88. ANSWERING SOME QUESTIONS - Correspondence on Justice

Many months ago, a student suggested several topics I might like to cover on future Philosophy Unleasheds. While I did one straight away, the remaining questions were soon lost to time as life got in the way and I forgot about the email entirely.

As I sit here now it’s Saturday. It’s been a long hard week of work, and the Philosophy Unleashed I had planned to write this week remains unwritten. Most of my favourite podcasts, when they find themselves with a deadline and no guest, tend to dip into the Q&A format to fill the space. Inspired by that idea, I therefore decided not to write a half-baked and rushed new essay this week but to return to the emails and answer those remaining philosophical questions I didn’t get around to. Feel free to add a comment to this post to send me anything else you want me to answer this week too. Normal service will return next week (hopefully) with a brand new essay. In all honesty it depends how I get on marking Year 10 mock exams…

So - here is the first question I was asked:

1) How do you work around tyranny of the majority in a direct democracy or an anarchy? What is to stop us if the masses vote for something terrible like killing someone?

The answer to this is very much why I advocate anarchism as “authentic democracy” rather than even standard forms of “direct democracy”. Power in such a system is necessarily limited and specific. If agreed to, it must be for a reason, and it would be a power which can always be revoked at any point if its initial justificatory basis has been undermined or violated. Such a power cannot compel people to do what they do not want to do, only to do what they agree needs doing. In my own conception of what justifies such anarchism there is also an understanding of various principles or “species facts” which lead to “species interests” which should not be violated. As one such interest is in the preservation of our lives and protection from harm, any “vote” to murder someone(s) (including votes to go to war, use capital punishment, etc.) would immediately violate the foundational belief of the very thing which would have given that “vote” any power in the first place, making it unjustified and illegitimate by definition.

There is also the tricky matter of what we mean by “majority” and how they came to hold their position in the first place. If by “tyranny of the majority” we mean the informed view of most people then a) it seems likely such a view might be the right one for what that particular group of people want and therefore might be worth exploring; and, b) if such a view involves tyrannising individuals or groups in ways that don’t seem to make sense then it needs to be explained how such tyranny came to be and if, in fact, the belief is justified? My hunch would be that in a truly free society, with proper education and discernment of information, liberated from the many distorting factors of our current capitalist society and its intentionally limited resources and structural inequalities, such tyrannies would have little motivation to emerge. Furthermore, given the species-interest universal to all and which shouldn’t be violated, alternative possibilities to “murder” would have to be looked at even if the majority believed such a thing was what they desired. It could well be the case that the majority do turn against an individual or group for some legitimate reason I can’t think of right now - but whatever the cause of their decision to turn against the minority, it doesn’t necessarily follow that any person-harming response would be equally legitimate for them to enact. Far from majorities being tyrannies in such societies, the idea would be for minorities to be protected to do whatever they want to do so long as the universal species-interests of all are not violated. Majorities would only ever need to form when sufficient numbers of people agreed that something larger was required for practical purposes - not merely to spitefully target other, smaller, groups unnecessarily.

In short - and I go into this in far more detail in my book - I believe this to be a problem of our current society being transplanted into an idea of a society that would be radically different from our own. I am not naive enough to believe it couldn’t happen (or blind enough to not see that it currently already happens in our current first past the post democracies all the time), but would suggest that all the changes needed for such an anarchy to exist would likely take with them many of the motivating forces for the sort of petty cruelties which tend to be the hallmark of the way the world is today. If anything, therefore, the existing tyrannies of majorities manipulated through ideological media and distorting mass communications today are a further argument as to why replacing the current failed system with something better is so essential.

The next question, related, was this:

2) While a justice system where rehabilitation is most logical because it has the overall best outcomes (the person is rehabilitated to return to and contribute in society, no further cruelty is exercised on the criminal). How will it satisfy the emotional side of those wanting payback? Most people would be upset if a serial killer was set free after only being taught they should no longer kill people.

The reason I see this as a related issue is because, again, it sees the arbitrary way things are now as both the only way that things could be and as more important than they actually are. The student is quite right that, today, many would be upset if a serial killer was set free. Indeed, just this week, interventions are being considered by the Ministry of Justice after the UK Parole Board approved the release of Colin Pitchfork, a convicted child killer and rapist. There is certainly an emotional side to our response to crime and many desire payback when terrible things are done to people. If someone murdered or raped someone I loved, I would want them to suffer terribly too. However…it is important to recognise that such an emotional response is not always worth paying attention to.

That might sound heartless, but it is simply recognising the bias of the people affected by such crimes and the need for a more objective view. Of course I would want the person who did something awful to a loved one and put a hole in my life to suffer…but that doesn’t make it right that I would feel that way. Sometimes I get cut up on the road when driving and I want to punch the other driver, but despite our recognition of the phenomenon of “road rage” I would still have done something wrong if I actually did carry out my frustration and commit such an act of violence. Emotional responses are not always the most rational. I have a wide range of anxieties and phobias. It is important to understand that I have them and recognise them if they are causing me discomfort, but it is also important to recognise that my feelings are not based in reality despite their pressing realness to me. Likewise, I have occasionally been wronged by a friend, and have been angry at that friend and wished bad things would happen to them in return…only to later sort everything out and become their friend again. Anger, fear, vengeance…these are all related emotions we may very well feel…but they are not good emotions on which to base rational actions. Furthermore they can often make us unreasonable and make us desire things we might later regret.

So while we can understand that a justice system designed to rehabilitate rather than punish offenders might upset those who are their victims, we also might reasonably hold the view that such upset - though unfortunate - holds less weight than the greater benefit we get from treating even criminals with respect and dignity.

Ultimately, punishment holds the inherent paradox that the thing which motivates us to do it - the idea that someone has been harmed, and harming someone is wrong - is undermined the moment we act: by making us commit more harm. There are many responses to this - and responses to the responses - too deep to go into in this small space, but the point is that there is less inconsistency in a system of justice which says everyone should be protected from harm, even criminals, even criminals who have harmed others, than one which says harm is wrong unless it is inflicted as deserved retributive punishment. Given that, the objection that such a system of rehabilitation might leave those inevitably biased toward seeking more retributive measures against the criminals that have caused them harm is not really all that compelling. They too will need rehabilitation, and find more productive ways to overcome their grief or outrage than causing more harm in the world.

In short: the emotional side perhaps doesn’t need to satisfied if the emotional desire voiced is unreasonable. This becomes especially true when we recognise the truism that no amount of punishment to the worst of criminal offenders - the murderers, the rapists - would bring the dead back or undo the rape. Given that the emotional desire for punishment is ultimately futile and the rehabilitative system can actually hope to make things better in the future and decrease the harm in society, there seems even less reason to take it very seriously.

More work needs to be done to look at where this problematic and damaging emotional desire for retribution comes from instead of wasting our time seeking to satisfy it. I recommend reading Martha Nussbaum’s excellent Anger and Forgiveness for more on this, and am currently focusing most of my own philosophical research right now into the area of punishment and the question of why self-evidently poor systems based around retribution continue to exist as well as what a world might look like without prisons.

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As I said - I’ll hopefully be back with something more fully formed next week depending on this week’s marking workload, but feel free to comment on this post with any of your own questions you want me to answer either this week, or in a future PU post. I really like being challenged to think on the spot. Speaking of which, a previous contributor to PU, Mohammed Hassan, recently interviewed me on his podcast about my book, anarchism, ethics and philosophy in general. Give it a listen HERE and I’ll see you all next week.

Author: DaN McKee

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