Is punishment justifiable?
Retribution, deterrence and reform are commonly cited rationales for the administration of punitive measures. In recent times however, punishment, both in definition and in practice have moved away from notions of reform and rehabilitation, towards retribution and incarceration. At the same time, free will is being called into question by multiple disciplines. If individuals are not the full and free agents of their actions, what does this mean for how we approach punishment? This evening we discuss the question of whether punishment is ever justifiable, and if not what are the alternatives?
Definitions
- the infliction or imposition of a penalty as retribution for an offence.
- to be distinguished from discipline - Punishment is about controlling or regulating behavior through fear. The stated goal of positive discipline is to help individuals understand that their choices, actions and behaviors all have consequences, and that it is the choices one makes that determines the consequences thereby letting them realize that they have more control of their lives.
Prominent Rationales for Punishment
The most common rationales for punishment and punitive measures fall into one of the following:
a) Retribution // “Bad people deserve to suffer.” people who have committed culpable wrongs deserve their lives to go worse as a result. Retributivists also think that the severity of punishment should match the severity of the crime.
b) Deterrence // “Criminals should be punished so that they and others will be less likely to commit crime in the future, making everybody safer.”
c) Reform // “Punishment communicates to criminals that what they have done is wrong, and gives them an opportunity to apologise and reform.”
Some critiques of Punishment
b) punishment treats symptoms not causes // c)punishment focuses on guilty individuals, not guilty systems that create those individuals]
a) Punishment creates politeness, not morality: Punishment often does not change the tendency to engage in the behavior that was punished, just to avoid the source of the punishment. What the means is that often as soon as the punished individual believes it’s not being observed, the same tendency to engage in harmful behavior may reappear. e.g. ‘Punished children do what was punished behind their parents backs, or as soon as they get to college’.
Thus for punishment to work, one might need to arrange for a totalitarian state to ensure that the person is always feeling watched and thereby inhibit the behavior permanently under an umbrella of anxiety, numbness, and hate (the emotions that punishment produces). But even then, the tendency (or desire) to engage in the punished behavior will not change.
"Why, then, do we punish children? We do so for two main reasons. The first is that punishment looks like it works even though it doesn’t. Because the punished individual is inhibited in your presence, it’s easy to think they would be inhibited in your absence. Punishment produces politeness, not morality. Thus, the inhibited, obedient child inadvertently reinforces the parent’s punitive behavior by acting obedient (for the sorts of parents who find obedient children reinforcing).”
b) Punishment treats symptoms not causes:
c) Punishment totally fails to acknowledge the systemic or societal influences that lead to a harm:
- Epigenetics
- Generational trauma
- The effect of nurture is huge.
All of these are just some of the myriad of ways that our environment might contribute to our likelihood
whatever we believe about free will and holding people accountable to their actions, it strikes me that punishing the harmful act is too little too late. The harm is done. Surely if our only response to harms done is to punish the actor, without changing the world that created them, we are letting not only the victim, but the actor, and all of us down.
It also totally obfuscates the systemic issues that likely underly a lot of harms done - poverty, inequality, and cultural influences. For example, it is my opinion that if we pressed a red button now, and every human that had ever raped someone dropped dead, we’d only be safe for a few years. Why, bc we are still producing rape culture. And that is on all of us to change. We are all participating in it and reprodusing it. Punishing rapists without address the soviety that produced them, is a huge failing imo.
“It’s funny to appreciate a city from a jail bus, because it’s that very city that’s sending you away. And I mean all of it is sending you away – from the disciplinarians that fancy themselves educators, to the bullshit jobs that treat you like a crook from the first day, to the police who menace you everywhere you go. The city taught me the survival mechanisms it would ultimately punish me for. There’s no other way to understand it.”
The ugly fact is that we have predictive policing algorithms now. They have already been deployed in multiple states across the US. On one hand this is dire and terrifying, but the upside is that now we know who really needs help if we are to stem harms before they happen.
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Beliefs about free will seem to matter [brain tumour patients // scores on free will and punishment anticorrelate]
2000: Scientists concluded that the tumour interfered with the orbifrontal cortex which helps to regulate social behaviour and likely exacerbated his pre-existing interest in pornography, and “manifesting sexual deviancy and paedophilia”.
Dr James Cantor, “Although these cases can be an important clue, I would not conclude that they represent someone who became paedophilic or became non-paedophilic again. Rather, the evidence suggests that someone who was already paedophilic all along lost the ability to hide it after the injury, and then regained the ability to suppress it as the neurological problem was treated.”
***
But do we even have free will? [Determinism and neuroscience]
‘Determinism’ or causal determinism: the idea that events in the past cause events in the future. And it follows, taking the idea to its logical conclusion, that therefore everything happens for a reason that can be traced all the way back to the birth of the Universe itself. These ideas led to what is referred to as the Newtonian clockwork universe:
“Newtonian mechanics came to be regarded as the ultimate explanatory science: phenomena of any kind, it was believed, could and should be explained in terms of mechanical conceptions. Newtonian physics was used to support the deistic view that God had created the world as a perfect machine that then required no further interference from Him, the Newtonian world machine or Clockwork Universe”
Similarly, the idea of free will has long been debated in neuroscience. In the 1980’s studies by Libet calling into question the notion of conscious free will.
They recorded brain activity as participants made self generated finger movements whilst looking at a clock. They were asked to report the time at which they decided to move their finger. The crucial finding was that the preparatory neural activity that predicted movement (readiness potential) preceded the time reported as the point of conscious intent to move. This has been replicated using direct recordings of neural activity using implanted electrodes also .
Of course this is dubious in many ways. Self report is another motor act, which is subject to the same delays as the finger movement, if not more. Moreover, recent work has shown that humans can veto this preparatory activity.
so whilst it is all highly debated, it’s not clear that we don’t have free will, but it’s certainly still an open question.
Free will is likely a spectrum, not a binary. And there are situations in which we have more or less agency over an act. But there remains many acts that are likely an accumulation of our environmental circumstances.
***
I’ll finish with this quote:
“Every society has the criminals it deserves.”
―Emma Goldman, Red Emma Speaks
Discussion
“prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral”
***
However, all of these depend on the idea that humans are autonomous agencies with free will to change their actions.
Why is this relevant? certainly, we use this information in our determining of how to treat harms done.
Patients with brain tumors that seemed to cause their harmful behavior are treated morally and legally differently.
Strangely enough in a study that gave two surveys, one of determinism/belief in free will and one on attitude to punishment, subjects who scored higher in belief in determinism recommended more punitive measures for behavioral deviations than those who scored higher in belief in free will.
“A possible explanation for these results emphasized the burdensome moral responsibility which punishment may represent to those who believe in free will. Such responsibility would demand that punishment be administered with scrupulous attention to fairness and justice”
There is a chicken/egg element to this discussion also. Is it that we believe in punishment bc we hold individuals responsible we believe in free will? or do we believe in free will bc we need to hold others accountable for their actions?
On the other hand, the reverse has been suggested, that beliefs about free will originate from a need to hold others accountable for their actions:
So where does the boundary between my brain made me do it, my environment made me do it, and it’s my fault, actually lie?
—
Punishment is treating symptoms not causes
Lastly, whatever we believe about free will and holding people accountable to their actions, it strikes me that punishing the harmful act is too little too late. The harm is done. Surely if our only response to harms done is to punish the actor, without changing the world that created them, we are letting not only the victim, but the actor, and all of us down.
The ugly fact is that we have predictive policing algorithms now. They have already been deployed in multiple states across the US. On one hand this is dire and terrifying, but the upside is that now we know who really needs help if we are to stem harms before they happen.
Quote from Aeon.
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For me personally, I find there there is never justification for punishment according to our definitions. Disacpine may be required for sure, there are consequences to our actions - so repeat offender peadophiles may have to be keep away from children, but this should be for their safety, not to extract misery and retribution on the actor/harmer.
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References
http://www.jimal-khalili.com/blogs/2016/9/7/do-we-have-free-will-a-physicists-perspective
Might it be that if we believe in free will, we believe we need to punish?
Attitudes Toward Punishment in Relation to Beliefs in Free Will and Determinism Viney et al.
An experiment was conducted to investigate attitudes toward punishment in relation to beliefs in free will and determinism. College students responded to two questionnaires; one designed to assess attitudes toward punishment and one designed to assess strength of belief in free will or determinism. It was found that subjects who scored higher in belief in determinism recommended more punitive measures for behavioral deviations than those who scored higher in belief in free will. A possible explanation for these results emphasized the burdensome moral responsibility which punishment may represent to those who believe in free will. Such responsibility would demand that punishment be administered with scrupulous attention to fairness and justice.
On the other hand, the reverse has been suggested, that beliefs about free will originate from a need to hold others accountable for their actions:
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2014 Apr;106(4):501-13. doi: 10.1037/a0035880.
Free to punish: a motivated account of free will belief.
Clark CJ1, Luguri JB2, Ditto PH1, Knobe J3, Shariff AF4, Baumeister RF5.
Belief in free will is a pervasive phenomenon that has important consequences for prosocial actions and punitive judgments, but little research has investigated why free will beliefs are so widespread. Across 5 studies using experimental, survey, and archival data and multiple measures of free will belief, we tested the hypothesis that a key factor promoting belief in free will is a fundamental desire to hold others morally responsible for their wrongful behaviors.
In Study 1, participants reported greater belief in free will after considering an immoral action than a morally neutral one.
Study 2 provided evidence that this effect was due to heightened punitive motivations.
In a field experiment (Study 3), an ostensibly real classroom cheating incident led to increased free will beliefs, again due to heightened punitive motivations.
In Study 4, reading about others' immoral behaviors reduced the perceived merit of anti-free-will research, thus demonstrating the effect with an indirect measure of free will belief.
Finally, Study 5 examined this relationship outside the laboratory and found that the real-world prevalence of immoral behavior (as measured by crime and homicide rates) predicted free will belief on a country level.
Taken together, these results provide a potential explanation for the strength and prevalence of belief in free will: It is functional for holding others morally responsible and facilitates justifiably punishing harmful members of society.
Meanwhile, science is struggling to maintain the idea that free will is anything other than a post hoc sensation that serves some social purpose.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627310010822
But in the first-ever qualitative review of these studies, researchers are finding that the results are far from conclusive. The review analyzed 48 studies, ranging from Libet's landmark 1983 paper through 2014.
"We found that interpretation of study results appears to have been driven by the metaphysical position the given author or authors subscribed to -- not by a careful analysis of the results themselves," Dubljevic says. "Basically, those who opposed free will interpreted the results to support their position, and vice versa."
https://aeon.co/essays/what-i-learned-about-masculinity-behind-bars-in-texas
https://aeon.co/ideas/should-life-in-jail-be-worse-than-outside-on-principle
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-us-prisons-violate-three-principles-of-criminal-justice
https://theconversation.com/death-penalty-is-capital-punishment-morally-justified-42970
Notes
There is a difference between consequences and a perpetrator
Avoidance of people for example
Thinking every stove is harmful is very different to thinking every human is dangerous.
Retoriative justice
Q. How can one who is in a situation who is in trouble consent to participation?
Is is that different to use brain stim / pharmacological intervention compared to social interventions, certainly those
We form an ethics around touching people, but we have built our cities that are meant to turn up us into workings/men and women, but without touching us.
Boudriallard - prisons are there to disguise the fact hat ever day life is carcenl
methods of punishment being more or less fucked up/ effective
FOOCOO - the mot effective forms of power are the ones that make a person want a thing. eg nudging
Suppose we contract an
- suspension of a prelveidge would be a punishment
- Incentivie us to behave well.
I love the idea of a wider variety of punishments - Cami 2018
- means tested fines
- china - social point system