexts it is, but that's distinct from my earlier post.
But to punish a family for the evil of one member who goes against the cultural aspect of that family? That is a different thing altogether.
There is also a spectrum between these two extremes as well. This is not an easy subject.
Baby Hitler is easier... give his mom 2 tickets to America, arrange a stay with some distant relatives there, some money, and make sure they get on the boat. She'd be glad to get away from his father.
Collective punishment - that's a war crime.
If I'm stranded on a desert island with one other person, I'm going to want Man Adolf to help me knock down coconuts and build a house and just make conversation to stop me going insane. Retributive justice would be the last thing on my mind.
Perhaps the author's Twitter followers skew differently.
If one were to punish not only the individual but also his family, I would think that inner family loyalty would in the end be strengthened.
2. In to command and persuade Baldwin asserts that punishment is most effective if it is ( in principle ) accepted by the punished. In Modern society punishing the family lost likely would not be accepted.
Also interesting the wiki article ( English ) about the concept in German law.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sippenhaft
It's counterproductive on average.
Denmark has this strange law that allows families to be kicked out of apartments in certain areas if their children continues to commit crimes (and let's be honest it's targeted at male immigrants from the middle east). So if a young man living at home is caught committing crime repeatably, then the family will get a warning letting them know that their sons activities can cause them to lose their apartment. The idea is that the parents will step in and take action where the government can't or fails.
Not sure if it deters crime, but it does help motivate families to step in.