I don’t think this is a terribly contentious claim. I would be very surprised if I heard of a human society that had no concept analagous to “crime.” Dissolving the language makes the claim sound a lot less exciting.
I can tell you that I, personally, have no concept analogous to “crime”. I don’t see why the value of your happiness would be correlated with your personality, or why it would ever have a negative value.
Perhaps it would be better to taboo “crime”.
Society teaches you that some things cause your happiness to have negative value.
I think the fundamental statement is that, “Society teaches you that some acts are forbidden.” The concept of “forbidden” entails negative consequences. More generally, I think you’re analyzing a social phenomenon at an individual scale, which is needlessly confusing things.
Let me make three assumptions. I don’t think there are any societies that would contest them, though of course nihilists, egoists, and other special philosophies exist.
There are certain acts that are detrimental to the sustained existence of human society.
These acts are often highly beneficial to individual humans who commit them.
Society must substantially prevent these acts from occurring.
Given that all of these are true, there are bound to be forbidden acts. Something is not forbidden where a rational actor prefers all of the consequences of doing over consequences of not doing it (i.e. assuming a 100% chance of being caught). For example, if the legal consequences of thievery were that you were given a large wad of cash so you wouldn’t need to steal, this would not really amount to forbidding theft, and indeed it would encourage it to occur. Also, that wad of cash had to come from somewhere, and thus you’ve diverted resources from some other entity.
The concept of forbidding something requires it to have unpleasant consequences. (This is excepting fantastic situations like omniscient police.) That doesn’t mean that your happiness has strictly negative value—we don’t torture prisoners—but it does mean that some unhappiness must be inflicted on some individuals that happiness generally can be maximized.
It might be nice if we could get all the results we want without having to make people suffer, but reality just doesn’t work like that. Understanding crime and punishment from a utilitarian perspective is really no different than understanding going to the dentist from a utilitarian perspective. It’s unpleasant, and if we could get the same results without doing it, we would, but we can’t, and it’s much better than the alternative.
I think this practical necessity has then shaped most people’s concept of morality. It’s really good for society if we punish murderers, therefore, it’s really good to punish this murderer. Carrying out just punishment does increase utility (there are interesting prisoner’s dilemma parallels here) in the aggregate in the long run, and thus we assign positive moral value to it.
I’m curious as to an alternative approach. What would you do with thieves, murderers, and rapists, that can actually be done with existing technology?
That doesn’t mean that your happiness has strictly negative value—we don’t torture prisoners—but it does mean that some unhappiness must be inflicted on some individuals that happiness generally can be maximized.
We don’t torture prisoners? If the ‘we’ in question is the US, I think it’s more accurate to say that we don’t admit we torture prisoners.
This is entirely correct. But we hide it because we think it’s wrong. The condition of our prisons is due more to extremely powerful guard unions and other general incompetence than it is due to an affirmative desire to make prisoner’s lives miserable.
Unless you’re saying we do have some covert policy of torturing prisoners. That may be true across some extremely limited scope, and it’s done purely as a means to an end. I don’t think there’s much of a case for saying that we deliberately and gratuitously torture prisoners as an intentional part of their punishment, which was my point.
I don’t think there’s much of a case for saying that we deliberately and gratuitously torture prisoners as an intentional part of their punishment, which was my point.
We have a fairly strong taboo to the effect that government should stop at the prisoner’s skin. However, there are a lot of ways of making people acutely miserable without breaking the taboo.
I don’t think it’s a bad taboo—it’s better than overtly mutilating people, I think.
Torture and Democracy is a history and analysis of no-marks torture, and concludes that no-marks torture is generally a result of monitoring by human rights groups.
I’m inclined to agree with you—the prison-industrial complex affects the number of people in prison in the US, but it’s not the only way that sort of thing can happen.
As for the US, it’s not just the guards’ unions, though the unions have lobbied for “tough on crime” measures—there’s money in constructing prisons and in for-profit prisons. Also, prisons can be a major source of employment in rural areas, and prisoners count as residents for counties (I think—it might be at some other organizational level) to get Federal aid, but the money need not be spent on them.
the prison-industrial complex affects the number of people in prison in the US
Surely its effect is above zero, but I’m highly suspicious of how significant it really is. I wasn’t around back then, but from what I know, it seems pretty evident that the crime wave of the sixties, seventies, and eighties produced a genuine popular sentiment in favor of tougher criminal law, which hasn’t subsided to this day. In fact, this is one of the few major political trends in recent decades that looks like an authentic democratic response to popular demand.
Some large proportion of Americans, perhaps a majority, seem to be in favor of the rape of male prisoners.
Also, a large proportion seem to favor life imprisonment because it’s more painful than execution. I used to think they said that as an excuse to be against the death penalty, but I’m no longer so sure.
I don’t believe this is quite correct. I think a large number of Americans support (to an extent) the status quo in all areas, and this prevents them from taking prison rape as seriously as other rape. But I’ve met nobody who’d be willing to pay ten cents to increase the amount of prison rape.
Nor have I seen many people who disfavor execution as being “too easy”. I won’t say zero on this one, however.
Can you unpack where you’re getting the “because it’s more painful” clause?
I mean, I assume you’re talking about revealed preferences here, where the fact that X happens and I don’t stop it is evidence that I’m in favor of X. I don’t entirely buy that, but I don’t think discussing it will be productive.
But I don’t see how you can use revealed preferences as evidence of my putative reasons for being in favor of X.
I’ve heard a number of Americans say that. I haven’t heard argument against it, and there’s a lot of sentiment against making prison conditions more humane.
I don’t have statistics from polls—I don’t know if polls have been taken on that question—but I think I’m making a reasonable deduction.
I asked about this in my livejournal, and some people have run into that argument (one used it in the tactical way I imagined), and some haven’t.
I’m concluding that it’s within the range of possible beliefs for Americans, but not very common. It may have been more common in the past than it is now.
Fascinating! I sorta wish I’d ever heard anyone say that, I’d really want to know how much money they’re willing to spend every year on causing pain to convicted criminals.
That’s the only example I’ve been able to find in about 15 minutes of googling (and British, not American), so it may be a less common view than I thought. Or maybe I don’t have the right search terms.
Punishment doesn’t seem like a very reliable way of getting people to not do what you don’t want, but I’m not sure that an absolutely no-punishment society is feasible.
There are certain acts that are detrimental to the sustained existence of human society.
These acts are often highly beneficial to individual humans who commit them.
Society must substantially prevent these acts from occurring.
This gives a reason it might be instrumentally good to punish someone, but it’s only good so long as it’s necessary to prevent those acts. If there are better ways to prevent them, or punishing them isn’t sufficiently effective, then punishing them is a bad idea.
Carrying out just punishment does increase utility (there are interesting prisoner’s dilemma parallels here) in the aggregate in the long run, and thus we assign positive moral value to it.
We need to distinguish between terminal values and instrumental values. If you mean that it has a positive instrumental value, that means that we don’t imprison them because they should be punished. We do it for the greater good. If you mean that it has a positive terminal value just because it leads to something with a positive terminal value, that would logically result in each link of a chain of events resulting in something with a positive terminal value to increase the total terminal value exponentially.
I’m curious as to an alternative approach. What would you do with thieves, murderers, and rapists, that can actually be done with existing technology?
The issue here isn’t whether or not punishing people deters crime. It’s whether or not we are punishing people with the intention of reducing crime.
If punishing people is more cost-effective (counting their own unhappiness as cost) than giving them a psychiatrist and trying to reform them, so be it. If not, let’s give them a psychiatrist instead.
This is ignoring my (2) - those acts are individually beneficial. I want a nice watch. I steal a nice watch. It’s unclear how a psychiatrist is going to be particularly helpful here, if there’s no punishment. Moreover, what if I don’t want to go to the psychiatrist? Am I allowed to wander around freely before I finish my sessions? What if he can’t help me? Ultimately, the psychiatrist is still a punishment—I’m being compelled to go even if I otherwise might not. The fact that it’s a much nicer punishment than prison doesn’t change the fact that it’s a punishment. You wouldn’t give me free psychiatric sessions that I had no obligation to go to in response to my stealing something (or killing someone).
I think I’m in agreement with you on the terminal/instrumental bit. I just think of it bigger-picture. If someone murders his wife, it is good to punish him irrespective of the fact that he has no chance of reoffense. I think my main objection is that I don’t think there’s a world that is likely to exist in which non-coercive responses to certain actions provide adequate deterrence, so there’s no practical difference between justice being a terminal value and not being a terminal value. But that’s somewhat irrelevant.
However, I might even go so far as to say it is good to punish him even if it has no chance of deterring anyone else. Similarly, if I had $10 to give to a serial killer or a sick orphan, I’d give it to the orphan, even if they would experience an equal amount of happiness from obtaining it (and only partly because “equal amount of happiness” may not be a meaningful concept in human language). I believe this choice is typical of all of humanity. The idea of justice as a terminal value requires more development than I can properly do in a comment response; I’ll develop a top-level post on the issue soon.
I think I’m in agreement with you on the terminal/instrumental bit.
The idea of justice as a terminal value...
I don’t understand. Do you think justice has terminal value, or just instrumental value?
Punishment may very well be the best way to minimize harm. I’m not saying it necessarily isn’t. I’m just saying that hurting a criminal has negative terminal value. As far as I can understand, the terminal value of punishment is what this post is about.
I don’t think this is a terribly contentious claim. I would be very surprised if I heard of a human society that had no concept analagous to “crime.” Dissolving the language makes the claim sound a lot less exciting.
I can tell you that I, personally, have no concept analogous to “crime”. I don’t see why the value of your happiness would be correlated with your personality, or why it would ever have a negative value.
Perhaps it would be better to taboo “crime”.
Society teaches you that some things cause your happiness to have negative value.
I think the fundamental statement is that, “Society teaches you that some acts are forbidden.” The concept of “forbidden” entails negative consequences. More generally, I think you’re analyzing a social phenomenon at an individual scale, which is needlessly confusing things.
Let me make three assumptions. I don’t think there are any societies that would contest them, though of course nihilists, egoists, and other special philosophies exist.
There are certain acts that are detrimental to the sustained existence of human society.
These acts are often highly beneficial to individual humans who commit them.
Society must substantially prevent these acts from occurring.
Given that all of these are true, there are bound to be forbidden acts. Something is not forbidden where a rational actor prefers all of the consequences of doing over consequences of not doing it (i.e. assuming a 100% chance of being caught). For example, if the legal consequences of thievery were that you were given a large wad of cash so you wouldn’t need to steal, this would not really amount to forbidding theft, and indeed it would encourage it to occur. Also, that wad of cash had to come from somewhere, and thus you’ve diverted resources from some other entity.
The concept of forbidding something requires it to have unpleasant consequences. (This is excepting fantastic situations like omniscient police.) That doesn’t mean that your happiness has strictly negative value—we don’t torture prisoners—but it does mean that some unhappiness must be inflicted on some individuals that happiness generally can be maximized.
It might be nice if we could get all the results we want without having to make people suffer, but reality just doesn’t work like that. Understanding crime and punishment from a utilitarian perspective is really no different than understanding going to the dentist from a utilitarian perspective. It’s unpleasant, and if we could get the same results without doing it, we would, but we can’t, and it’s much better than the alternative.
I think this practical necessity has then shaped most people’s concept of morality. It’s really good for society if we punish murderers, therefore, it’s really good to punish this murderer. Carrying out just punishment does increase utility (there are interesting prisoner’s dilemma parallels here) in the aggregate in the long run, and thus we assign positive moral value to it.
I’m curious as to an alternative approach. What would you do with thieves, murderers, and rapists, that can actually be done with existing technology?
We don’t torture prisoners? If the ‘we’ in question is the US, I think it’s more accurate to say that we don’t admit we torture prisoners.
This is entirely correct. But we hide it because we think it’s wrong. The condition of our prisons is due more to extremely powerful guard unions and other general incompetence than it is due to an affirmative desire to make prisoner’s lives miserable.
Unless you’re saying we do have some covert policy of torturing prisoners. That may be true across some extremely limited scope, and it’s done purely as a means to an end. I don’t think there’s much of a case for saying that we deliberately and gratuitously torture prisoners as an intentional part of their punishment, which was my point.
Eh...
We have a fairly strong taboo to the effect that government should stop at the prisoner’s skin. However, there are a lot of ways of making people acutely miserable without breaking the taboo.
I don’t think it’s a bad taboo—it’s better than overtly mutilating people, I think.
Torture and Democracy is a history and analysis of no-marks torture, and concludes that no-marks torture is generally a result of monitoring by human rights groups.
I second Torture and Democracy’s analysis; it’s a great, if very long and very depressing, book.
This doesn’t sound right. Russia’s prisons are pretty horrible too, but we don’t have powerful guard unions.
I’m inclined to agree with you—the prison-industrial complex affects the number of people in prison in the US, but it’s not the only way that sort of thing can happen.
As for the US, it’s not just the guards’ unions, though the unions have lobbied for “tough on crime” measures—there’s money in constructing prisons and in for-profit prisons. Also, prisons can be a major source of employment in rural areas, and prisoners count as residents for counties (I think—it might be at some other organizational level) to get Federal aid, but the money need not be spent on them.
History of treating teenagers like adult criminals
Surely its effect is above zero, but I’m highly suspicious of how significant it really is. I wasn’t around back then, but from what I know, it seems pretty evident that the crime wave of the sixties, seventies, and eighties produced a genuine popular sentiment in favor of tougher criminal law, which hasn’t subsided to this day. In fact, this is one of the few major political trends in recent decades that looks like an authentic democratic response to popular demand.
Some large proportion of Americans, perhaps a majority, seem to be in favor of the rape of male prisoners.
Also, a large proportion seem to favor life imprisonment because it’s more painful than execution. I used to think they said that as an excuse to be against the death penalty, but I’m no longer so sure.
I don’t believe this is quite correct. I think a large number of Americans support (to an extent) the status quo in all areas, and this prevents them from taking prison rape as seriously as other rape. But I’ve met nobody who’d be willing to pay ten cents to increase the amount of prison rape.
Nor have I seen many people who disfavor execution as being “too easy”. I won’t say zero on this one, however.
Can you unpack where you’re getting the “because it’s more painful” clause?
I mean, I assume you’re talking about revealed preferences here, where the fact that X happens and I don’t stop it is evidence that I’m in favor of X. I don’t entirely buy that, but I don’t think discussing it will be productive.
But I don’t see how you can use revealed preferences as evidence of my putative reasons for being in favor of X.
I’ve heard a number of Americans say that. I haven’t heard argument against it, and there’s a lot of sentiment against making prison conditions more humane.
I don’t have statistics from polls—I don’t know if polls have been taken on that question—but I think I’m making a reasonable deduction.
I asked about this in my livejournal, and some people have run into that argument (one used it in the tactical way I imagined), and some haven’t.
I’m concluding that it’s within the range of possible beliefs for Americans, but not very common. It may have been more common in the past than it is now.
Fascinating! I sorta wish I’d ever heard anyone say that, I’d really want to know how much money they’re willing to spend every year on causing pain to convicted criminals.
I wonder if there’s a generational difference. I believe I’m rather older (age 57) than the typical LessWronger.
Opponents to capital punishment, like Geoffrey Robertson QC, argue that it is “much worse for an individual to spend the rest of their life in prison than to be executed immediately”
That’s the only example I’ve been able to find in about 15 minutes of googling (and British, not American), so it may be a less common view than I thought. Or maybe I don’t have the right search terms.
Punishment doesn’t seem like a very reliable way of getting people to not do what you don’t want, but I’m not sure that an absolutely no-punishment society is feasible.
This gives a reason it might be instrumentally good to punish someone, but it’s only good so long as it’s necessary to prevent those acts. If there are better ways to prevent them, or punishing them isn’t sufficiently effective, then punishing them is a bad idea.
We need to distinguish between terminal values and instrumental values. If you mean that it has a positive instrumental value, that means that we don’t imprison them because they should be punished. We do it for the greater good. If you mean that it has a positive terminal value just because it leads to something with a positive terminal value, that would logically result in each link of a chain of events resulting in something with a positive terminal value to increase the total terminal value exponentially.
The issue here isn’t whether or not punishing people deters crime. It’s whether or not we are punishing people with the intention of reducing crime.
If punishing people is more cost-effective (counting their own unhappiness as cost) than giving them a psychiatrist and trying to reform them, so be it. If not, let’s give them a psychiatrist instead.
This is ignoring my (2) - those acts are individually beneficial. I want a nice watch. I steal a nice watch. It’s unclear how a psychiatrist is going to be particularly helpful here, if there’s no punishment. Moreover, what if I don’t want to go to the psychiatrist? Am I allowed to wander around freely before I finish my sessions? What if he can’t help me? Ultimately, the psychiatrist is still a punishment—I’m being compelled to go even if I otherwise might not. The fact that it’s a much nicer punishment than prison doesn’t change the fact that it’s a punishment. You wouldn’t give me free psychiatric sessions that I had no obligation to go to in response to my stealing something (or killing someone).
I think I’m in agreement with you on the terminal/instrumental bit. I just think of it bigger-picture. If someone murders his wife, it is good to punish him irrespective of the fact that he has no chance of reoffense. I think my main objection is that I don’t think there’s a world that is likely to exist in which non-coercive responses to certain actions provide adequate deterrence, so there’s no practical difference between justice being a terminal value and not being a terminal value. But that’s somewhat irrelevant.
However, I might even go so far as to say it is good to punish him even if it has no chance of deterring anyone else. Similarly, if I had $10 to give to a serial killer or a sick orphan, I’d give it to the orphan, even if they would experience an equal amount of happiness from obtaining it (and only partly because “equal amount of happiness” may not be a meaningful concept in human language). I believe this choice is typical of all of humanity. The idea of justice as a terminal value requires more development than I can properly do in a comment response; I’ll develop a top-level post on the issue soon.
I don’t understand. Do you think justice has terminal value, or just instrumental value?
Punishment may very well be the best way to minimize harm. I’m not saying it necessarily isn’t. I’m just saying that hurting a criminal has negative terminal value. As far as I can understand, the terminal value of punishment is what this post is about.