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...
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
He defines his identity ("I am a retributivist") according to philosophical stance rather than to simply describe his beliefs ("I ascribe to retributivism").
> "To be clear, I oppose family punishment. Why? Because I am a retributivist."
That's not an explanation. The answer "I am a retributivist" does not answer "why?". The natural next question is "What led you to retributivism?"
Once your political or philosophical stance becomes your identity ("I am a conservative." "I am a progressive.") it becomes extremely difficult to accept alternative information or perspectives that might change your mind. It becomes extremely difficult to even bother justifying your stance. "I vote straight line Democrat because I am a Democrat" "I vote straight line Republican because I am a Republican"
Everyone goes through a phase of needing to determine where they stand on the most important issues. University is the time and place for that. It's very convenient shorthand to say "I'm a ___", to let others know your current thinking. It just saves time.
Some people never got the memo, you aren't supposed to construct your identity around these things. It's just a shorthand expression that starts with "I'm a".
As everyone matures, people either give up on these questions, or refine their views into something that doesn't fit cleanly into a label.
So it is "ivory-tower", but it's not bizarre, it's very normal. And unfortunately, not growing out of it is also normal for the professorship.
Agreed. I think for me, bizarre because the conclusion was so medieval. I get that it is a philosophical essay so reasoning like "I do not agree with punishing family members for the crimes of their kin because I am a civilized human being" isn't really going to point us readers to anything new. But "... because I ascribe to an equally medieval value that the punishment of a crime must include the suffering of the perpetrator" was a shocking, rather bizarre turn that I had not expected.
Yeah, the author has committed to a stance without explaining why or how, beyond kind of provocatively suggesting that it's the only stance intellectually consistent with ruling out family punishment as a policy... as if he didn't outline his stance in several bullet points, and only 1 of those bullet points is sufficient to rule out family punishment.
> How bizarre and ivory-tower.
I agree in general, but knowing that the author is a professor of Economics at George Mason University, I am less surprised.
My perception is that Econ department seems to have a lot of room for unusual ideas within the field and rather a lot of professors who hold forth or publish on topics that overlap to a variable degree with economics-- like how this post addresses questions of punishment and moral philosophy with what appear to be the tools of economics.
He defines his identity ("I am a retributivist") according to philosophical stance rather than to simply describe his beliefs ("I ascribe to retributivism").
That could also just be you reading way to much into a certain choice of words. I use the phrase »I am a XYZ« with all kind of values for XYZ all the time - human, American, software developer, atheist, heavy metal fan, ... In none of the cases - except maybe for human - do I want to imply that XYZ defines my identity or even dominates my identity.
> 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. In my Hitler-on-an-island thought experiment, for example, I maintain that the morally correct action is to make Hitler suffer as much as possible. Though you can’t make him die twenty million times, you should try your best to approach that ideal.
However, something is off here. They don't so much think that punishing wrong-doers is right; I suspect, since no reasoning is given, that they feel it's right. I'm no better, I don't agree with redistributism just because I don't feel the same, but I do feel that suffering is bad.
I think the moral justification for the revenge motive in distributing justice is rather flimsy, but it does have an actual utility. The other rationales have utility as well (deterrence and isolating dangerous people from the rest of society), but the utility in incorporating revenge into the justice system is social cohesion (or at least removing a threat to it). Most people who have been wronged crave revenge, which I would personally consider to be rather immature, but nearly all people react this way when tested. If people lose faith that the justice system will implement it for them, then faith in the institutions falls to pieces, and social cohesion collapses as people resort to vigilantism. Which would lead to the total collapse of a country as the government loses its monopoly on violence.
> If people lose faith that the justice system will implement it for them, then faith in the institutions falls to pieces, and social cohesion collapses as people resort to vigilantism.
I understand the argument, and I
do understand you're not advancing the argument yourself, simply presenting it.
Still, I disagree. The US is perceived as uniquely barbaric among the developed world for its punitive practices with its corporal punishment, extraordinarily long prison sentences, globally highest per capita prison rate, extra legal punishments like prison rape or "tuning up" by cops and guards that get a nod and a wink by American society. Not so coincidentally, trust in American institutions is at such an all-time low that some cities seem to have simply given up attempting to enforce any rule of law in certain districts. Partisanship and polarization is at levels not seen since the US Civil War.
So, I'm not sure that a sincere, compassionate reformation of the penal system that emphasizes rehabilitation and redemption could make things much worse.
There’s nothing unique about the US system when it comes to addressing this particular question. The details of specific sentencing guidelines are just implementation details. The primary concerns addressed by any justice system that implements “punishments” are deterrence and revenge (though the rationale for confinement can be slightly different). Nearly every justice system in the world seeks to punish offenders, because justice dictates that’s what they deserve. If the public feel that the justice system is not inflicting the appropriate level of suffering onto offenders, then you see vigilantism and other forms of civil unrest. But there’s not some grand moral justification for this, it’s just human nature.
Right, and the 'revenge' (retributive justice) is ostensibly measured and fair for the crime, acted out by impartial and dispassionate agents. The other danger of allowing revenge by the hand of those directly wronged is that there is a desire to escalate the response. See the classic fueds for examples of how this can spiral out of control.
State administered vengeance is certainly a superior alternative to vigilantism. It’s the underlying desire for revenge that I consider to be morally dubious. I’m not sure it’s entirely immoral to seek revenge, but I definitely think it’s immature and that the morally superior option is forgiveness.
But in any case, our justice system does incorporate vengeance into processes, but I don’t think that stems from a moral necessity. I think that it’s necessitated by the fact that the role of the government is to govern people, and people demand vengeance, regardless of the moral consequences.
I suppose you're right and my expecting an entire dissertation in an off-hand blog post isn't reasonable. Maybe I just disagree with "retributivism" (I find the concept barbaric and uncivilized fr) and so my standard for justifying its adoption is unreasonably high. Still, "balance the scales of justice" seems a rather weak justification.
The word “is” has many meanings, it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with identity. If you say “I am hungry”, it doesn't mean that your hunger is your entire identity. “I am a retributivist” and “I ascribe to retributivism” are completely equivalent sentences.
I'm not sure I understand your query, but I appreciate self-reflection in general, e.g. "I hold the view that the suffering of the victim of a crime creates a kind of cosmic imbalance that is only rectified by equal suffering of the perpetrator, therefore I am a retributivist" or "Human beings who have been wronged have an emotional need to exact revenge and, like it or not, they are incomplete until this happens, therefore I am a retributivist" or "Societies that enact retributivist penal policies have less crime" or whatever, rather than "I think the way I do because I am a retributivist"
Same with politics. "I voted for the Republican because I am a Republican" elides a lot of self-reflective reasoning. "The Republican in the contest has a sound fiscal policy and promised to repeal the smoking ban" or whatever is just better thinking.
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.
In the US military, particularly during initial training, collective punishment is often used in addition to or even in lieu of individual punishment. For example, if one soldier misbehaves, the whole unit has to do extra pushups or gets their weekend pass revoked. This is effective at getting groups of people to help enforce conformance to rules on individuals who are less concerned with the consequences of their individual actions.
Perversely, some governments reward terrorists’ (and other criminals’) families with monthly stipends[1].
Me of 20 years ago would probably be shocked at me nowadays, but I’ve slowly come around to thinking that only those who substantially share a moral framework with me deserve to be treated in that framework, and those who choose to act in a radically different moral framework probably deserve to be treated under that framework. In other words, I refuse to let my moral framework be used as a tool to harm me.
So I am not horrified by the discussion of family retribution and don’t automatically reject the idea without consideration.
> I’ve slowly come around to thinking that only those who substantially share a moral framework with me deserve to be treated in that framework
Indeed. You can only get burned so many times by people who treat values and virtues like command words, expecting you to fall into place and obey, but never budging themselves when you reverse the challenge.
It's baffling that the writer either overlooked or ignored this. Collective punishment transfers the cost of enforcement from the ruler to the ruled.
We don't need florid nonsense[0] or baby Hitler hypotheticals to explain it. The Nazis didn't engage in reprisals[1,2] on the basis of moral philosophy. One practical motivation was to alienate resistance from the remainder of the population.
[0] What’s clear is that when rulers enforce family punishments, the ruled shiver with terror. Don’t tell me these tactics don’t work.
These tactics don't work because both sides will just go colonel Kurtz and spiral into endless depravity.
The CIA tried their mind ops from Vietnam to Nicaragua and their enemies never cowered.
Yep. Look at the failure of terror bombing campaigns. Rather than demoralizing civilian populations, it hardens their resolve to fight from London to Kyiv.
but I’ve slowly come around to thinking that only those who substantially share a moral framework with me deserve to be treated in that framework, and those who choose to act in a radically different moral framework probably deserve to be treated under that framework. In other words, I refuse to let my moral framework be used as a tool to harm me.
It's incoherent to exclude this from your own moral framework.
Isn't collective punishment in boot camp primarily used as a tool to increase the group cohesion of the trainees? In that case, it doesn't really fit into the other use cases, and must be argued against individually.
I'm not sure about the actual utility, but in abstract, it fits quite well to my impression of how humans, especially in small, "hunter-gatherer band sized", groups, work. And the military has a special need to create cohesion in its military that goes beyond what would be even vaguely acceptable in any liberal democracy for the general population. Especially in the special case of a criminal: which government would be stupid enough to increase the group cohesion of a dangerous criminal's family (including this criminal)?
Although less explicitly, collective punishment is used in the office as well. For instance by letting an entire team work overtime if one of the team members screwed up his work and made the team miss a deadline.
But the fact that collective punishment is used in some places doesn't automatically make it right, IMO.
I don't see how that is "punishment". A team is a group of people helping each other to achieve a common goal. Sometimes other team members will screw up and you will step in and do what you can to help the team overcome this. Other times that member is going to be you, and then your teammates will (hopefully) step in to cover your ass.
Is that collective punishment, or putting the end goal before other concerns? I would hope most managers do not want to punish workers, but will insist things need to get done, and done well, in time and on budget. It's the subtle balance that is the challenge if you want to be a good boss.
> Although less explicitly, collective punishment is used in the office as well. For instance by letting an entire team work overtime if one of the team members screwed up his work and made the team miss a deadline.
A "good" idea (*sarc*) to either
- decrease the team cohesion (i.e. make the team members hate each other)
or
- increase the team cohesion in the face of a "common enemy" (the boss) who all of the team members will from now on hate
social conformity is the easiest type of human control, once you get enough people on board. unfortunately it all comes apart when the social rules have to change and you are faced with a majority of the population that has grown up and solidified their views and will not budge
Perversely, some governments reward terrorists’ (and other criminals’) families with monthly stipends.
That is a very one-sided point of view. Do you think the people you call terrorists - and people sympathizing with them - think of themselves as terrorists? And even if they do, do you think they think terrorism is bad in their situation? Were the people blowing up a bomb next to Hitler terrorists and was what they did bad? I bet Hitler and Stauffenberg will have quite different opinions on that.
> That’s right, I think that inflicting suffering on vicious wrong-doers is morally praiseworthy even in the absence of any deterrent effect.
this terrifies me. i can look at just about anyone -- myself included -- and tie them to a vicious deed in 3 hops, and point out that their current path is likely to facilitate more vicious deeds. "you work for a company which has sold technology to a foreign government that used it to murder journalists and suppress the public", or even just "you paid taxes to a government and funded the use of weaponry associated with widespread casualties in a foreign war which most viewed as unjust by the time it ended".
if i adopted author's point of view i would be compelled to murder one in three people i meet everyday. the consequentialist view, in contrast, makes it easy to convince myself that doing so is the wrong course of action because it has no "deterrent effect" (or it deters the target from as much good deeds as bad deeds): that retribution against every wrongdoer isn't likely to bring about a world of greater moral worth.
Why do people create entire moral theories around single human instincts?
We have an instinct to punish bad people, that was acquired through throughout our evolutionary history living in social groups. Why? because it lead to good consequences for the genes that expressed it. The result is that retribution is now a good on its own because it feels good. Leaning into that as a single guiding moral principal is just another kind of narrow hedonism. A moral theory needs to account for the balance of all kinds of positive and negative experiences.
I'm a sugar-fat-and-salt-ist, I like consuming those 3 things together, and it has become my guiding moral framework. I believe that consuming those things myself is morally praiseworthy.
We onow exactly what such a world looks like, the approach the "author" advocates for was already tried multiple times. In fact, it is currently being tried in multiple places. Ans besides causing suffering upon suffering, it doesn't do anything.
If that's what consequentionalists believe, they are very far down the rabbit hole that accepts destroying lives and killing people for some greater goal. A very dangerous way of thinking indeed...
The author's article essentially builds a strawman, calls that consequentialist logic, and proceeds to happily burn that strawman to sell an alternative horror. Also there's a Godwin point because why not.
You'll find no significant evidence of consequentialists advocating for family punishment ; even if the author's claim that it's effective was supported by more than his word.
Consequentialism refers to a set of theories that optimize some metric in the long run, and everything is judged against that end. You still have to specify the metric. Contrast that with bottom up theories, where good actions are composed of things that are categorically good.
If the measure is defined as low crime, or progress towards some ideological goal, then I think the argument has some weight.
But descriptively, people are individual consequentialists. They care about the consequences to their part of the world. How am I doing, how is my family doing, how are my friends doing? If the article's policy for justice makes any of those things worse, then an individual consequentialist isn't in favor of it.
The author is explicitly not trying to sell family punishment. They are merely pointing out that it can be very effective. Making evildoers themselves suffer maximally for the crimes they commit is just another extreme.
Both, family punishment and excessive suffering as a form of punishment, are simple cruelty. Neither do the prevent crime, nor are they effective, history has shown us that.
Seems to be yet another example of totalitarian and proto-fascist ideology taking hold.
This is why it's never a good idea to live by a philosophical code.
Every "-ism" is a human attempt to model a phenomenon within a complex system. And any model you come up with is not going to match up 100% with reality. The more rigidly you follow your creed, the less moral you become.
> tie them to a vicious deed in 3 hops, and point out that their current path is likely to facilitate more vicious deeds.
Which would be irrelevant to a non-consequentialist. You're morally responsible for the actions you commit, judged by the kind of actions they are, not their consequences.
yeah but Caplan explicitly references Hitler: notable not for killing anyone with his own hand but rather via this same "3 hops removed" type of causal chain. if he was considering only the action -- and none of this larger chain -- then he would have rather assigned moral responsibility to the soldiers in the trenches: right?
Most people would agree working for a company that makes weapons that kill people doesn't make you a murderer. But it's much more of a gray area when you order someone to murder and they do it. A lot of people don't distinguish between those two things.
It might not make someone a murderer but it does mean they've been supporting what the company is doing. They'd at the very least be responsible for their own part in allowing those actions to take place. Charles Manson didn't even order anyone to kill people but he was still found guilty of murder. There's a massive amount of grey area.
I think the part you're missing here is that the punishment must be proportionate to the crime (it's an eye for an eye, not your whole head for an eye).
Also it requires the punisher to have some form of legitimacy.
These two conditions make it unlikely that you would be compelled "to murder one in three people I meet everyday".
> I think the part you're missing here is that the punishment must be proportionate to the crime.
i'm going more for the "death by a thousand cuts" angle, because that's just the nature of most large-scale interpersonal harm among otherwise well-off nations. i drive an automobile, knowing full well that the impacts on air quality from my actions causes illness and premature death. Caplan's an economist, so let's say my portion of that pollution accounts for 0.1 premature deaths, or 2 life-years (made up numbers). i'm complicit in this act, i have knowingly and willingly harmed other beings: looking at this act in isolation it's surely a moral failing.
"eye for eye" retributive justice says "i cut a life short by 2 years, so throw me in prison for 2 years". most people who consider retributive justice make _some_ sort of carveout here: "this is ridiculous: the infrastructure in my country is such that i can't live a reasonable life without burning fuel, 2 years jail won't change that!" but author explicitly goes out of their way to suggest punishments like these actually are merited "even in the absence of any deterrent effect".
i threw out "one in three people" pretty casually. add up all these individually small harms i've willingly inflicted: maybe "one in ten" is more reasonable. either way it's too large to ignore if you take seriously that every wrong-doing is to be punished without regard to deterrence or broader circumstance.
Most people do not consider driving a car to be a morally wrong act, certainly not one deserving of retribution. The complexities of society, negative externalities, and infrastructure are built into our moral code.
The author is not advocating for some utilitarian scheme where every possible harm you have contributed to must be paid back to you. I think you understand the difference between "morally heinous act that deserves retribution" and "participating in a society"
i'm struggling to balance examples which are unambiguously acts of harm but which everyone does against examples which carry moral weight. i probably got a bit too clever trying to go for both.
what i'm more specifically worried about is how the author's viewpoint plays out in the world where we don't all agree on the moral code. half my country has conflicting moral views around drug use and abortion and sex reassignment. a world where i'm punished so that you can enjoy a richer life is one i can at least understand (that's just the tradeoff between positive and negative rights). but a world where i'm punished for no benefit to anyone is exactly that world in which i risk my livelihood every time i want to unwind after a stressful week of work with a record and a joint in the privacy of my own bathtub. but that's the world Caplan's advocating for when he separates punishment from things like "deterrence".
Agreeing as a country on what is illegal / immoral is a complex issue, but it is orthogonal to the consequentialist vs retributionist debate. The discussion there is only about what happens after someone is proven to have done something society deems wrong.
If anything, a consequentialist would be _more_ likely to lock you up for drug use because the net effect of forced rehab could be positive. Whereas a retributionist would want to punish you proportionally to how you have harmed others (which, in the case of smoking a joint, is no harm at all).
The argument misses differences assumes that individual power and agency are infinite - which is something economists like to do, because it's a bedrock misdirection that capitalism requires to function.
In reality most people have limited agency, and failing to live according to the terms and conditions set by those with more power can have serious negative consequences.
Obviously (to me at least) the people ultimately responsible for resulting horrors and atrocities are those with the most power and agency.
Individually, there's a line to be drawn between enthusiastic compliance and reluctant compliance.
There's also a line between healthy self-responsible functioning and diminished responsibility because of mental illness and/or breakdown.
Even so - ultimately when someone else sets the terms, they're responsible for what happens.
This culture is set up to hide that reality. The more power and agency you have the less you're personally responsible for the consequences of your actions.
Fictions like limited liability companies, corporate personhood, "markets", the invisible hand, and the rest all exist to absolve the rich and powerful from personal consequences.
Very occasionally people go to jail for fraud - usually for inconveniencing the wrong class of people.
But more extreme transgressions - promoting tobacco and alcohol addictions, abusing workers (sometimes to death), pushing destructive drugs through official channels, destroying public education, using healthcare to exploit not to heal, knowingly using media channels to distribute lies, poisoning the ecosystem - are either not punished at all or punished with inconvenient fines.
> If you can end World War II a year early by giving Hitler amnesty for his crimes, you should. Though once you’ve ended the war and got Hitler in chains, the morally best approach is to make him maximally suffer - and claim he died of a heart attack. The reputational harm will be trivial - and his millions of victims deserve no less.
Whoever wrote this, economics professor or not, is a psychopath who also has no word, which in my book places them lower than Tony Montana.
We're not in charge of avenging the victims of anyone.
It may be somewhat understandable to avenge one's next of kin; but avenging strangers is just a pretext for cruelty.
(The quote is also legally and logically incoherent, because once Hitler has been given amnesty, on what basis would one have him "in chains"??)
> We're not in charge of avenging the victims of anyone.
The analogy doesn’t state who you are in this hypothetical situation. So what if in fact you are exactly the one in charge of that? Does your moral compass change depending on whether you’re in the position of representing all of humanity?
Hitler had it all though. He killed his family, that's family punishment. He killed himself too, that's personal death sentence. 7000000 Germans died too, that's kin punishment. What evil can be invented to exceed this?
Talking about Hitler is boring but maybe it makes sense in this context. Inflicting suffering on Hitler would have absolutely no deterrent effect, but I think the vast majority of people would do it given whatever confluence of magic and time travel made it a possibility. Someone on the level of Hitler or Stalin or Mao deserve the suffering regardless of any deterrent effect it may or may not cause, simply because of the raw amount of suffering they caused.
I don't think it's unreasonable to think that at that level of 99-100/100 evil that can be true, but even just a few steps back and it's not so clear-cut anymore.
> Someone on the level of Hitler or Stalin or Mao deserve the suffering
I think that's the crux here though. You're talking about retribution. Causing them to suffer makes you feel good. It doesn't prevent any further suffering from being caused, it doesn't create a deterrent (not that those work all that well anyway) and it doesn't change their behavior. It just satisfies you by providing sadistic joy as an outlet for your anger at them. This is easier to imagine if you believe in such a thing as "evil people".
Personally I don't think framing people as "evil" is useful or even meaningful. It offers no explanatory power and it provides no mechanism to prevent future harm. Germany treated the Nazis as uniquely evil and ended up enacting very narrow bans on that specific kind of evil without addressing the underlying mentalities, systems and relations that enabled or even encouraged it.
For a fictional example (to move away from Godwin for a moment) consider Harry Potter: the stories reveal various horrifying details about the wizarding world from the casual attitude to chattel slavery of an entire species, to the existence and employment of the Dementors that literally suck all life and joy out of you, to a horrifying prison system, to rampant bigotry against mixed-lineage "mudbloods" and not to mention the entire extended canon surrounding the oppression of goblins; and yet once the Big Evil is defeated, none of these things are challenged and the protagonist decides to become a public servant, helping uphold the system unchanged. Even though The One Who Shall Not Be Named is established to be inherently and undeniably evil, to any careful reader it should be obvious that the entire system is flawed at best and directly harmful at worst yet the hyperfixation on "evilness" as a sliding scale attribute rather than an emergent property denies any challenge to the status quo.
> Inflicting suffering on Hitler would have absolutely no deterrent effect, but I think the vast majority of people would do it given whatever confluence of magic and time travel made it a possibility.
"Kill him painfully" polled at 14.4%. Makes me doubt the vast majority agree with you.
I have a feeling being personally responsible for inflicting said suffering may affect the outcome a bit. I struggle to envision any world I'd be willing to torture anyone. Even Hitler.
> i can look at just about anyone -- myself included -- and tie them to a vicious deed in 3 hops
You're not distinguishing between remote and proximate cooperation with evil, or material and formal cooperation. No one is claiming that buying a pair of sneakers from a company that uses part of its funds for an evil end makes you guilty of the crime. If that was the standard, then forget 3 hops. Everyone would be saddled with an unbelievable amount of guilt, and trying to avoid it would make life unlivable. But more to the point, you aren't actually guilty according to the principle of double effect. We do not have in life the luxury of avoiding all evil, so we can only do what is best, and that often means allowing evil side effects, within bounds.
I do have problems with the author's views, of course, and I think Ed Feser's article "Justice or Revenge?" can explain at least one of them [0]. But I am not opposed to retributive justice. It is part and parcel of justice. Mercy presupposes the legitimacy of retribution as well as just deserts; it would be a meaningless idea otherwise.
> No one is claiming that buying a pair of sneakers from a company that uses part of its funds for an evil end makes you guilty of the crime
If you are a German company, yes, the law makes you guilty. This goes by the sweet name of Lieferkettensorgfaltsplichtengesetz (also known as LkSG), and makes it a duty (Pflicht) for companies to pay diligence (Sorgfalt) to the absence of crime at any point in their supply chain (Lieferkette). I do not know exactly what the criteria are to decide whether you did your search with enough diligence, should a crime be found in your supply chain, but I just wanted to point that this concept definitely exists in some jurisdictions.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
> “If you commit murder, we will run a national lottery and execute the loser” should scare you about as much as “If you commit a murder, you could be struck by lightning.”
Interesting that it implicitly and without stating considers only the perspective of the murderer here. As a person who almost certainly won’t become a murderer the idea scares me quite a bit. Even more so when I consider all my friends and family and acquitances, all of them who i think are unlikely to become murderers, and all of whom could be executed under such a system by the lottery.
So no. “If you commit murder, we will run a national lottery and execute the loser” should scare you much more than the alternative.
What the author brands "consequentialism" sounds like a more narrow brand of utilitarianism. Consequentialism is about more than minimising suffering or maximising happinesses. First we need to find our actual utility function, then maximise that. Of course, it doesn’t help that we humans don’t quite have a utility function, let alone know what it is.
My point being, I don’t think retributivism and consequentialism are incompatible, to the extent "balancing the scales of justice" is a significant part of our utility function. Retributivism and (old fashion) utilitarianism are.
I came here to say this. The author is saying “consequentialism” but meaning something else, and I am not quite sure what. Like you say, some specific subset of consequentialism maybe.
For one, because nobody wants to live in a world where their family is motivated to keep them in line. For another, because nobody wants to live in a world where they have to keep that kind of eye on everyone close to them.
And third, because duh -- and I'm not being sarcastic. If your gut says something is repulsive, listen. Your gut is like that for good evolutionary reasons.
And if your gut is silent but everyone else's gut says it's repulsive, listen even harder.
> My challenge for readers: Propose any alternative to retributivism that precludes family punishment
What? My proposed alternative: "Innocent people should not be punished for the crimes of others". Done. That can exist without the rest of retributism. Did I misunderstand the question?
My thought as well. He even adds more or less this exact statement as a third tenet of his own moral code:
"that it is morally impermissible intentionally to punish the innocent or to inflict disproportionately large punishments on wrongdoers."
Up until that statement, family punishment would be incredibly effective for extreme cases under retributivism as well. Mass murderer who is at peace with the prospect of torture, death, and or life imprisonment? Gotta go after their family to reap that sweet sweet revenge.
It seems like any moral system of punishment that omits a strict prohibition on punishing the innocent is just begging for abuses and depravity down the line (if not right off the bat). Are there realistically any consequentialists out there who have spent serious time thinking about moral systems of criminal justice that omit this strict rule against punishing the innocent? If not, what exactly is the author arguing other than their own convenient straw man? A strawman that they have only just barely sidestepped themselves via an explicit carve-out, while implying consequentialists would somehow have a terribly difficult time doing same.
It should be noted that Arab culture does not have the same ideas of identity that Western culture has. Arab culture is far more nuanced, with a very strong nuclear family bond (Aile, this bond is strong enough to warrant and excuse honor killings), a very strong bond with cousins (Hamule), a strong tribal bond, and lessening and lessening bonds the further out one goes. The expression "My brother before my cousin, my cousin before my tribe, ..." has many variations describing Arab loyalty.
The Western idea that the human is the atomic unit to be punished is not universal. Some societies even today "punish" the the hand that stole by amputation, for example.
I was discussing honour killings very recently with one of my Arab neighbours. The conversation started with him explaining to me that when security forces need to arrest a Beduin they don't use the local police, rather an Arab from the north (he lives just outside Beersheba, in the south of Israel). This is because the unit of "personality" is not the single body, but instead the family. So any local Beduin who arrests another Beduin would have his family endangered. They don't care about hurting a specific person - they care about the family as a whole.
He also mentioned that this is the reason behind the honour killings. It doesn't matter if the family looses a single member of the family - because that is not the unit of personality that is important to them. The honour of the entire family is more important. And other things reflect this as well - he says that every single day one family shoots at another family, it is never in the news because who outside knows about it? Even if there are injuries, though usually there are not. He says that these attacks against the families are effective at keeping the other family's members from attacking your own family's interests. I did not ask what those interests are.
I could ask him about the home demolitions. I could definitely see that as being connected to the idea that the Aile or Hamule is punished, not just the person. And it is well established that the home demolitions are an effective deterrent against further terrorist bombings (which themselves are rarely publicized or condemned in international media for some reason - only the response which destroys property is).
> The Western idea that the human is the atomic unit to be punished is not universal.
The idea hasn't always been universal in the West either. In WW2, the German army sometimes chose to kill the entire male population of a city in retaliation for attacks on German officers.
See e.g. https://ww2gravestone.com/the-putten-raid-dutch-razzia-van-p...
Interesting explanation. Let's hope Arab culture can soon leave these ridiculous justifications for despicable acts like honor killings behind and may Jamal spend the rest of his life behind bars for dumping his 16 years old niece's body in to a canal for wanting to elope with the wrong person.
> these ridiculous justifications for despicable acts
Arguably western culture had just as many ridiculous justifications for despicable acts. Their culture is different, but don't be fooled into thinking that it is inferior.
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?
> 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?
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.
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 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?
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.
> My challenge for readers: Propose any alternative to retributivism that precludes family punishment
The assumption underlying this is that one has to have some moral system, some set of explicable rules, consistently applied. The reality is that one's sense of morality doesn't spring from a set of rules but is more akin to an aesthetic judgement. We feel that things are wrong.
This doesn't mean we can't discuss morality. On the contrary, different people have different moral feelings and those feelings can change in response to new information and to persuasion. Moreover we have ways of achieving some form of overall consensus, embodied in cultural artifacts, systems and rules. But these (in a healthy society) are living things, continually updated and maintained and ultimately in service of the feelings of the individuals and groups that make up a society.
It's common to argue that someone's moral judgements are inconsistent and therefore invalid, but moral judgements, being akin to aesthetic ones, can never be inconsistent because they are independent emotional responses to particular scenarios. That doesnt mean that arguments about consistency are pointless, though, as we may come up with a rule that produces different outcomes in scenarios we feel should have the same outcome. But there we are talking about the consistency of a rule and how well or badly it reflects out own moral judgements, not our moral judgements themselves.
So to this challenge I'd just say that I don't need an "ism" to feel that both retribution-motivated state punishment and family punishment are wrong, and that if you can't think of an "ism" that describes the majority view that's a failing of moral philosophy as an academic subject, not something that has any bearing on my moral judgements whatsoever.
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!!
"Applying your principles to these hypothetical situations might lead to a situation you, western consequentialist, would feel is abhorrent."
Yeah, we all know our feelings and intutions about what is right and wrong, and our reasonings, may not always match. Who hasn't felt guilt, or at least unease, about hurting someone you love, even though you knew it was for the best?
This is basically saying:
"Your best effort to reason a moral code from first principles doesn't match modern western moral intuitions about justice"
That's no challenge for consequentalism. It might be a challenging decision for someone trying to implement a justice system, but all justice systems are full of weird compromises and grey areas.
Even simpler: It shows that consequentionalism is not compatible with democractic justice systems and human rights most of the time. I'd even say always.
But consequentialism sure is an edgy example of first principle thinking. One that allows people to partray themselves as really tough, cold logical driven badasses ready to meet the hard decisions.
I won't speak to consequentialism because I'm not a philosopher, but using the ends to consider if the means are justified certainly can be valuable to justice systems and human rights in some cases.
Of course it would be foolish (or self-serving) to rigidly adhere to an overly simplistic and abusable system. But at the end of the day are we arguing over ivory tower dogmas, or are we discussing morality and law in the practical world?
(Also, I think there's a chance you are meaning to speak to retributivism rather than consequentialism)
I come at the hitler on an island choice from a completely different angle: I’m immediately thinking that being on an island with someone even a bit like hitler would be a major risk to myself. It’s like are you really expecting to share the last rations or are you going to get hit around the back or the head? So kill him quickly and know that, whatever happens, the risk to yourself - and the world, should you be rescued - is much diminished?
This doesn’t mean that “lesser” evil people don’t get the benefit of the doubt. It’s not like being on a stranded desert island with your typical childhood bully is carte Blanche to kill. But there are a few people in history who the world would be a kinder better place without.
While people (ex: dictators) are often used as the face of evil, the influence of one person is always limited. Assuming that "killing Hitler" would have prevented WWII (and the other atrocities) could easily lead to the mindset of "someone else is responsible for global situation X", while I think a better mindset is "everybody influences a bit".
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.
This type of philosophical reasoning is morally relative, imo, and also comes from some sort of collectivised, god-like perspective.
An individual is capable of doing right or wrong, where I define wrong as initiating harm to others. That individual can be held to account and we would call that justice. That individual has a family, brother, father, etc - they have nothing to do with his bad actions. You cannot hold them to account for another. That is the answer, it is that simple.
The reason people get confused, is because people are encouraged to think collectively rather than individually. "We did this", "for the greater good those people should do that", etc. They are invoking a "we" which is non-existent - one can only speak for oneself.
However, this "we" that is invoked (that doesn't actually exist), appears to be a collective of all of us with godly rights and ability. This allows one to believe that "we" can stand in for god/nature/innate morality, and can work out the greater utility, as if it can accurately model the potential outcomes before choosing one, as ifgreatest utility is the measure of 'right'. Also, the idea tricks one into thinking that for "we" normal moral understanding need not apply, utility is the moral measure.
I find this sort of thinking highly incontinent, based on a flawed, but commonly held misunderstanding of what one is. One is not "we", or "us".
I'm not enough in the mood to fully focus in order to be sharp enough to grok the post. Posts like this require my full focus and I unfortunately don't have it today. I'm more at like 60% :)
I did read it. And I was just horrified at the idea. My issue is that it implies that families have each other's back. Not every family lives by the value that they should look out for each other. Why bind them culturally like this? To some families, being a blood relative means nothing. Let them have that value if that is how they want to live.
Second, this diminishes agency. Yes, you can police other people. However, you can't control other people. It's already hard enough to do this for yourself, but at least when you screw up you can simply say "it was all my fault." There is amazing comfort and meaning in that it was all you.
With that said, culturally speaking: don't some Asian countries apply some of this of this system? I don't think they go as far as family punishment, but family honor is a thing. I have a suspicion that there are cultures in the world that have a more nuanced idea on how to implement stuff like this without the grating consequences of the loss of a huge chunk of agency (among other things).
My simplified understanding is that the author is not advocating for punishing family members. Instead he is trying to discredit consequentialism, a position that an act is morally right based on the outcome. In that view retribution serves no utility since it doesn't maximize good and only causes suffering. The consequentialsit has to find a reason for punishment, and they say that it's a deterrence for future crime, which is a good outcome. But punishing families would also provide even more deterrence and the good from it would probably outweigh the bad of punishing innocent family members. But remember, a consequentialist should only care about the outcome so the act of punishing innocents isn't morally wrong in itself. The retributionist author on the other hand believes in the inherent morality of punishing criminals and immorality of punishing innocents.
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.
From The Neanderthal Parallax by Robert J. Sawyer:
Any serious crime has a single punishment: the castration of the offender and all others who share at least half his genes (parents, siblings, and children). This eugenic practice serves to keep any undesirable elements out of the gene pool without severely punishing an offender, beyond his loss of genetic heritage. Ponter explains that it also has the desirable secondary effect of eliminating an offender's violent impulses due to their lacking testosterone, and so they don't commit further crimes (how female offenders are punished isn't discussed).
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.
Really weird post and discussion around it. The "family" is not some abstract entity / offender's property. The "family" is made of other humans. "Not punishing people that didn't do anything wrong" is pretty high at the list of my consequentialist morals.
The point is that there's nothing inherently immoral about family punishment from a consequentialist lens. Consequentialist morality is based solely on outcomes; therefore, if family punishment results in fewer crimes perpetrated on innocent people, there is not a coherent consequentialist argument for family punishment being immoral. It suggests that there's some cost/benefit ratio at which family punishment could be considered morally correct.
Morality frameworks defined as a single rigid rule will always encounter some "repugnant conclusion" given a sufficiently contrived situation, news at 11.
The "retributive morality" the author espouses doesn't actually dodge "justification of family-punishment" either. It relies on the same external axiom, that family should not be held culpable for their members' crimes (and are thus categorized as "innocents"). The same assumption should cause consequentialism to assign an extremely negative valence to family-punishment, because the consequence of family-punishment is that "everyone lives in a society where family members are held culpable for their members' crimes, and live/act in fear of such largely-uncontrollable punishment".
Easy -- No one is ever punished for anything and crime gets to the point that society crumbles, because as humans we cannot enact a justice system that does not occasionally punish innocent people.
Slightly less easy, but closer to current reality: For "don't knowingly punish innocent people" -- enact a justice system that is terrible at fact finding (or has gross bureaucratic and procedural inefficiencies), so that you punish a lot of innocent people but never do so knowingly.
Easy again: For "don't punish innocent people, knowingly or otherwise -- you have no criminal justice system that is workable within these constraints in the real world.
I see a huge logical fallacy here. It doesn't stand.
> therefore, if family punishment results in fewer crimes perpetrated on innocent people, there is not a coherent consequentialist argument for family punishment being immoral.
Punishing a criminal's family _is_ perpetrating violence on innocent people; unless family itself is criminal, in which case, you can still investigate each family member.
Unless you deny any individual's own responsibility.
In which case, the issue is not only family, but society as a whole. That's a pretty twisted vicious circle.
> Punishing a criminal's family _is_ perpetrating violence on innocent people
What's the logical fallacy here?
The point is that consequentialism doesn't object to ideas like "perpetrating violence on innocent people" with any kind of principle. If the consequences of such violence are overall negative, then the act becomes immoral. Punishing the family members of a criminal has negative consqeuences for those people, but those could be outweighed by the positives for society as a whole by reducing other kinds of immoral actions (which themselves have greater negative consequence.) All of these individual actions have their own moral weight - there are no categories of moral/immoral actions in general.
> but those could be outweighed by the positives for society as a whole by reducing other kinds of immoral actions (which themselves have greater negative consequence.)
No. Because you cannot outweigh a wrong by another wrong. There's no balance, it only adds up on wrong.
The negative consequences are not only for the innocents wronged in this scenario.
They are also to all the rest of society that, witnessing that, can only deduce and fear that _no one_ is safe from being wronged the same way, because of the actions of a third party (be it family or other). And that it's not anymore a matter of justice, but of power (of who decides what is wrong or not, and who decides how many circles around the criminal should be punished).
Ruling by fear and violence never brought good (but only from the partial and twisted perspective of those in power). Neither in education for kids, neither in training for animals, neither in society for people, never.
Even if still imperfect, democratic-tending societies have this figured out above autocratic ones.
> there are no categories of moral/immoral actions in general.
That depends highly on how you define and consider morality as a virtue.
>No. Because you cannot outweigh a wrong by another wrong. There's no balance, it only adds up on wrong.
This is not in line with consequentialist thinking, so there is no logical fallacy. You're failing to consider a line of reasoning in terms of a different moral philosophy to your own.
>They are also to all the rest of society that, witnessing that, can only deduce and fear that _no one_ is safe from being wronged the same way, because of the actions of a third party (be it family or other).
As other commenters have pointed out, this is not a statement that holds in general in consequentialist terms. How great are the harms to the rest of society? How great are the harms of the crimes prevented in this way? What is the real net benefit or downside to the whole population? These are the questions consequentialism wants answered to judge the morality of such a policy.
> This is not in line with consequentialist thinking, so there is no logical fallacy.
Ok, but then what's the point of a consequentialist take, if that's so removed from past experiences?
> These are the questions consequentialism wants answered to judge the morality of such a policy.
Correct. The problem/flaw is deep in the roots of consequentialism itself: if you wait only for the outcomes to judge whether something is moral or not, you can only be a spectator, not an actor. You can't act without a principle. If you want to take action, you've got to act after principles, from memory and/or reasoning (or you may act irrationally - but then you may only invoke amorality, which defeats the consequentialist definition as well).
>The point is that there's nothing inherently immoral about family punishment from a consequentialist lens. Consequentialist morality is based solely on outcomes; therefore, if family punishment results in fewer crimes perpetrated on innocent people, there is not a coherent consequentialist argument for family punishment being immoral. It suggests that there's some cost/benefit ratio at which family punishment could be considered morally correct.
If one assumes that the families of those who commit crimes are innocent as well, punishing those families are also crimes against innocent people. By your own logic, punishing ten innocent members of a family for a crime committed by a relative against a single person makes things worse, not better -- as more crimes (and more innocent people hurt) are committed in executing such punishment than the harm caused by the initial crime.
In fact, in the US at least, we already inflict a version of this on the communities of those who commit crimes. If someone commits a crime and is convicted, they are generally discriminated against in finding jobs, getting housing, being able to exercise the political franchise and a variety of other punitive "punishments" that are beyond those prescribed by law.
This encourages recidivism, reduces potential economic output, reduces economic/social/political opportunities and otherwise negatively affects the families and communities of those convicted, even after completing the official punishment for whatever crime may have been committed.
While there certainly are folks who cannot integrate into society without harming it (e.g., serial killers) and, as such, should be permanently removed from society in order to protect the other members of that society, most folks who commit crimes are not such people. However, when we discriminate against those who have already been punished for their crimes, we intentionally put them at odds with society, increasing the risk of recidivism. And more's the pity.
The knockdown argument against consequentialism in the article is the effectiveness of familial punishment. Even granting that, it only seems to apply to some sort of collectivist consequentialism focused on minimizing crime.
Looking at it as an individual consequentialist, the individual would be worse off being punished for the actions of their family. An individual criminal, who care for their family, would also be worse off. So there are significant costs against the (presupposed) benefit of being more effective at deterring crime.
Every individual does this moral calculus for themselves, and the result in the aggregate is very little political support for familial punishment. How often is someone victimized by crime vs. do they have a family member on the wrong side of the law?
Caplan has some very interesting opinions to be sure....but the further the topic strays from data-driven science and into philosophy, the more his neurodivergence stands out.
He seems to regularly state as near-universal fact some tenet of human behavior that he is alone (or nearly alone) in holding.
A Consequentialist needs to have a strong family-honor (left-right) code that has community-wide (top-down) moral system and laws to support the nascent intra-familicide to go with this notion in order for this concept to work.
So, Purist form of consequentism does not work either as well as pure retributivism, given our diverse human nature: that said, consequentialism is not for the squeamish, er, retributivists, either.
However, it does feel like retributivism seem to be in vogue today thru onerous laws that prohibits corrective-family-code (against "murderous-feeling" family members by "well-ignorant" public enforcers, or worse, punishing family-code, ... for a worser society).
Custodial sentences already do punish families when they apply to anyone whose presence (or labour!) will be missed. This is one of the many problems of prison, namely, how can it be just to punish families who have not been party to a crime?
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.
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.
I think this article is trying to use tools of reason and morals to describe something, the need for retribution, which comes from a more instinctual place, and doesn't really fit in to any moral logic.
If you think any of this through, it quickly devolves into self-defense and strategy optimization in iterated games. Justice is just an imaginary framework on top of that that makes society not collapse from blood feud. "Suffering" only exists in the sufferee, ceases to exist when they do and doesn't have any real physical effect, besides via empathy.
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.
I am very bored by philosophical discourse that pivots around labels so much.
“I believe this because I am a [LABEL]” is the lowest form of philosophical discussion.
You state and affirm a concept first, than of course you could infer that it makes you fall into a specific category, but reversing it feels like tribe games more than philosophy.
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.
The author is a professor of Economics at Charles Koch I mean George Mason University, wrote a popular book that argues that going to college is a waste of time.
I am always amused when a tenured professors with a lifetime appointment argues that college is silly.
It's also weird that the author can set up this thought experiment such that consequentialists are not able to consider the punishing of innocents as part of the outcome. The entire argument seems to hinge on them only being able to assess morality by the outcome, but a specific step in a process can also be present in the outcome.
Process: you punish innocents
Outcome: societal effects + you have punished innocents.
> morally deserve to suffer a proportionate punishment
I fail to see what is "moral" about retributivism. My morality is about what I do; I have no right to impose my standards on others. Consequently I'm opposed to the idea of punishment in criminal justice. Punishment is simply the practical expression of anger, which shouldn't have any part in the outcome of a criminal case.
TFA doesn't explain what is meant by "moral", but I think the author means something very different from how I use the word (I generally avoid it).
Voting is, of course, the imposition of the will of the majority on some minority.
I just don't think majority voting is the right way to deal with issues of moral judgement. I don't think morality should have anything to do with criminal legislation, because I think morality is a private matter - something people have to figure out for themselves.
From an Orthodox perspective (my background) it is wrong to inflict suffering (AKA torturing consciousness) for the sake of inflicting suffering because to do so is to assault an icon of God (humans created in His image). This is the reason that vengeance is prohibited. The only justifiable use of force in this context is deterrence / prevention of harm inflicted on innocents. I have a hard time seeing any other use of force as sane or justifiable.
> Family punishments…have been common throughout history…totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and modern North Korea have successfully used family punishment to put fear into the hearts of their most courageous opponents. Such tactics work because,
Do these tactics work? Did Soviet Russia have lower crime rates because of this punishment.
The author seems to leap from “this happened” to “this worked” without any supporting evidence.
I’d say that not only did they not work, they resulted in much more harm than the actual crimes committed. Punishing a family member for the crimes of their family means you’re now causing more harm overall. Not to mention, why punishing someone other than the criminal is wrong.
I love critiques of consequentialism, but I found this piece to be fundamentally free of meaning. Then I looked up the author's bio. "I am a Professor of Economics." Well that explains it. The only thing worse than an economist is an economist trying their hand at philosophy.
Snark (somewhat) aside, this is the worst kind of philosophizing, where the author clearly read a couple SEP articles and then described their position with a mix of half-understood and contradictory jargon, and dumb thought experiments where the only possible subject can be Hitler.
It's pure sophistry. No actual philosopher worth their salt would use such extreme and intentionally trolling examples.
> it is morally impermissible intentionally to punish the innocent or to inflict disproportionately large punishments on wrongdoers.
> What if harming Hitler’s baby was the only way to save the world? As a moderate deontologist, I reluctantly endorse this implication
So the author believes that it is not permissible to punish an innocent person, regardless of any positive benefits that arise from its deterrent value. But he also believes it is permissible to harm a baby if it confers tremendous benefits. Clearly there is no logically coherent moral philosophy here.
This is one step closer to also normalizing genocide. Where do you draw the line of when it is ok to punish a group of people for something that someone who is vaguely* related to them did?
*The use of "family" is a red herring. The point is that a group of people is punished not because of attribution of some charges, but merely because the charged person/group cares enough for them. This can easily be extrapolated to "we will kill all X because we cannot capture the rebels among X".
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 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.
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
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.
