Finn d'Abuzz wrote:I don't understand how vengeance and retribution have gotten such a bad rep. Nor do I understand how those in favor of punishing wrongdoers for their crime, feel compelled to provide the caveat that they are not keen on vengeance.
This is what vengeance and retribution are: "Infliction of punishment in return for a wrong committed"
There seems to be a notion running through this thread that vengeance implies blood lust and and a viceral need to inflict pain and suffering.
Of course the degree of vengeance taken can exceed the degree of the wrong committed, but that shouldn't be a knock on retribution.
The concept of retribution runs deep throughout most of the cultures that thrive on our planet, and has done so for a very long time. It would seem to be something of an evolutionary success mechanism.
It is unwise to provide the State with the power to kill its citizens, but how is it immoral? That someone dies is not prima facia evidence of immorality.
The argument that as all society really needs to do is prevent a wrongdoer from doing additional harm and anything more is immoral is flawed for a number of reasons, including:
1) The only certain way to achieve this allegedly sufficent solution it to terminate the wrongdoer. A close second is to imprison the wrongdoer for life without any chance of parole, but how often does that even happen with murderers let alone those who committ "lesser " crimes?
No one is going to argue for the execution or life long imprisonment of all wrongdoers, and so the concept of preventing wrongdoers form doing addtional wrongs is, essentially, without meaning.
If rehabilitation was a viable method (and it is not) the argument that punishment is not necessary would be a lot stronger.
2) In the main, people act in response to stimuli and their actions are modified by consequences. Negative consequences are required to abate antisocial behavior. Will they eliminate such behavior? Of course not, but the goal is control not elimination.
3) What is immoral is to propigate an absense of accountibility. Accountibility is what underlies honor and what, ultimately, holds society together. As ye sow, so shall ye reap. If you murder you deserve to be murdered in return.
Since Society cannot permit each person to mete out his or her own personal assessment of retribution, we need to cede to the State this role. Since the State can't be trusted to do so in anything approaching a perfect fashion, we should not permit it the power of death. Morality doesn't enter the picture.
This is an interesting post. I disagree with, I think, everything in it.
Your last sentence is key... "Morality doesn't enter the picture." Doesn't it? What sorts of questions then are moral questions?
What you are attempting is a total avoidance of moral questions in establishing how a justice system ought to function. It's really a justice as book-keeping argument...one eye over here, one eye over there...books balanced, cosmic order of right and wrong re-established.
You actually make only one moral claim in the entire post, in your point 3) where you suggest that the only immorality might occur where your book-keeping system is altered by other considerations, such as perhaps, empathy.
Here's a clue...
Quote:The concept of retribution runs deep throughout most of the cultures that thrive on our planet, and has done so for a very long time. It would seem to be something of an evolutionary success mechanism.
As Craven points out, there is much that runs throughout human behavior which is quite ignoble. Take rape. It has the same attributes...it's ubiquitous in all cultures and would seem to be an evolutionary success story. Or take cruelty. Same story...found everywhere so (according to your formula) would seem to have an evolutionary advantage. Or, if you want to stick to social arrangements (such as a justice system), then take domination of the many by a few (political system). Again, according to your formula, it happens everywhere, thus seems to have an evolutionary causation. Your 'logic' would then hold that none of these matters would properly engage moral questions.
You're argument has a home and a name...
Quote:The Is-Ought Problem
Hume noted that many writers talk about what ought to be on the basis of statements about what is. But there seems to be a big difference between descriptive statements (what is) and prescriptive statements (what ought to be). Hume calls for writers to be on their guard against changing the subject like that, not without giving an explanation of how the ought-statements are supposed to follow from the is-statements. But how exactly can you derive an 'ought' from an 'is'? That question, prompted by Hume's small paragraph, has become one of the central questions of ethical theory, and Hume is usually assigned the position that such a derivation is impossible. Others interpret Hume as saying not that one cannot go from a factual statement to an ethical statement, but that one cannot do so without going through human nature, that is, without paying attention to human sentiments. The "imposssible" view was assumed by G. E. Moore's "open question argument", intended to refute any identification of moral properties with natural properties?-the so-called "naturalistic fallacy". Now any ethical theorists who wish to give morality an objective grounding in more down-to-earth features of the world is fighting an uphill battle, especially if they seek to do that without taking account of the role of human sentiments and empathy in the formulating of moral judgements.
There's rather more you've written that I could take issue with, but this fallacy is the biggy.
