Challenge: tell me why this is wrong (Erin)

Purely secular rationale, from Hegel: living under the rule of law means treating violations of the law as offenses against society as a whole, not just against one individual. In other words, punishment must be mediated by the state in order to be fully moral/legitimate. By contrast, "eye for an eye" punishment treats the crime as if it's an assault on (in this case) the blinded woman alone: victim and perpetrator resolve their conflict as if it violated a contract, according to distributive justice. But that's a private criterion of justice, not a public, fully moral one. For the latter, we need something much broader: a rationalized system in which punishments are normalized: fines and jail-time and (maybe) capital punishment matched to an ascending scale of crimes, from, say, purse snatching to premeditated murder. Note that in such a system, judges exercise far less discretion than in the alternative, where the judge basically decides on distributive justice on a case by case basis -- unless, of course, the judge just relies on Scripture.

The relevant distinction here is, I think, modern and pre-modern civil justice, not Christian and non-Christian. I mean, sure, we're all "Christian" in the sense that our culture derives in large part from a Christian civilization. But we derive from the Greeks, too, and no one serious says that we ARE Greeks now.

On a more positive note if this is a sign that Islamic courts are taking crimes committed against women, including so-called "honor" crimes, more seriously, that's all to the good.

The reason we have a society that doesn't think it's good to employ "eye for an eye" as a standard of justice

Given the large numbers of vocal people in our society, and not just in the present administration, who apparently not only see nothing wrong with torturing people suspected (note: suspected, not proved) of committing acts of terrorism, but even loudly cheer it on, I'm not sure that we still have a society that "doesn't think it's good to employ 'an eye for an eye' as a standard of justice".

***

Rather, it has always been taken to mean the price for the lose of an eye is the value of an eye, and no more. In modern terms, the passage bans punitive damages.

This is a good point, and it is something that critics of "an eye for an eye" tend to miss. This goes back as least to Hammurabi, if not further (Hammurabi's code is the oldest evidence we have). "An eye for an "eye" was meant to be merciful, not cruel. In the cultural milieu in which these law codes developed, the alternative to "an eye for an eye" was not a fine and imprisonment, but rather death. "An eye for an eye" is meant to be more lenient than that.

But in general I think Damon Linker is correct: a rational system of justice has standardized punishments that regard the crime as an offense against the state rather than just an offense again an individual. Otherwise, you don't have a system of justice; you just still have a system of private vendetta, simply administered by the state.

This is one reason why I am opposed to the "victims' statements" so much in vogue at sentencing hearings. To be honest, the feelings of the victims and their families should not have any bearing on the administration of justice. Their only role should be to testify to the facts of what happened to them.

I obviously think that this punishment is wrong.

And I, maybe not just as obviously, think that this punishment is right. Not necessarily because the victim requested it, but because it so appropriately fits the crime, though I think as the perpetrator of the crime, his punishment should be not simply equal to his victim's suffering/damages, but greater. After all, to require thieves to return only what they've stolen is not sufficient deterrance, whereas adding 20% to that, or doubling it, might cause those who take from others, whether property, limb, or life, reason to pause before acting.

RD Miksa

The Old Testament requires thieves to return more than what they stole. There are guidelines/limits there. The punishment fits the crime - i.e., thieves return the goods (and more), they don't get their hands chopped off.

On the other hand, if two men are fighting and the wife of one grabs the other man's testicles, then her hand is to be cut off. YHWH - the guy Jesus calls "Father" - has some interesting ideas about justice and punishment.

This sentence makes sense in a place like Iran or any part of the world where Babylonians and Assyrians used to live....remember the Rule of Hammurabi? If a builder built a house that collapsed and killed the occupant's sone, the law ordered that the BUILDERS son be put to death.

I believe that punishment in the middle east is about deterrence. How shall we punish a crime so that people will not do it in order to avoid that punishment? Also, how shall we punish a crime such that the c[erpetrator is no longer a threat?

In the area that used to be Mesopotamia, the answer is equitable retribution. We in the West must realize our basis of law is the ancient Roman law which was not based on equitable reribution in the same way as the Law of Hammurabi was.

I'm not sure that blinding in this situation is wrong. I don't think that prison makes much sense, except as either a temporary holding pen, or an until-death alternative to hanging. Prison is not harsh enough to deter really nasty criminals, and turns petty offenders into serious criminals.

Punishment seems to have three functions, which it would be best to separate:
1. Deterrence, which should have some theatrical element
2. Rehabilitation
3. Prevention of reoffending

In the case of rapists, for example, I would favour castration, because this fulfills purposes 1 and 3 perfectly, and sex criminals are probably almost incapable of reform. For most minor to middling crimes, I would support some combination of fines and flogging.

I sound like a law-and-order extremist, but I also think a lot of youngish petty criminals are basically just losers from horrible backgrounds, and they have to taken away from those backgrounds, given some sort of practical training for work, and provided with homes to go to hundreds of miles from where they grew up. I also think all drugs should be legal.

"Reciprocity" or "equality" is consistently the virtue most esteemed by those who fancy themselves to be left-liberal, secular-progressive, post-Christian, what have you.

To the extent that one argues against reciprocity in either charity, rewards or punishments, to just that same extent one is not, in fact, post-Christian.

Since most self-styled left-liberals and secular-progressives do in fact cling to atavistic notions of gratuitous charity, gratuitous reward, and lenient, humane, and forgiving punishment, they are to just the extent that they do not as post-Christian as they like to believe, but rather -- at least in part -- cultural primitives like those to be found in the backward wilds of Pennsylbama.

Joe at 9:21 a.m.:

From Fiddler on the Roof:

Man: "We should unite with the people of Zolodin. Maybe they have a plan."
Man: "We should defend ourselves."
Man: "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."
Tevye: "Very good. That way the whole world will be blind and toothless."

On a related note: What kind of punishment should Bernard Madoff suffer? (On the heels of Blagojevich's embarrassment to Orthodox Christians everywhere, to give equal time to another religious group Madoff now steps up to the plate to give Jews a bad name. :^) )

Guav,

Congratulations on being more logically consistent than most of your fellow (ir)religionists.

Though, of course, the question still remains of why we should be bound by "reciprocity" in the absence of a God or other such source on intrinsic moral meaning in our lives.

Rombald says;

Punishment seems to have three functions, which it would be best to separate:
1. Deterrence, which should have some theatrical element
2. Rehabilitation
3. Prevention of reoffending

In the case of rapists, for example, I would favour castration, because this fulfills purposes 1 and 3 perfectly, and sex criminals are probably almost incapable of reform. For most minor to middling crimes, I would support some combination of fines and flogging.

Rombald,
First, I think there are more than three functions. First, what do you see as the difference between rehabilitation and prevention of re-offending? I've always seen not re-offending as a specific subset of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation should also address the underlying issues, if any, such as alcoholism, etc. Deterrence is also generally broken down into specific and general deterrence. There is alos the concepts community condemnation, and, frankly, vengeance, or more nicely restitution.

As to your comment on sex offenders, they actually have a very low recidivism rate. Much lower than most other types of offenders. I've always been curious if that is true because the category "sex offender" is defined so broadly in most states as to be practically useless.

Here's a question: As, apparently, the alternative to this was paying a fine, can anyone say this isn't just?

Men should not be able to run around disfiguring women just because they can afford to pay them off.

Now I'm wondering how many other women get paid off not because they want to, but because the men who control them want them to. I.e., in a world where women are considered property, crimes against them by other men just mean their 'owners' get compensated if there's an option for that. (I think I've heard various groups complain about this exact issue before, where women get pressured into accepting payment for being raped and whatnot.)

I'm actually rather glad someone is standing up to the near-traditional crime of throwing acid in women's faces. (You may think that's sarcastic, but it's not. It happens a lot, it's not some crazy random crime that happened this one time.) Maybe the next person tempted to do that will consider the fact he's might not get out of it with a fine.

And I find it odd that people are talking about 'standardized levels of punishment'. Iran's levels of punishment are much more standardized than ours, especially WRT to personal injury and maiming. You get to do exactly that back to the victim, it is exactly fitted to the crime, as opposed to here, where punching someone in the stomach and breaking their leg are the same crime.

Now, it might be too harsh, but that's not really the same argument. It's not some crazy arbitrary system of justice.

I agree with you, DavidTC. I think that the price exacted (his sight for hers) will have a much greater deterrent effect than the little wrist slap of having him pay a fine.

If I were Queen, I would exact at least a 20-year prison sentence and also require him to support her for the rest of his life, without the benefits of marriage. If he cannot do that while in prison, then his family should be forced to.

I would prefer that the perp receive a harsh prison sentence rather than being blinded, but I must admit I would rather he be blinded than that he receive a little wrist slap that will encourage other twisted men to do the same thing.

Daniel,

"Cruel and unusual punishment" *is* only an emotive -- or rather an *emotivist* -- concept if predicated not -- as it was by the Founders in the Constitution -- on Judeo-Christian grounds, but *only* on secularist grounds, or at least those that claim to be post-Judeo-Christian.

Charity is a moral attitude for which there is no secular warrant.

In the absence of a God or other such source of intrinsic moral meaning in our lives, there is no reason why those strong and healthy enough to be "cruel" to those who are weaker and less healthy than themselves to do so.

That is what animals do in a state of nature "uncorrupted" -- in Nietzschean terms -- by Christianity and other such "life-denying, strength-denying, health-denying myths" by which "the half-dead, the weak, and the sick" contrive to keep their betters from fulfilling themselves and therefore from advancing the species, the race, be it animal or "human."

From what I can tell, you have abandoned belief in God, in the divinity of Christ, and in Christ's resurrection. Why then do you cling to a Roman Catholic (or rather Liberal Protestant) version of Judeo-Christian "slave" morality, for which -- in the absence of those precepts -- there is really no logical warrant, besides emotivist nostalgia for and sentimentality toward that in which you claim to disbelieve.

Daniel,

The absurdity is to think that one can throw out the Christian baby -- the one whose birthday Christians are going to celebrate 10 days from now -- while keeping the Christian bath-water in a "secular" form, one that ignores those implications of the baby's birth, life, death, and Resurrection that are impediments to doing in Rome as the Romans do -- or rather doing in Babylon as the Babylonians do.

To the extent that "secularists" shrink from Nietzsche's conclusions, to just that same extant they are slipping the baby back into the bath -- whether or not they admit to themselves they are doing so.

My question to you wasn't a "personal" one -- or rather it referenced only those parts of your person or persona as you have chosen to share with me and others in the history of your comments on this blog.

Sorry to "harsh" your "bliss" (as the saying goes), but you yourself are in the business of harshing people's "blisses" on this blog -- at least when the "blisses" in question entail skepticism toward orthodox left-liberalism and/or faith in orthodox Christianity.

Your stance begs questions because it is curious and therefore a source of curiosity.

How one can do any or all of the following and yet still consider himself a faithful Christian, let alone a Roman Catholic is hard for some of us to understand, so we ask questions:

(1) Deny the existence of God

(2) Deny Christ's divinity

(3) Deny Christ's resurrection

(4) Deny the authority of Judeo-Christian scripture, of the Bible

(5) Deny the authority of Christian tradition, of the Catholic Church

Chief among those questions is; What "there" *is* there in your Christianity?

Dealing as it does in first principles, this thread doesn't seem to me to be an inappropriate place to ask such a question of a regular here who has weighed on on this thread.

Of course, you're welcome not to asnwer -- but I'm equally entitled to ask.

I don't get why you see a problem with reduced punishment from a secular perspective. What I don't understand is how there would be any argument for *harsh* punishments from a secular perspective - why that's the default if there's no religious argument for forgiveness. They don't have much of a deterrent effect. "An eye for an eye" is not, after all, a secular concept. Bloodthirst for vengeance seems to me a common human desire, one enshrined (to some extent at least) in Jewish and Muslim and dharmashastric ("Hindu") law, but one with little rational basis. Harsh punishments (as opposed to rigorous enforcement) do little to prevent crime, and hatred tends to make the haters miserable. Secular utilitarian reformers have been at one with Christians and Buddhists in asking for punishments to be reduced; all three seem perfectly consistent in my books.

Daniel,

This conversation (at least on my end) will end as most of our conversations do -- with me saying that I take your flippant previous post as an admission that you have no good argument to make for your position.

Which begs the question of why you choose to stake out that position almost every day in a venue addressed primarily to those who disagree.

If you're looking for fellow left-liberal "dittoheads," I suggest Daily Kos or Huffington Post.

If you're trying to assuage what seems to be your nagging fear that Christianity might after all be true, then I am happy if my questions have failed to help you with that task.

In your case, "the lady doth protest too much" -- except, of course, that your're no lady ... or gentleman.

Rufus reveals a curious opacity to concepts in both philosophy--which is not limited to his false Nietzsche vs. religion-of-Rufus dichotomy--and evolutionary science, which, again, is not limited to his rather crude paradigm.

For instance, a quote from David Sloan Wilson and Eliot Sober's paper on "Reintroducing Group Selection to the Behavioral Sciences": Human behavior not only reflects the balance between levels of selection but it can also alter the balance through the construction of social structures that have the effect of reducing fitness differences within groups, concentrating natural selection (and functional organization) at the group level. These social structures and the cognitive abilities that produce them allow group selection to be important even among large groups of unrelated individuals.

Thus, group agreements that reduce the fang-and-claw intraspecies competition that Rufus apparently thinks is the only mechanism of natural selection can actually foster the survival capacity of humans as a group. Hence, the popularity of laws and agreements among humans, regardless of the meaning ascribed to such laws by appeals to a divine being.

I'm not an expert on either philosophy or evolution myself, but I am smart enough to recognize when I need to inform myself by reference to others who know more than I do. I believe this has increased my reproductive fitness over time, as well as improving my subjective sense of well-being. ; )

Btw, kudos to you, DavidTC, for your analysis.

Men should not be able to run around disfiguring women just because they can afford to pay them off. Yes. Thank you!

If you read the whole article, you find this at the end:

Attacking women and girls by throwing acid in their faces is sufficiently common in countries such as Bangladesh and Cambodia that groups have been formed to fight it. Human rights organizations have condemned the practice in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Perhaps a more useful question to ask would have been: In a society where terroristic attacks on women are so common that organizations have to be formed specifically to discourage them, what kind of sanction would change those attitudes? What is the appropriate response when a society already organizes itself around religious principles, but when those principles apparently don't stop people from behaving cruelly, and are even used to justify their bad behavior?

sigaliris,

When you write that you are "not an expert on philosophy or evolution," with that -- at least -- I can agree.

In fact, you're not even an expert on the rather more limited field of musings by one Rufus Thomas on this one blog.

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.*

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

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.

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.