How do you feel about this analogy? Does this fairly represent your view?
Hundreds of years ago, we had ~no practical means to stop murderers from doing murders. So, at that point, executions were seen as necessary just to protect innocent people. But then we developed the technology of prisons, which meant that executions no longer served any clear protective role. Having done that, today many people are opposed to all executions and feel very queasy even about executions done far in the past. Analogously, today we see prisons as necessary to prevent people from doing crimes. But we might develop technology that would mean that prisons were not necessary to achieve that. And if we did, we might very well look back on the prisons of today the way that people who oppose capital punishment look back on executions in the past.
I’ll give you credit, I’ve never met an actual human being in real life who truly doesn’t believe in punishment. I’ve met many people who claim not to believe in it, but when pressed they always do in one form or another for crimes they actually care about. I’ve gone over the idea of biomedical moral enhancements with people and a lot of them like the idea until it comes to things like rape or pedophilia or genocide when it just doesn’t satisfy their sense of justice anymore.
I’ve just come to accept that retribution is one of our most deeply ingrained instincts, even if it’s one that we’ve recognized for a long time needs to be curbed to some degree. Unless we were to radically alter human nature itself, I don’t see humanity ever completely outgrowing punishment.
The problem is that this philosophy requires others to pay the price of it. If you don't imprison a murderer who kills again that person has paid the price of your kindness. You may feel bad about it, but then you are still alive to do so. As Alfred said to Batman: Some people just want to see the world burn. It isn't a question of punishment so much as prevention. Many years ago a NYT's reporter named Fox Butterfield published a series of articles where he pondered the question of why were crimes declining while prison populations were increasing. The idea that the link was became the people who committed the crimes were in jail and not out committing crimes did not seem to register with him. There was a recent survey that suggested that lack of punishment encouraged people to think they could continue to get away with "it". Until a day of reckoning occurred. If they had been punished earlier they would have not continued. T\F? Don't know. As a moral standpoint your idea is nice. But then if Hitler had been punished for his first attempt to overthrow the German Government in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch had been punished sufficiently things might have turned out better for millions of Jews and others. Just a thought.
Isn't that a form of punishment in that it restricts their movement and ability to associate with others. If your dad tells you to go to your room or your mom tells you no TV or video games isn't that a from of punishment?
Yeah imprisonment is clear case of punishment. The approach outlined above is incremental, and depends on the development of relevant technologies out past the frontier of current capabilities. Up until that point some people will need to be punished with imprisonment.
Then the question is at what point? And would that point be too late? It may be you are confusing punishment with retribution? An eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. It's both punishment and retribution. If Joe murders Bill's brother then Bill gets to kill Joe's brother and so on. See Hatfield & McCoys or Romeo and Juliet. If X steals from Y. Would Y rather have what X stole + interest or would Y want X punished or both? Is returning what was taken (or the equivalent) + interest sufficient or is more required?
I'm not sure technology is the way to go. A lot of human nature hasn't changed since the days of Cain and Abel. People steal for gain, they steal for the thrill of it or to prove they are smarter than the "other guy". If you look at people who become spies they tend to do it not only for the money but to prove how clever they are. Lobotomies were once considered an advanced technological treatment for violent people or people who were depressed, or anxious. Everything look good on paper, to coin a phrase.
"In truth, I’d wager there is roughly as much variance on these issues among victims as the general population."
I haven't done a survey or anything, but anecdotally it seems like being the victim of a crime increases desire for punishment of perpetrators of that crime. I've observed the stereotypical liberal who is for sentencing reform then gets angry when they are a crime victim and the perpetrator receives what they believe is a light sentence. I'm not sure if it's a thing in the UK, but in the US victims are given a chance to address the convicted perpetrator as part of sentencing and they often express positive feelings about the suffering the perpetrator will endure in prison.
Is punishment really “unchosen” suffering? The offender (almost always) knows that he is tempting fate, at the very least. In a way, a criminal is like a person who performs a risky stunt.
I agree. There are also more straightforward examples of chosen punishment, like Jason Riddle rejecting his pardon, or the flagellants injuring their own bodies as penance. Not every criminal is a Raskolnikov, but I think a similar psychological tendency exists to a greater or less degree in many people.
> The serious wrongdoer faces a kind of permanent internal exile, one might say a living-death of moral personhood.
I'm not sure what you mean here but one idea might be prison towns. I.e. a town that prisoners live in, they are not allowed to leave the town (there's a big fence round it), but where otherwise then can live normal lives.
The main drawback for them is they have to live with people like themselves, i.e. criminals, which seems fair.
I can see how there's a basically utilitarian case for punishment minimization over a long time scale, and I think that's far more reasonable than just abolishing police tomorrow and hoping the lynch mobs that replace them aren't the racist type of lynch mob.
Still, I have some misgivings here. Obviously universal surveillance and "voluntary" self-modification set off some alarm bells. I'm also not entirely sure that punishment violates the golden rule or the categorical imperative or whatever you call it. I wouldn't really say I feel a conviction that I should never be punished for anything I've done or might do in the future. If I did something really bad and I had to choose between a public flogging or a prison sentence or some kind of futuristic lobotomy/sedation, I would probably choose the former rather than the latter. I don't view gentler forms of control as necessarily less injurious to my dignity, and I don't view a painful life as necessarily less valuable than a painless one.
I'm deeply sympathetic to this perspective. Harms inflicted by others, or the state, should always be minimized, with special focus on the greivous, needless harms endemic to many systems of justice; causing harm to others, despite our inclinations, does not produce some other nebulous positive good, and systems of social control that seek to minimize man's brutality should not simply replicate it.
But reflecting on the concept of punishment, I realize my own inutitions need to be sharpened. Behavioral psychologists distinguish "positive punishment" (applying harm) from "negative reinforcement" (taking away a good thing or the prospect of it), and in neat animal models where pellets emerge from dispensers they have cleanly differentiable effects. I was hoping this might be a wedge to help me justify my favor for practices likes parking tickets and failing a student who cheats (by contrast to practices like "locking a person in a cage for years on end") but zooming into any individual case makes it hard to disentangle "removing privilege" (negative reinforcement) from "actively causing harm" (positive punishment). Just considering a parking ticket, one person's mild negative incentive becomes another person's needlesly punitive, life-altering diasaster under different circumstance. But if we collapse these categories, we are left with "doing anything that would effect the subject negatively" which leaves us with no means by which to enforce any social norms at all, let alone legal ones. When I tried to re-differentiate the categories on a cleaner moral axis, I was left a bit bereft. I have no idea how to define, and especially, operationalize an idea of punishment, as contrasted with other means of incentive-creation, and as someone who does in fact want to eliminate harms caused by the punishing impulse.
I have held sway the difference you mean to eschew, between retribution and consequence: harm done for the sake of it, and harm done as a necessary side effect of a greater good. Myself unable to disentangle these motives at the level of policy, I'd like to see you refine your idea of punishment: does it include failing people who cheat on tests, ostracizing rapists and fabulists, and giving parking tickets to people to park in the middle of the highway? If not, how do you draw the line? It's easy to say we should minimize all harm caused, but when other harms are spewing out the backend, what do you do? On the other hand, if you did mean to include any and all means of affecting any negative impact on another, what means of social control are disincentivizing antisocial behaviors?
I'm reminded a bit of animal training, where (thankfully, at long last) the predominant school of thought is "all positive reinforcement, all the time." But this is a scheme we can only implement because of the magnitude of our power over the animals we are seeking to train--our ability to see farther than the dog can is the reason we never have to resort to kicking it. A dog can't dispense treats in such a way as to teach the another dog to lie down, roll over, or stop biting. They can mostly only bite back, or exile the dog in question. A human can perceive a wide range of contingencies, projected over a long period of time, and establish a harmless training protocol in a way another dog never could. But a world in which we're governend by the kind of powers that can meaningfully reduce harmful behaviors without harming us (whether we're talking human-evolved supersystems like governments or hypothetical future AI overlords) is also one in which we've ceded our ability to meaningfully make choices for ourselves, even assuming our values are congruous to the system at hand. Which poses further troubling questions.
I think we are evolving away from systemic punishment because technology and increased wealth/well-being will allow for greater preventative measures. In other words, I think we will get to a place where everyone can thrive emotionally and physically, scarcity mindset will crumble and crime will be seen as a collective failure of prevention vs an individual failure.
This is already happening a little bit in the discussion to take some money from policing and provide better resources to vulnerable populations. Most people just don't see this as viable because we've been unable to meet needs to the extent that this seems reasonable.
I don't think the technologies needed to restrain violence, the largest single proposal, are very far at all. If anything they may be too near, likely to be deployed in a society that still has authoritarian tendencies. You could put together a reasonable prototype of a slap drones in 10 years I suspect.
How do you feel about this analogy? Does this fairly represent your view?
Hundreds of years ago, we had ~no practical means to stop murderers from doing murders. So, at that point, executions were seen as necessary just to protect innocent people. But then we developed the technology of prisons, which meant that executions no longer served any clear protective role. Having done that, today many people are opposed to all executions and feel very queasy even about executions done far in the past. Analogously, today we see prisons as necessary to prevent people from doing crimes. But we might develop technology that would mean that prisons were not necessary to achieve that. And if we did, we might very well look back on the prisons of today the way that people who oppose capital punishment look back on executions in the past.
Broadly yeah, though it's a bigger hope than just prisons.
It's been a long time since I read it but this reminds me of Foucault's 'discipline and punish.'
I’ll give you credit, I’ve never met an actual human being in real life who truly doesn’t believe in punishment. I’ve met many people who claim not to believe in it, but when pressed they always do in one form or another for crimes they actually care about. I’ve gone over the idea of biomedical moral enhancements with people and a lot of them like the idea until it comes to things like rape or pedophilia or genocide when it just doesn’t satisfy their sense of justice anymore.
I’ve just come to accept that retribution is one of our most deeply ingrained instincts, even if it’s one that we’ve recognized for a long time needs to be curbed to some degree. Unless we were to radically alter human nature itself, I don’t see humanity ever completely outgrowing punishment.
Fax my brother, spit your shit indeed.
Has OCD also impacted your opinion on this like mine?
100 percent
The problem is that this philosophy requires others to pay the price of it. If you don't imprison a murderer who kills again that person has paid the price of your kindness. You may feel bad about it, but then you are still alive to do so. As Alfred said to Batman: Some people just want to see the world burn. It isn't a question of punishment so much as prevention. Many years ago a NYT's reporter named Fox Butterfield published a series of articles where he pondered the question of why were crimes declining while prison populations were increasing. The idea that the link was became the people who committed the crimes were in jail and not out committing crimes did not seem to register with him. There was a recent survey that suggested that lack of punishment encouraged people to think they could continue to get away with "it". Until a day of reckoning occurred. If they had been punished earlier they would have not continued. T\F? Don't know. As a moral standpoint your idea is nice. But then if Hitler had been punished for his first attempt to overthrow the German Government in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch had been punished sufficiently things might have turned out better for millions of Jews and others. Just a thought.
I don't recall saying in the article that we shouldn't imprison murderers under the present circumstances
Isn't that a form of punishment in that it restricts their movement and ability to associate with others. If your dad tells you to go to your room or your mom tells you no TV or video games isn't that a from of punishment?
Yeah imprisonment is clear case of punishment. The approach outlined above is incremental, and depends on the development of relevant technologies out past the frontier of current capabilities. Up until that point some people will need to be punished with imprisonment.
Then the question is at what point? And would that point be too late? It may be you are confusing punishment with retribution? An eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. It's both punishment and retribution. If Joe murders Bill's brother then Bill gets to kill Joe's brother and so on. See Hatfield & McCoys or Romeo and Juliet. If X steals from Y. Would Y rather have what X stole + interest or would Y want X punished or both? Is returning what was taken (or the equivalent) + interest sufficient or is more required?
I'm not sure technology is the way to go. A lot of human nature hasn't changed since the days of Cain and Abel. People steal for gain, they steal for the thrill of it or to prove they are smarter than the "other guy". If you look at people who become spies they tend to do it not only for the money but to prove how clever they are. Lobotomies were once considered an advanced technological treatment for violent people or people who were depressed, or anxious. Everything look good on paper, to coin a phrase.
"In truth, I’d wager there is roughly as much variance on these issues among victims as the general population."
I haven't done a survey or anything, but anecdotally it seems like being the victim of a crime increases desire for punishment of perpetrators of that crime. I've observed the stereotypical liberal who is for sentencing reform then gets angry when they are a crime victim and the perpetrator receives what they believe is a light sentence. I'm not sure if it's a thing in the UK, but in the US victims are given a chance to address the convicted perpetrator as part of sentencing and they often express positive feelings about the suffering the perpetrator will endure in prison.
Is punishment really “unchosen” suffering? The offender (almost always) knows that he is tempting fate, at the very least. In a way, a criminal is like a person who performs a risky stunt.
I agree. There are also more straightforward examples of chosen punishment, like Jason Riddle rejecting his pardon, or the flagellants injuring their own bodies as penance. Not every criminal is a Raskolnikov, but I think a similar psychological tendency exists to a greater or less degree in many people.
> The serious wrongdoer faces a kind of permanent internal exile, one might say a living-death of moral personhood.
I'm not sure what you mean here but one idea might be prison towns. I.e. a town that prisoners live in, they are not allowed to leave the town (there's a big fence round it), but where otherwise then can live normal lives.
The main drawback for them is they have to live with people like themselves, i.e. criminals, which seems fair.
or, uh, just send them all to Australia?
This was called "transportation". It's a fascinating history.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z938v9q/revision/4
I can see how there's a basically utilitarian case for punishment minimization over a long time scale, and I think that's far more reasonable than just abolishing police tomorrow and hoping the lynch mobs that replace them aren't the racist type of lynch mob.
Still, I have some misgivings here. Obviously universal surveillance and "voluntary" self-modification set off some alarm bells. I'm also not entirely sure that punishment violates the golden rule or the categorical imperative or whatever you call it. I wouldn't really say I feel a conviction that I should never be punished for anything I've done or might do in the future. If I did something really bad and I had to choose between a public flogging or a prison sentence or some kind of futuristic lobotomy/sedation, I would probably choose the former rather than the latter. I don't view gentler forms of control as necessarily less injurious to my dignity, and I don't view a painful life as necessarily less valuable than a painless one.
I'm deeply sympathetic to this perspective. Harms inflicted by others, or the state, should always be minimized, with special focus on the greivous, needless harms endemic to many systems of justice; causing harm to others, despite our inclinations, does not produce some other nebulous positive good, and systems of social control that seek to minimize man's brutality should not simply replicate it.
But reflecting on the concept of punishment, I realize my own inutitions need to be sharpened. Behavioral psychologists distinguish "positive punishment" (applying harm) from "negative reinforcement" (taking away a good thing or the prospect of it), and in neat animal models where pellets emerge from dispensers they have cleanly differentiable effects. I was hoping this might be a wedge to help me justify my favor for practices likes parking tickets and failing a student who cheats (by contrast to practices like "locking a person in a cage for years on end") but zooming into any individual case makes it hard to disentangle "removing privilege" (negative reinforcement) from "actively causing harm" (positive punishment). Just considering a parking ticket, one person's mild negative incentive becomes another person's needlesly punitive, life-altering diasaster under different circumstance. But if we collapse these categories, we are left with "doing anything that would effect the subject negatively" which leaves us with no means by which to enforce any social norms at all, let alone legal ones. When I tried to re-differentiate the categories on a cleaner moral axis, I was left a bit bereft. I have no idea how to define, and especially, operationalize an idea of punishment, as contrasted with other means of incentive-creation, and as someone who does in fact want to eliminate harms caused by the punishing impulse.
I have held sway the difference you mean to eschew, between retribution and consequence: harm done for the sake of it, and harm done as a necessary side effect of a greater good. Myself unable to disentangle these motives at the level of policy, I'd like to see you refine your idea of punishment: does it include failing people who cheat on tests, ostracizing rapists and fabulists, and giving parking tickets to people to park in the middle of the highway? If not, how do you draw the line? It's easy to say we should minimize all harm caused, but when other harms are spewing out the backend, what do you do? On the other hand, if you did mean to include any and all means of affecting any negative impact on another, what means of social control are disincentivizing antisocial behaviors?
I'm reminded a bit of animal training, where (thankfully, at long last) the predominant school of thought is "all positive reinforcement, all the time." But this is a scheme we can only implement because of the magnitude of our power over the animals we are seeking to train--our ability to see farther than the dog can is the reason we never have to resort to kicking it. A dog can't dispense treats in such a way as to teach the another dog to lie down, roll over, or stop biting. They can mostly only bite back, or exile the dog in question. A human can perceive a wide range of contingencies, projected over a long period of time, and establish a harmless training protocol in a way another dog never could. But a world in which we're governend by the kind of powers that can meaningfully reduce harmful behaviors without harming us (whether we're talking human-evolved supersystems like governments or hypothetical future AI overlords) is also one in which we've ceded our ability to meaningfully make choices for ourselves, even assuming our values are congruous to the system at hand. Which poses further troubling questions.
I agree with all of this.
I think we are evolving away from systemic punishment because technology and increased wealth/well-being will allow for greater preventative measures. In other words, I think we will get to a place where everyone can thrive emotionally and physically, scarcity mindset will crumble and crime will be seen as a collective failure of prevention vs an individual failure.
This is already happening a little bit in the discussion to take some money from policing and provide better resources to vulnerable populations. Most people just don't see this as viable because we've been unable to meet needs to the extent that this seems reasonable.
I don't think the technologies needed to restrain violence, the largest single proposal, are very far at all. If anything they may be too near, likely to be deployed in a society that still has authoritarian tendencies. You could put together a reasonable prototype of a slap drones in 10 years I suspect.