Sigh... deep and mournful
Mar. 18th, 2005 04:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumIt's a sad day when learns one of one's friends, even a distant one with whom one is pretty much out of touch, turns out to be out of touch in a way one finds, at best disturbing; at worst, reprehensible.
Eugene Volokh thinks torture, as a norm in judicial punishment isn't wrong. Worse, he seems to think it laudatory.
I've not been reading the Volokh Conspiracy much lately because I have been a coward. I dislike the amount of time I have spent in the past year or so defending what I do for a living, while trying to correct those who either see it as evil, or needing torture to work best. Eugene's various comments on the matter (that torture, per se, isn't necessarily to be shunned... the Ticking Bomb defense, writ large) made me unwilling to wade in much where so many others, with wider followings than mine, were doing yeoman's work.
But this, gives me the willies.
If you look at the bottom you will see links to more of his general philosophy on the matter, but in brief I think it can be summed up like this. "Make criminals suffer, not so much to discourage others, but because vengeance is good for society."
His summation of his views is this, One can certainly reach a different judgment than I do: Even if one thinks there's some moral benefit to executing the Eichmanns or even the serial rapist-killers, one might say that the benefit is small enough that it's exceeded by the risk of error, and the very serious moral cost of that error. As I mentioned at the outset, I am keenly aware that I may be wrong on this general question, and the matter that causes me the most trouble is precisely this one. Yet my tentative current sense is that for a small number of extraordinarily monstrous crimes, the need for retribution is so strong — and the risk of error can be made so low — that not just death but deliberately painful death is the proper punishment.
The part I have the most disagreement with is this one, from higher up the piece,
"5. Humanity: Likewise, I think, with Mark's argument that deliberate infliction of pain, even on monsters, "makes the person who engages in it a little bit more of a beast, and a little bit less of a human being, than he would otherwise be." First, we should recognize that this is a metaphor; I may be mistaken, but my sense is that most literal beasts (i.e., animals) don't actually try to inflict pain as punishment for wrongs. Literally speaking, this desire is quite characteristic of human beings (though perhaps some other higher primates might be included; I'm not sure). This doesn't make Mark's argument wrong, but only shows that we need to look behind the metaphor.
So what's behind the metaphor? It could be a judgment that it's beastly, less-than-human, and thus morally improper to succumb to our visceral emotional impulses. But I don't think that's what Mark literally means. Love, empathy, the desire to pick a mate, the desire to have children, and other worthy emotions are also visceral emotional impulses; while we should certainly indulge in them with rational caution and care, there's nothing wrong in following emotions, and it's sometimes bad to resist them.
I take it, then, Mark's point is that it's beastly, less-than-human, and improper to indulge this particular emotion. But that too, I think, assumes the conclusion. When someone rapes and murders twenty children, why is it a "beastly" impulse as opposed to a worthy one to try to exact a harsh retribution? Mark acknowledges that retribution in general is a proper goal of punishment — but his argument doesn't, I think, explain why this particular sort of retribution is not. (To be fair, he does say "in my eyes, at least" — here we may be returning to a point I mentioned in my original post, which is that a lot in this debate rests on people's visceral moral intuitions.)
My response to this is that I have met people who have crossed the line, and been torturers, most of those in the pursuit of what they deemed to be higher moral aims (that is to say they were not indulging personal desires, not wallowing in some deviant urge, whereby they got a specific pleasure from inflicting pain on those who were not able to avoid it) and they are now damaged, mentally, and morally. They no longer see people as people. They see some as being not-quite people (I don't know how better to put it) and therefore not to be treated with the same respect, humanity; if you will, that everyone else gets.
The problem is, that as time goes on, they seem to have put more and more of the world into the category of, "not quite human."
This is not a new thing. A huge amount of the shift in human relations, the benefit of nations, even of empire, is to increase the number of people who counted as people. The Clans of the Highlands used to exterminate each other, root and branch, because those not in one's own family weren't quite as human. The scale shifted too, after all, those who weren't speakers of some form of Gaelic were less human still.
Read the Icelandic sagas; we see people casually settling scores by killing people's slaves. Person A (a family member) had given grave offense, so that night person B whacked person A's favorite slave in the side of the neck with an axe. It made him feel better, proved a point to his father (person A), but wasn't all that nice to the slave. More interesting, one must presume Person B knew the slave, had known him for years, but didn't think his life was as important as making the point.
Where am I going with this? I don't want to live in a place where hanging someone with piano wire, from a meathook, is seen as not enough punishment (and Eugene makes exactly that argument).
Call me sentimental, but if we are to have a death penalty, I want it to be more parallel to putting down a rabid dog; distasteful, but a sad necessity; and done without passion, than to having heritics hung, drawn and quartered.
Appealing to the base in human nature seems to me a poor thing, and I don't see that vengeance has had a calming influence on the countries which put it's practice into graphic; even public methods of punishing malefactors.
Eugene Volokh thinks torture, as a norm in judicial punishment isn't wrong. Worse, he seems to think it laudatory.
I've not been reading the Volokh Conspiracy much lately because I have been a coward. I dislike the amount of time I have spent in the past year or so defending what I do for a living, while trying to correct those who either see it as evil, or needing torture to work best. Eugene's various comments on the matter (that torture, per se, isn't necessarily to be shunned... the Ticking Bomb defense, writ large) made me unwilling to wade in much where so many others, with wider followings than mine, were doing yeoman's work.
But this, gives me the willies.
If you look at the bottom you will see links to more of his general philosophy on the matter, but in brief I think it can be summed up like this. "Make criminals suffer, not so much to discourage others, but because vengeance is good for society."
His summation of his views is this, One can certainly reach a different judgment than I do: Even if one thinks there's some moral benefit to executing the Eichmanns or even the serial rapist-killers, one might say that the benefit is small enough that it's exceeded by the risk of error, and the very serious moral cost of that error. As I mentioned at the outset, I am keenly aware that I may be wrong on this general question, and the matter that causes me the most trouble is precisely this one. Yet my tentative current sense is that for a small number of extraordinarily monstrous crimes, the need for retribution is so strong — and the risk of error can be made so low — that not just death but deliberately painful death is the proper punishment.
The part I have the most disagreement with is this one, from higher up the piece,
"5. Humanity: Likewise, I think, with Mark's argument that deliberate infliction of pain, even on monsters, "makes the person who engages in it a little bit more of a beast, and a little bit less of a human being, than he would otherwise be." First, we should recognize that this is a metaphor; I may be mistaken, but my sense is that most literal beasts (i.e., animals) don't actually try to inflict pain as punishment for wrongs. Literally speaking, this desire is quite characteristic of human beings (though perhaps some other higher primates might be included; I'm not sure). This doesn't make Mark's argument wrong, but only shows that we need to look behind the metaphor.
So what's behind the metaphor? It could be a judgment that it's beastly, less-than-human, and thus morally improper to succumb to our visceral emotional impulses. But I don't think that's what Mark literally means. Love, empathy, the desire to pick a mate, the desire to have children, and other worthy emotions are also visceral emotional impulses; while we should certainly indulge in them with rational caution and care, there's nothing wrong in following emotions, and it's sometimes bad to resist them.
I take it, then, Mark's point is that it's beastly, less-than-human, and improper to indulge this particular emotion. But that too, I think, assumes the conclusion. When someone rapes and murders twenty children, why is it a "beastly" impulse as opposed to a worthy one to try to exact a harsh retribution? Mark acknowledges that retribution in general is a proper goal of punishment — but his argument doesn't, I think, explain why this particular sort of retribution is not. (To be fair, he does say "in my eyes, at least" — here we may be returning to a point I mentioned in my original post, which is that a lot in this debate rests on people's visceral moral intuitions.)
My response to this is that I have met people who have crossed the line, and been torturers, most of those in the pursuit of what they deemed to be higher moral aims (that is to say they were not indulging personal desires, not wallowing in some deviant urge, whereby they got a specific pleasure from inflicting pain on those who were not able to avoid it) and they are now damaged, mentally, and morally. They no longer see people as people. They see some as being not-quite people (I don't know how better to put it) and therefore not to be treated with the same respect, humanity; if you will, that everyone else gets.
The problem is, that as time goes on, they seem to have put more and more of the world into the category of, "not quite human."
This is not a new thing. A huge amount of the shift in human relations, the benefit of nations, even of empire, is to increase the number of people who counted as people. The Clans of the Highlands used to exterminate each other, root and branch, because those not in one's own family weren't quite as human. The scale shifted too, after all, those who weren't speakers of some form of Gaelic were less human still.
Read the Icelandic sagas; we see people casually settling scores by killing people's slaves. Person A (a family member) had given grave offense, so that night person B whacked person A's favorite slave in the side of the neck with an axe. It made him feel better, proved a point to his father (person A), but wasn't all that nice to the slave. More interesting, one must presume Person B knew the slave, had known him for years, but didn't think his life was as important as making the point.
Where am I going with this? I don't want to live in a place where hanging someone with piano wire, from a meathook, is seen as not enough punishment (and Eugene makes exactly that argument).
Call me sentimental, but if we are to have a death penalty, I want it to be more parallel to putting down a rabid dog; distasteful, but a sad necessity; and done without passion, than to having heritics hung, drawn and quartered.
Appealing to the base in human nature seems to me a poor thing, and I don't see that vengeance has had a calming influence on the countries which put it's practice into graphic; even public methods of punishing malefactors.
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no subject
Date: 2005-03-19 06:16 pm (UTC)You see this every time there is a conviction on a multiple murder, especially one involving children: people who claim that it's a pity we're just going to put the evil one to death, that they deserve to be tortured beforehand.