A man in Iran has been sentenced to be blinded as punishment for blinding a woman by throwing acid in her face:
Ameneh Bahrami refused to accept "blood money." She insisted instead that her attacker suffer a fate similar to her own "so people like him would realize they do not have the right to throw acid in girls' faces," she told the Tehran Provincial Court.
Her attacker, a 27-year-old man identified in court papers as Majid, admitted throwing acid in her face in November 2004, blinding and disfiguring her. He said he loved her and insisted she loved him as well.He has until early this week to appeal the sentence. [...]
The three-judge panel ruled unanimously on November 26 that Majid should be blinded with acid and forced to pay compensation for the injuries to Bahrami's face, hands and body caused by the acid.
That was what she had demanded earlier in the trial. But she did not ask for his face to be disfigured, as hers was.
"Of course, only blind him and take his eyes, because I cannot behave the way he did and ask for acid to be thrown in his face," she said. "Because that would be [a] savage, barbaric act. Only take away his sight so that his eyes will become like mine. I am not saying this from a selfish motive. This is what society demands."
I obviously think that this punishment is wrong. The man should receive a lengthy jail sentence as well as being ordered to pay the woman's medical expenses; I'd support a civil lawsuit to recover damages as well. But coming at it from a question of Christian morality, which rejects vengeful punishment and preaches forgiveness, I don't think that it's a good idea to operate on the "eye for an eye" principle; in fact, I think it's evil to do so.
None of this means that I don't have great sympathy for the victim--it's just that my religious views don't permit this kind of punishment for crimes, which are excessively cruel and which speak more to a desire for vengeance than for mere punishment. And that's one of the reasons I reject the death penalty, too--far too often any legitimate concern about protecting society isn't even in the equation, and motives of vengeance and the desire for the criminal to suffer the pains he inflicted on his victim or victims is very present in the community which is responsible for handing down the sentence.
(Challenge below the fold:)
Here's the thing, though: the Iranian woman, Ameneh Bahrami, doesn't see it that way. To her, having her attacker blinded is not only a just, but also a merciful punishment--she is not demanding his life, nor is she demanding that he be scarred and disfigured. In her society the punishment is neither cruel nor unusual, and she is asking simply that her attacker be made to suffer the same fate--blindness--that he inflicted upon her.
I sometimes think that our post-Christian American secularists forget how much they owe to the "Christian" part of the post-Christian reality. The reason we have a society that doesn't think it's good to employ "eye for an eye" as a standard of justice is because we started out as a nation founded on Christian principles. Some of our founders didn't share these religious beliefs, but they didn't insist that America be a deist nation or a nation hostile to religion--the most they did was forbid the creation of an official State church. But they took for granted that the religious traditions of Christianity, which themselves looked back to the Jewish traditions, would form much of the basis of the moral underpinnings of the laws of the new nation.
So here's the challenge: using a purely secularist rationale, explain why it is wrong or unjust to punish a man who has blinded a woman by blinding him. "It's inhuman" or "it's barbaric" or even "it's cruel" are statements of emotional belief, not argument; I'm interested in hearing the secularist case for rejecting "eye for an eye" as a punishment standard. In a truly post-Christian, completely secularist America, what shared societal moral basis for rejecting this standard do we have?
I think you could actually make a stronger secular case in favor of "eye for an eye" than against it. The man in this case robbed the woman of that self-determining freedom which is the epitome of all existence, causing her to wish she had died of her injuries. Why should he not be robbed of his, not merely by being put in jail, but by having his own eyesight removed? Wouldn't that be a fit punishment when someone robs another person of the right to define their own happiness and meaning of life, and then live in whatever manner best helps them seek that happiness and meaning?
Tell me why it's wrong to blind Ameneh Bahrami's attacker--or tell me why it isn't, if you think a secularist society ought to allow for punishments of this type.
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Any of you ever seen Fiddler on the Roof? If not, go rent it and watch it. Here's a famous quote from Rab Tavye:
"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? Then the whole world will be blind and toothless!"
Blindness for blindness is not wrong, per se. You just have to remember mercy, when you ask yourself where the revenge cycle can possibly end.
Rufus: are you then admitting to a dichotomy between "Nietzsche" and "God-or-some-other-such-source-of-intrinsic-moral-meaning in our lives"? Because if so, I still think this is a false dichotomy, not only because intrinsic-moral-meaning has a spectrum of beliefs but also because extrinsically-derived moral meaning also has a spectrum of beliefs, not just Nietzscheanism. PS: Sig never used the word "progress", just "fitness", which is indeed at the core of evolution.
Back to the topic--while i have great sympathy for Alicia's POV--how can you stop bad behavior especially by men--all my sympathies are for the POV that the punishment is wrong. So why from a secular POV? Well, let's pick a couple or three views and discuss them simplistically.
1. Emotivism (held by Hume and Ayers): "all moral evaluations and claims are merely reflections of subjective preferences and evaluations." [Alisdair McIntyre]. Since you can't make a rational statement about "right" or "wrong" anyway, I am going with my personal feeling that this action is wrong.
2. Deontology, as expressed by Francis Kamm: one may harm in order to save more if and only if the harm is an effect or an aspect of the greater good itself. Which acid-in-the-eye is not. (This may be an intrinsic-moral-meaning argument, but I think falls in the secular realm).
3. The Social Contract: while the secular morality of Cultural Relativism probably requires accepting this form of "justice", if we posit that in the long run, across the world, a more workable social contract will occur wherein punishment-tempered-by-mercy is more acceptable to all than an eye-for-an-eye.
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of "secular" arguments to make here--on both sides. You don't have to play the God card to argue that an eye for an eye is wrong--it's easier, but why play an ace when a five will do. And, while I agree that an eye for an eye was actually a judicial improvement at the time, I do agree that the teachings of Jesus take us beyond that level.
If you were, you would not have mischaracterized the choice I pose -- along with many, many others more philosophically adept than either of us -- as being one between Nietzsche and "Rufus" but rather one between Nietzsche and God or what I referred to in my earlier posts as "some other such source of intrinsic moral meaning in our lives" -- with the key term being *intrinsic.*
It's still a false choice. And you are very strangely and deeply engrained with Nietzsche. Your argument throughout this thread casts yourself as a Christian Uebermensch faced with the degenerate and liberal Last Man in the form of Daniel. The rhetorical manifestations of master/slave morality and Will To Power are also quite intriguing. I'm really only missing a suitable trope that fits to Eternal Return. Surely you'll get to that when talking about afterlife concerns. :-)
As for your notion that a reduction of intragroup and intergroup conflict could itself be a means of evolutionary "progress," I would submit first that evolution and progress are not the same thing and second that -- in any event -- it take quite a bit of "tooth and claw" to resolve human conflict into the "progressive" "harmony" that you would have us submit to. Witness the histories of Russia from the 1910's to the 1950's and of China from the 1940's to the 1970's for just two examples.
First of all, the Soviets and Maoists (and Nazis, and the French Revolutionaries,) inherited the class/caste wars and dreadful international conflicts they did from many generations of at least nominally religious predecessors and powerful religious traditions and clergy. If organized religion were inherently a sufficient force for the good, these earlier rulers and clergy would not have been as incompetent before the problems that led to overthrow of their monopolies on power and religion.
It should also be noted that their societies did not overthrow the Soviets, Nazis, Revolutionaries etc for being atheists per se or for their bloody manner of dealing with the longstanding internal and external hostilities that brought them to power. They lost power for being themselves inadequate to the arising next series of conflicts and challenges.
Hegelians did not take the French Revolution to disprove his theory of synthesis; it demonstrated it in the long run. At present Putin seems a rather excellent demonstration of the principle, actually, and so is the convergence of much of Eastern Europe with the West.
Secondly, the general problem you are arguing is a fuzzy creationism or revelationism of a moral order on your end. The argument is one involving neuroscience and the accumulated global evidence of essential uniformities and peculiarities worldwide provided by social and cultural anthropology. In neuroscience and evolutionary biology the corresponding problem is framed reductively as the origin of altruistic behavior in contrast to selfishness. The essential development seems to be a cognitive ability to imagine oneself into the situation of the other creature sufficiently fully.
It is wrong to blind him for exactly the same reason that it was wrong to blind her. I'm quite sure that in his own mind he felt that he had a good reason for blinding her; and I'm quite sure that the woman feels that she has a good reason for blinding him. And they are BOTH wrong: there is NO good reason for such barbarity.
If the man cannot be rehabilitated, and keeping him permanently locked up is not an option for whatever reason, then kill him as humanely as you would destroy a rabid dog. But blinding him will not bring back the woman's sight, any more than blinding her would win him her love. Barbarity is violence for its own sake, and that describes both acts.
Our host, Erin, and the other posters, all sound like well educated folks living in a stable enough country that they have the time to contemplate things like whether the use of severe punishment is effective or not. (Actually, people in Texas and Florida appear not to wonder either, but that's sort of an exception.) I live in Arizona, myself, and I'm comfortably enough insulated from the realities of live in Iran that I'm a bit shocked by the story too. We are all fools.
People in less stable areas of the world don't wonder about the effectiveness of severe punishment. Instead, they wonder how they can reduce the punishments dished out by the reality of their lives, and are willing to grasp anything that might lead to some sort of order. Violence is not a question, its the norm. These folks see extreme punishments as the only way to meet the threat. What we may call vengeance is just punishment in their cultural terms. The kicker there is that our cultural norms about punishment appear weak and ineffective to them. Who's really got a grounded and workable point of view?
A grounded and workable point of view is one that can be applied. Iran has a serious and growing problem with violence against women. This whole 'acid attack' thing is a growing trend. During his sentencing, the acid psycho, Movahedi, said "The newspapers have made this a huge case, but I haven't done anything bad." This guy may be unhinged, but his attitude is not uncommon. Women are treated like property, and you can break one without punishment, so long as you offer to marry her.
Iran's society is broken, but actually is ruled by law. We are watching the checks and balances in that system at play. We can speculate or scoff; we have that ability safe here in the western world. It simply doesn't matter what we think. That man is going to get his eyes blinded by acid in public. I, for one, hope that if it must happen, it helps them sort out some of their misogyny.
So, in answer to the challenge, "It's wrong to ask if it's wrong." We aren't qualfied.
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