The Real Basis of Punishment: Retribution as Communication

Imagine you’re discussing something with someone and then, just after you make a point that they think is foolish, they slap you in the face and tell you to stop being silly. Perhaps they jokingly wag their finger at you. Then they continue the discussion. What do you do?

I can’t speak for everyone, but I think one common reaction would be an outrage out of all proportion to the actual pain suffered, and based instead on a feeling of humiliation and disrespect. The desire this might produce could be expressed principally as ‘desire that things not go on as normal’. Maybe you slap them back, or shout at them, or leave immediately. In each case, the goal is (at least in part) to ‘mark’ the unacceptability of that action – or to put it another way, to ‘refute’ the ‘message’ that the action expressed, namely that it’s ok for this person to do that.

That is, the action taken in response would be not aimed at producing any effect, not at causal power, but would be communicative. Its rationale would be as part of an ongoing ‘discourse’ about how to act. If somebody watching had assumed that actions all ‘aim at ends’ in the sense of some result they produce, or was in another way committed to looking at actions as actions, and not as assertions, then they might well be confused, and find it hard to make sense of your response. What did it acheive?

This, I think, is what is often going on in discussions about ‘justifications for punishment’. There are broadly two sorts of theories about why we punish/why we should punish/whatever – I want to consider the debates without implying endorsement of any of their assumptions, let alone their real applications and history. Some say ‘it’s useful’ – whether by ‘deterrence’, ‘incapacitation’, or ‘rehabilitation’, it aims at some sort of good. The other says ‘it’s deserved’, or ‘it’s proportionate’ or ‘it’s justice’.

Disgust, Society, and Sex

I talked yesterday about disgust being ‘a dualistic emotion’, concerned to maintain our sense of the separateness of ourselves as persons, and other things belonging to the personal, spiritual, symbolic realm, from that horrible mindless matter that’s everywhere.

I suggested, in fact, that insofar as this sort of dualism is likely quite basic to how we are organised psychologically, but is nevertheless also false, “personhood” might almost be defined as “matter becoming disgusted with itself”.

But this poses an obvious question – if we struggle to avoid being disgusted at ourselves, how on earth will we deal with other people? Since other people are precisely that most disgusting thing, a fusion of personhood and matter, mind and body, we find them very disgusting. But we need to live with them, so how can this work? How can the need for society overcome our mutual repulsion?

It seems to me there are broadly two (diametrically opposed) ways that we do this: decorum and sexuality.

Environmentalism and Conservatism – who owns ‘Green Politics’? Part 3

In yesterday’s post, I talked about how one might come to endorse an ‘environmentalist worldview’, that replaced conflict between ‘humanity’ and ‘nature’, and subjugation of the latter by the former, with harmonious co-existence, from a left-wing perspective as part of a general rejection of what I called ‘the psychopolitics of domination’. I also talked, of course, about left-wing anti-environmentalism.

Now, there are many obvious ways of being a right-wing anti-environmentalist. You might be a free-marketeer, or an actual businessperson, who was unhappy with the collective action needed to deal with environmental problems (equally of course you might be one of the companies that stands to profit from dealing with them). Or you might want to embrace the emotional set-up of man-against-nature triumphalism, to justify assaults on whatever and whoever is perceived as ‘backward’ and ‘wild’.

But what’s interesting is that there’s an obvious niche forright-wing, specifically conservative, environmentalism. We saw this, for instance, in that speech a while back in which the Pope said that just as climate change was destroying non-human nature, so the gays and feminists were destroying human nature. So what’s going on here, and how does this brand of ‘right-environmentalism’ compare with the ‘left-environmentalism’ discussed earlier?

To illuminate this I think we will have to unpack the concept of ‘nature’ a little bit more. In particular, we should distinguish a very broad abstract component, and a more concrete component, the linkage of which is somewhat arbitrary.

Social Arrangements to Conceal the Fact that they’re Social Arrangements

What is property? I’ve already written four posts on this, but I thought I’d throw out a particular formula that I came across and quite liked.

This is perhaps not the full definition of property but a part:

property is a set of social relationships, which function in such as way as to conceal their nature as social relationships. It is the organisation of masses of people in order to produce solitude.

A Bit of Needless Definition-Mongering

Everybody’s always talking about their society, and their community. Maybe they love it, or they have duties to it, or they limit their concern to within its boundaries, or whatever.

But often it’s left vague what actually forms a certain person’s society. Obviously it’s possible to use the word in a totally subjective way – any group of people can be a society, so I can define any number of ‘societies’ that include me. And we can qualify the word to fix our reference wholly or partly – national community, local community, etc.

But surely there’s some way to use the word in which “my society” can have a single, non-subjective meaning (even if there are still grey areas or fuzzy boundaries). If not, let’s redefine the word so it can. What criteria would we use?