The Power to Punish
Content note: this is written as part of a challenge to publish a daily essay.
Once upon a time, people in quarrels could challenge one another to a duel, and the loser would die. This was certainly an escalation. Nowadays we have a society which has set that option down, which reduces the risk and potential downside in so many interactions.
This is a common pattern in society. The United States of America has benefited from lots of people starting risky business ventures. The point of an LLC—a “Limited Liability Company”—is that your capacity for debt is limited. The company can go bankrupt, but the people owning it can move on without the debt following them (providing it was not due to a handful of criminalized exceptions like fraud or tax issues). While some companies grow to produce trillions of dollars of value for the economy, many stutter and die, but they don’t put their owners in lifelong poverty.
The heuristic can be stated thus:
If you want people to take more risks, then try to reduce or limit the magnitude of failure.
Allowing people to become vicious enemies, without allowing either side to resort to personal violence, means that people can do more ambitious things while risking others hating them for it. Now that I write it out, I’m not quite sure why this is good? If you do things that are worthy of people hating you and wanting to kill you, perhaps you should in fact not do them?
I guess the counterargument is that there are a lot of people, and a lot of people have pretty inaccurate beliefs, and if you do anything big or ambitious in the world, people will come to viciously hate you. Kennedy, a friend of mine, once said to me something to the effect of “I don’t want to be subject to the poor epistemics of the populace”; the idea being that people have a wide distribution of beliefs, and by random chance if enough people are aware of you someone may estimate your effects on the world as extremely negative, and grow to hate you.[1] So allowing anyone to challenge you to a duel-to-the-death is thus a tax on doing big things generally.
This does mean that it’s easier to do big things that are bad. Individuals can inflame violence, lie, cheat, take advantage of others, and make the world worse in countless ways, many of which are not amenable to criminal prosecution, and often not amenable to any other form of punishment either. (I often wish that the world were otherwise.)
Stepping back, how good is doing things generally? I find this a key tension in the world, and it differs between domains. If you’re in a surgical theater while an open-heart operation is happening and you have no surgical training, you should assume that the null action is probably the best, and stand quietly aside. But in the pursuit of knowledge through science, it is good for many people to come up with hypotheses and subject them to the experimental method. Many will be falsified, and those that survive are more likely to be true, and others will notice them and attempt to do more experiments on them, and if they’re found strong, build on the theories producing the hypotheses.
So what is the case for people being able to do things in the world, in ways that might lead to people hating them? I think that on an individual relationship level, it sounds naively bad to do things that will probably lead people close to you to hate you (e.g. your parents, partners, children, best friends, etc. etc.). But on a societal level, I believe that few people do big things in the world without a tide of naysayers and critics, and often with some finding it in their hearts to hate the people. Politicians, businessmen, activists, artists, philosophers, academics, etc. etc.
Yet I find this weakening of downsides gives a sense of impotence. Reducing the ability to punish people has its downsides. It is good to be able to punish people. I find this point to be so banal and yet also sometimes in desperate need of explaining, that I don’t know quite how to start. Having power over one another is good… entrusting people with serious responsibilities goes better if bad things happen if they screw it up?
A man named Lakin once hosted a party where each person he invited was asked to invite the kindest person that they knew, and so on, until an assortment of very kind people were there together. By what can only be assumed a clerical error, I found myself invited.[2] The attendees were largely very pleasant, wanted to please people, and to my eyes did not have a hurtful bone in their body. Many also felt to me weak, though. They seemed to not have much sternness in them, and I doubted they had the courage to stand up and call someone out on bad behavior. I spent much of the evening arguing in the kitchen with people about situations where it was right to speak the truth instead of being kind.
I find kindness to be somewhat meaningless if someone has little capacity for anything else. It is not a choice they are actively making. But I am repeating things that have been said many many times. Here is an analogous point from HPMOR:
“I know. The stars themselves proclaim your innocence, ironically enough.” The centaur took a step toward Harry within the small clearing, still holding his spear upright. “A strange word, innocence. It means lack of knowledge, like the innocence of a child, and also means lack of guilt. Only those entirely ignorant can lack all responsibility for the consequences of their actions. He knows not what he does, and therefore can be without harmful intent; so says that word.” The deep voice did not echo in the woods.
Harry’s eyes flickered to the spear-tip, and he realized that he should have grabbed his Time-Turner the moment he saw the centaur. Now, if Harry tried to reach beneath his robes, the spear could strike him before then, if the centaur was fast enough. “I read once,” Harry said, his voice a bit unsteady as he tried to match deep-sounding words to deep-sounding words, “that it’s wrong to think of little children as innocent, because not knowing isn’t the same as not choosing. That children do little harms to each other with schoolyard fights, because they don’t have the power to do great harm. And some adults do great harm. But the adults who don’t, aren’t they more innocent than children, not less?”
“The wisdom of wizards,” the centaur said.
“Muggle wisdom, actually.”
A person might be kind to you because they do not have the option to be cruel, or because they are scared of the consequences from others if they behave as such, or because it simply has not occurred to them. But it is far more representative of someone’s character if they choose to be kind if they indeed have the capacity, are not scared of the consequences, and have considered it.
So if I wish to see true kindness, then I must also see the capacity for cruelty. This is similar to the arguments for why a good God would allow evil; because for human free will to truly choose good, it must also be allowed to choose evil.
But I think this misses the key reason why it is good to have power over one another, which is not about kindness, nor about choosing good or choosing evil. It is because...
Alas, this essay has already gone on longer than I wished, and I must go help a dear friend move house. I was hoping to touch on my philosophy of responsibility and fault, and tie that into why it is good for people to have power over one another. I was also hoping to talk about the situations where I feel that I have no recourse against people who have behaved very poorly, to analyze why and what my options are. Hopefully I will get to this another day.
- ^
This is the same structure as the argument Bostrom & Sandberg make in The Unilateralist’s Curse.
- ^
I am joking, but I do suspect I may have been there substantially because of the status I have in the eyes of the person who invited me.
Person A has the capacity to be cruel, but has recently been kind to so many people that when they interacted with you, they just automatically were kind.
Person B enjoys being cruel to various people, and originally also intended to be cruel to you… but then realized that a much cleverer plan would be to be kind to you, and manipulate you to reveal some information that will allow them to be even more cruel towards a third party.
By this logic, B has better character than A.
I don’t think being manipulatively fake-kind to someone as a ploy to enable further cruelty counts as being kind in the first place, so I don’t think it constitutes an example of “they’re choosing to be kind despite having the capacity and courage to do otherwise and have considered it”. This is someone who is able to be cruel and is in fact doing so, even though they might appear kind to the person who gets manipulated.
Something about this feels off to me. How do we tell from the outside whether people have ‘the capacity for cruelty’ if they are just very nice and have a lot of deliberate practice and ingrained habits for not being mean? Do we wish to advantage those who aren’t much good at this and slip up frequently? This seems like the kind of heuristic that’d reward people who make themselves look mildly threatening to manipulate people’s status emotions and be perceived as powerful over those who very deliberately try to appear as non-threatening as possible in every social micro-interaction because they actually really want people to be comfortable.
Can’t we just praise people for being kind and calling out bad behaviour both, and scold them for being mean and not calling out bad behaviour both? Do we really need to have some sort of preemptive moral judgement of people’s character build up in our heads in advance of actually observing these things?
I think it depends on what question are you trying to solve.
A person who is “kind and weak” is a nice neighbor when things are okay, but a bad ally when things go wrong and you need to fight against an external threat.
If you repeatedly experience situations where you need help against someone who hurts you, but you are only surrounded by the “kind and weak” people who express their sympathies but won’t help you, it is easy to become bitter about this type of kindness. (For example, imagine a child who is bullied at school, and has classmates who are nice to them in private, but refuse to confront the bully.)
EDIT:
Perhaps more importantly, sometimes we need to predict what will happen if circumstances change. If a person is “kind and strong”, making them stronger is probably a safe choice, seems like more of the same.
If a person is “kind and weak”, making them strong could come with an unpleasant surprise. (Even for the person themselves!) Exposed to new temptation, it might turn out that the person actually sucks at resisting them. Or they might turn out perfectly OK… the problem is, we don’t know, so it makes sense to remind ourselves that the “kind and weak” people were actually not tested by the fire of some temptations.
(This can happen by giving a weak person an official position of power, but probably way more often happens informally, e.g. when a weak man finally gets a girlfriend, or a weak woman has a child.)
The same could be said from the opposite point of view, minus the phrase “in advance”. “Do we really need to have some sort of moral judgment of people’s character built up in the absence of the knowledge to put it in context?” Ignoring information that might let you make judgments in advance is still a form of ignoring information that may be morally relevant.
And you’re probably not going to say “well, then I just won’t make moral judgments at all”.
Everyone says that “kindness is good, but you need to be tough sometimes to deter wrongdoers,” the position that “you should never be tough to anyone” feels almost strawman-like. The real disagreement is where exactly to balance kindness vs. assertiveness, who is too kind, who is too assertive.Edit: retracted because too unkind[1]Hmm, the idea that people should have more power to punish others is interesting. Something like an unpopularity tax, to individuals or organizations. Though such an implementation would turn competing businesses into political mudslingers result in unpredictability and capital flight. I’m not sure what implementation would work. Maybe a randomly selected jury, so at least the punishers are informed? It might need to be large enough to resist bribery.
Actually, retracted because it’s not a strawman since others disagree with you.
Duels are a way to punish your enemies that requires high personal sacrifice. I think we have plenty of ways in today’s society where a person can take actions to be annoying to people they dislike. Some of them legal others like squatting aren’t legal but hard to prosecute and probably less risky then asking someone to a duel to the death.
The main thing that our society does, is that it doesn’t make it a honorable course of action to go to extreme length to punish your enemies, the power to punish is still there.
Well if no one ever did anything, then instead of human civilization we would have a frankly unremarkable species of ape-descended bipeds living in eastern Africa. I was going to say something about “hunting with sticks and stones” but I think inventing tools counts as doing things, we’re talking about pre-cavemen here.
If the modern world sounds better than that, then doing things has been overall good.
Perhaps this is reductive, but maybe what you’re reaching for when you feel that kindness is meaningless without the capacity for cruelty, is that there’s no predictive signal in it? We’re predictive machines, so we tend to only care about things where a prediction matters. If you never had to deal with the prospect of someone not being kind, then maybe that dissatisfaction with default kindness would dissolve?
do you also accept, then, that an action is not cruel unless the actor has the considered capacity for kindness?
Well, it certainly would be more cruel to be cruel in situation where you could as well be kind.