{"id":186,"date":"2005-07-05T14:22:56","date_gmt":"2005-07-05T19:22:56","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=186"},"modified":"2005-07-05T14:22:56","modified_gmt":"2005-07-05T19:22:56","slug":"punishment-coercion-and-revenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=186","title":{"rendered":"Punishment, Coercion, and Revenge"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Because I&#8217;m both both a libertarian and famous for conducting a<br \/>\nsuccessful propaganda campaign, libertarian activists sometimes come<br \/>\nto me for tactical advice.  During a recent email exchange, one of these<br \/>\ncriticized me for wishing (as he thought) to &#8220;punish&#8221; the Islamist<br \/>\nenemies of the U.S. and Western civilization.<\/p>\n<p>I explained that I have no desire to punish the perpetrators of<br \/>\n9\/11; what I want is vengeance and death.  Vengeance for us, death for<br \/>\nthem.  Whether they experience &#8216;punishment&#8217; during the process is of<br \/>\nlittle or no interest to me.<\/p>\n<p>My correspondent was reflecting a common confusion about the<br \/>\ndistinctions among coercion, revenge, and punishment.  Coercion is<br \/>\nintended to make another do your will instead of their own; vengeance<br \/>\nis intended to discharge your own anger and fear.  Punishment is<br \/>\nneither of these things.<\/p>\n<p>Punishment is a form of respect you pay to someone who is at least<br \/>\npotentially a member of the web of trust that defines your ethical<br \/>\ncommunity.  We punish ordinary criminals to deter them from repeating<br \/>\ncriminal behavior, because we believe they know what ethical behavior<br \/>\nis and that by deterring them from crime we help them re-integrate<br \/>\nwith an ethical community they have never in any fundamental sense<br \/>\ndeparted.<\/p>\n<p>By contrast, we do not punish the criminally insane.  We confine<br \/>\nthem and sometimes kill them for our own safety, but we do not make<br \/>\nthem suffer in an effort to deter them from insanity.  Just to state<br \/>\nthe aim is to make obvious how absurd it is.  Hannibal Lecter, and his<br \/>\nall-too-real prototypes, lack the capacity to respond to punishment<br \/>\nby re-integrating with an ethical community.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, criminal psychopaths are not even potentially members of<br \/>\nan ethical community to begin with.  There is something broken or<br \/>\nmissing in them that makes participation in the web of trust<br \/>\nimpossible; perhaps the capacity to emotionally identify with other<br \/>\nhuman beings, perhaps conscience, perhaps something larger and harder<br \/>\nto name.  They have other behavioral deficits, including poor impulse<br \/>\ncontrol, associated with subtle neurological damage.  By existing,<br \/>\nthey demonstrate something most of us would rather not know; which is<br \/>\nthat there are creatures who &mdash; though they speak, and reason,<br \/>\nand feign humanity &mdash; have nothing but evil in them.<\/p>\n<p>On the behavioral evidence, Saddam Hussein and his now-deceased<br \/>\nserial-rapist son Uday fit the DSM-IV criteria for psychopaths<br \/>\nexactly; by contrast Qusay, the other deceased son, appears to have<br \/>\nbeen a merely ordinary thug.  But it would be a dangerous mistake to<br \/>\ndismiss Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and their ilk as merely<br \/>\npsychopathic &mdash; they don&#8217;t have the deficits in impulse control<br \/>\nand other areas that would imply. I fear they are examples of a<br \/>\nphenomenon even more troubling &mdash; neurologically normal<br \/>\n<em>non-psychopaths<\/em> who speak, and reason, and feign humanity, and<br \/>\nhave nothing but evil in them.<\/p>\n<p>Osama bin Laden is a religious fanatic, not a psychopath.  He<br \/>\nsuffers not from lack of conscience but from a particular kind of<br \/>\nconscience, principles that drive him to plan and execute mass<br \/>\nmurder.  Like a psychopath, he apparently lacks any capacity to<br \/>\nidentify with his victims; but rather than being neurological, his<br \/>\ndisorder is possession by a killer idea.  He is a memebot.<\/p>\n<p>Fanatics of bin Laden&#8217;s intensity are like psychopaths in that<br \/>\nreason cannot reach them and punishment only fuels their rage.  We<br \/>\nhave seen bin Laden&#8217;s like before in Hitler, Savanarola, and a<br \/>\nthousand pettier examples.  Their belief systems are closed, circular,<br \/>\nself-justifying, bordering on if not becoming actually delusional.<br \/>\nYou can confine them or kill them, but they cannot be re-integrated<br \/>\ninto the ethical web of trust by the measures we use on mere<br \/>\ncriminals.<\/p>\n<p>The attempt to fit the treatment of fanatical terrorists into<br \/>\na &#8220;criminal&#8221; frame, as though they were shoplifters or second-story<br \/>\nmen or even ordinary murderers, is symptomatic of a deep blindness<br \/>\nin all too many Westerners &mdash; often a willful blindness.  It<br \/>\nis as though, by denying that these people are irredeemably evil,<br \/>\nthe tender-minded think they can edit evil out of the world.  The<br \/>\nrest of us, if we ever had that illusion, lost it on 9\/11.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Because I&#8217;m both both a libertarian and famous for conducting a successful propaganda campaign, libertarian activists sometimes come to me for tactical advice. During a recent email exchange, one of these criticized me for wishing (as he thought) to &#8220;punish&#8221; the Islamist enemies of the U.S. and Western civilization. I explained that I have no&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=186\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Punishment, Coercion, and Revenge<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}