(The part above the fold is just banter; the part below the fold is more serious.)
Waiting for my lasagna to heat up, I noticed that the snack basket had a small package of oyster crackers nestled amongst the chips. I poured the crackers into a paper cup, added some Cheez-Its, shook well, instant snack mix. But that's not the point.
Oyster crackers and Cheez-Its in the same cup reminded me of the old parable: Earlier this month I went to a time management session (I have yet to attempt to compute how many days (weeks?) of better time management it will take for me to enjoy a net "time profit" on the time investment of attending the session) where the instructor began with an anecdote, attributed to an English professor, of a container of large pebbles. "Is it full?" Yes. "Really?" [pour smaller pebbles into the container; they'll slip into crevices] - repeat these steps through grains of sand and finally water.
(This parable really originated with an ancient Greek thinker, no? I couldn't immediately confirm this with a web search.)
That's not to be confused with the story of a professor who mocks his student for believing that God was real, only for the student to turn around and mock the professor for believing that the concept of "cold" (versus hot) was real. A decent response paper assignment in a philosophy class would be for the students to improve on the hypothetical professor's weak sauce.
(Irrelevant aside: The author of the above link is a Mets fan whose call for Willie Randolph to be fired was published just a few hours before it actually happened.)
This led me to think about philosophy classes I'd actually taken, papers I'd actually written, and the disturbing premise behind my most memorable paper:
Most of the justifications for punishing a convicted criminal, even if they're logically sound to begin with, don't actually require that punishment be given to (or only to) people who are actually guilty.
Retribution arguments (or deterrence arguments for that matter) don't actually depend directly on punishing the guilty; rather, they depend on a universal good-faith belief that the guilty (and only the guilty) are punished. Obviously the best way to instill this belief is for it actually to be true -- but in theory it doesn't have to be true.
(A real-life example of this -- from years after I wrote the paper -- would be the Duke lacrosse rape suspects, if the general public had never learned how weak the case against them actually was. If the case hadn't so conspicuously unraveled then, regardless of whether they actually did it, I think many observers were so convinced that they did it that anything short of a harsh punishment (with or without formal conviction) would have been deeply unacceptable to those observers.)
Meanwhile, incarceration and rehabilitation are just methods to prevent future crimes. The fact that you have[n't] already committed a particular crime may be a strong signal that you [don't] need to be incarcerated, or rehabilitated, but other factors may predict just as strongly.
Here's the part that I fervently hope my paper conveyed (lest the TA mistake me for a monster): I don't like that the above statements seem to be true, and I certainly wouldn't advocate either show trials or preemptive punishment. But if we want to foreclose the possibility of show trials or preemptive punishment, then we need to present the reasons why the state punishes people a lot more rigorously than we typically present them.
We might also need to be more rigorous when we explain why certain practices would be obviously manifestly unjust as applied to the innocent (yet tolerable as applied to people found guilty of specific crimes).
(Or we could rely on a pragmatic, commonsense observation that the U.S. would never engage in particular practices that we intuitively think of as unjust... would it?!)
Posted by Matt Bruce at June 24, 2008 01:26 PM