70 lines
4.6 KiB
Plaintext
70 lines
4.6 KiB
Plaintext
Punishment, Coercion, and Revenge
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<p>Because I’m both both a libertarian and famous for conducting a<br />
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successful propaganda campaign, libertarian activists sometimes come<br />
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to me for tactical advice. During a recent email exchange, one of these<br />
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criticized me for wishing (as he thought) to “punish” the Islamist<br />
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enemies of the U.S. and Western civilization.</p>
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<p>I explained that I have no desire to punish the perpetrators of<br />
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9/11; what I want is vengeance and death. Vengeance for us, death for<br />
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them. Whether they experience ‘punishment’ during the process is of<br />
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little or no interest to me.</p>
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<p>My correspondent was reflecting a common confusion about the<br />
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distinctions among coercion, revenge, and punishment. Coercion is<br />
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intended to make another do your will instead of their own; vengeance<br />
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is intended to discharge your own anger and fear. Punishment is<br />
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neither of these things.</p>
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<p>Punishment is a form of respect you pay to someone who is at least<br />
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potentially a member of the web of trust that defines your ethical<br />
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community. We punish ordinary criminals to deter them from repeating<br />
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criminal behavior, because we believe they know what ethical behavior<br />
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is and that by deterring them from crime we help them re-integrate<br />
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with an ethical community they have never in any fundamental sense<br />
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departed.</p>
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<p>By contrast, we do not punish the criminally insane. We confine<br />
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them and sometimes kill them for our own safety, but we do not make<br />
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them suffer in an effort to deter them from insanity. Just to state<br />
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the aim is to make obvious how absurd it is. Hannibal Lecter, and his<br />
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all-too-real prototypes, lack the capacity to respond to punishment<br />
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by re-integrating with an ethical community.</p>
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<p>In fact, criminal psychopaths are not even potentially members of<br />
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an ethical community to begin with. There is something broken or<br />
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missing in them that makes participation in the web of trust<br />
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impossible; perhaps the capacity to emotionally identify with other<br />
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human beings, perhaps conscience, perhaps something larger and harder<br />
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to name. They have other behavioral deficits, including poor impulse<br />
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control, associated with subtle neurological damage. By existing,<br />
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they demonstrate something most of us would rather not know; which is<br />
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that there are creatures who — though they speak, and reason,<br />
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and feign humanity — have nothing but evil in them.</p>
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<p>On the behavioral evidence, Saddam Hussein and his now-deceased<br />
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serial-rapist son Uday fit the DSM-IV criteria for psychopaths<br />
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exactly; by contrast Qusay, the other deceased son, appears to have<br />
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been a merely ordinary thug. But it would be a dangerous mistake to<br />
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dismiss Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and their ilk as merely<br />
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psychopathic — they don’t have the deficits in impulse control<br />
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and other areas that would imply. I fear they are examples of a<br />
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phenomenon even more troubling — neurologically normal<br />
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<em>non-psychopaths</em> who speak, and reason, and feign humanity, and<br />
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have nothing but evil in them.</p>
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<p>Osama bin Laden is a religious fanatic, not a psychopath. He<br />
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suffers not from lack of conscience but from a particular kind of<br />
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conscience, principles that drive him to plan and execute mass<br />
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murder. Like a psychopath, he apparently lacks any capacity to<br />
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identify with his victims; but rather than being neurological, his<br />
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disorder is possession by a killer idea. He is a memebot.</p>
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<p>Fanatics of bin Laden’s intensity are like psychopaths in that<br />
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reason cannot reach them and punishment only fuels their rage. We<br />
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have seen bin Laden’s like before in Hitler, Savanarola, and a<br />
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thousand pettier examples. Their belief systems are closed, circular,<br />
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self-justifying, bordering on if not becoming actually delusional.<br />
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You can confine them or kill them, but they cannot be re-integrated<br />
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into the ethical web of trust by the measures we use on mere<br />
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criminals.</p>
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<p>The attempt to fit the treatment of fanatical terrorists into<br />
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a “criminal” frame, as though they were shoplifters or second-story<br />
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men or even ordinary murderers, is symptomatic of a deep blindness<br />
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in all too many Westerners — often a willful blindness. It<br />
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is as though, by denying that these people are irredeemably evil,<br />
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the tender-minded think they can edit evil out of the world. The<br />
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rest of us, if we ever had that illusion, lost it on 9/11.</p>
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