Alastair Norcross' Scalar Utilitarianism

 

Alastair Norcross is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder, specializing in normative ethics, applied ethics, and political philosophy. He is a defender of utilitarianism and "regards all natural rights as nonsense."

Norcross maintains that consequentialism does not offer a criterion of right action and it does not answer the question of what we are morally required to do, or what actions are right or wrong. Instead, it only offers a ranking of the moral value of actions. It tells us that action A is morally better than action B, but it does not tell us how far down the scale of goodness moral acceptability extends. 

The consequentialist cares about promoting values which come in degrees. In his 2020 book Morality by Degrees: Reasons without Demands, Norcross articulates and defends his approach to ethical theory or scalar utilitarianism. He argues that the basic judgments of morality are essentially comparative: alternatives are judged to be better or worse than each other. Scalar utilitarianism is not concerned with values of right and wrong, but rather addresses actions as comparatively and contextually better or worse in terms of their consequences. 

In Norcross' view, the consequentialist plays into the hands of his deontological opponent if he makes the distinction between right and wrong actions central to his ethics.

Norcross denies divine authority because he contends that any moral theory can be made to bow to "divine command."

In a 2019 interview, Norcross was asked, "If you could ask an honest omniscient being one question, what would it be?"

He responded with this question: "Is there continuation of worthwhile conscious existence after physical death? I’m pretty sure the answer is no, so I wouldn’t be too disappointed to hear that. But if the answer is yes, that would be worth knowing."

Related reading: Interview with Alastair Norcross; A Defense of Scalar Utilitarianism; Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory | Reviews | Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews | University of Notre Dame (nd.edu); Objections to Norcross' Puppies, Pigs and People: Eating Meat and Marginal Cases

Utilitarians Embracing Nihilism

2013 is the 150th anniversary of the publication of the book Utilitarianism, by the British philosopher John Stuart Mill. Since this philosophy inspires much of public policy in Western countries, MercatorNet hopes to publish a number of reflections to mark the occasion. This week: what sado-masochists are getting up to at Harvard.

* * * * *

Utilitarianism is a broad church which admits parishioners of varying persuasions and degrees of fervour. But there are two pillars to which all subscribe, one for society and the other for individuals.

The first is the famous maxim, “the greatest good for the greatest number”. John Stuart Mill modified this primitive calculus of pleasure and pain to take into account the pleasures of the intellect. In his well-known words, "it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied”. But the broad sweep of the utilitarian doctrine is still the same: good consequences make good actions. It gives ethical cover to pragmatic politicians when they use 50 percent of votes plus one to turn immoral actions into moral ones.

The second pillar is that we should be free to do whatever we want – always provided that we do not harm anyone else in the process. Mill expressed it very eloquently in his other classic, On Liberty:

“the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant… Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”

But after 150 years, the utilitarian notions of liberty and harm are beginning to crack under the strain of their own contradictions. Exhibit A is Harvard College Munch, a club with about 30 members which was given official approval last month.

Harvard’s peculiar decision

Munch is not about midnight snacks. It is a coy term for kinky sex, principally BDSM, ie, bondage, discipline and sado-masochism. “Or, as my crude definition states, it’s tying people up, telling them to do stuff, and hitting them with things,” Michael, the anonymous founder, told The Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper.

The less said about the lurid practices of Munch members the better, but it was welcomed by The Crimson as “an important movement toward tolerance” and “a mature approach to and acceptance of alternative sexual interests”.

Mill might have struggled to grasp why sado-masochism deserves to be an officially sanctioned undergraduate activity. In his landmark essay The Subjection of Women, he argued “that the legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.” But from what Harvard undergrad “Jill” told The Crimson, she doesn’t appear to have read Mill very attentively: “I like being told that I’m a slut or good for nothing but sex”.

How can America’s leading university authorise students to fantasise about harming and degrading women? Why aren’t feminist professors up in arms? The last president of Harvard lost his job because he suggested that women might be less talented at mathematics. Why do they ignore a club which encourages students to treat women like dirt? The easy response is: why not, if they consent to it?

But even Mill acknowledged that there are limits to informed consent. No one can legitimately sell herself into bondage, he wrote. “In this and most other civilised countries, for example, an engagement by which a person should sell himself, or allow himself to be sold, as a slave, would be null and void; neither enforced by law nor by opinion,” he declared. “The principle of freedom cannot require that he should be free not to be free.” This suggests that Mill would take a very dim view of Jill’s informed consent to sexual violence. Even the greatest of the utilitarians harboured some lingering respect for human dignity.

Towards nihilism

But 150 years after the publication of his most famous book, Mill’s intellectual heirs have developed an intricate casuistry which justifies informed consent to the “subordination of one sex to the other”. They have replaced Mill’s respect for the individual with nihilism.

Here’s how Munch does it. Each undergraduate organisation at Harvard is required to write its own constitution. Most of these are skimpy documents. The constitution of the Romanian Association, for instance, is 230 words long. The Libertarian Forum’s is 780 words long. Munch’s constitution is 4,350 words long, most of it taken up with safety regulations whose detail and complexity are straight out of Kafka.

You would have to have a heart of stone to read this document without giggling. It must have been drafted by the legal department of The Onion, a news satire website. There are colour-codes for outreach and “workshops” – blue for the general public, green for the whole Harvard community, yellow for undergraduates and red for Munch members and their undergrad guests. Grey is for “unofficial” Munch events. Presumably they natter on about the BDSM best-seller Fifty Shades of Grey, which outsold Harry Potter and Twilight last year.

A Safety Team is supposed to organise an abuse-response training workshop every semester. Abuse is to be taken seriously. “When any person informs an officer of [Munch] that they have been subject to an instance of abuse or assault, officers shall respond immediately as per their training.”

“The wishes of survivors (sic) are tantamount,” the constitution declares. This is ominous as the constitution of the Romanian Association mentions nothing about the survivors of its meetings! Presumably those who drafted the document also meant “paramount” -- but torturing “survivors”, not the English language, is my concern at the moment.

Then comes a lengthy procedure for expelling members from Munch for abuse of the rules. In a reversal of centuries of American jurisprudence, there is a presumption of guilt, not innocence. “It is important to clarify that HCM believes that accusations of abuse/assault/misconduct are overwhelmingly true”. Apparently Munch has not contemplated the possibility that members who get their kicks out of humiliating and degrading their friends might get an additional frisson out of telling humiliating and degrading lies about them.

What would John Stuart Mill have made of this attempt to reconcile utilitarian notions of liberty with the utilitarian prohibition of harm by sprinkling it with the pixie dust of occupational health and safety bureaucratese?

If he were honest, he would have to acknowledge that the idea that “informed consent” is all that is needed to make actions ethical is collapsing. No act, according to utilitarians, is wicked except one which harms other people. But, at Harvard, even harming other people can be rationalised away with safety protocols. In fact, this was precisely the approach which the Bush Administration used to justify torturing detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Bad guys could be waterboarded as long as good guys with cattle prods, handcuffs and dogs ticked the boxes in the torturer’s rule book. It’s a sad end for Mill’s noble ambition to create a Britain in which people would be liberated of the dead weight of custom, privilege and sex roles.

A post-utilitarian future

What happens next? What direction will public policy take when the bankruptcy of utilitarianism becomes apparent?

Exhibit B comes from Germany, where Angela Merkel’s government plans to reinstate a ban on bestiality which was lifted in 1969. Again, the less said about the details the better, but the interesting point is that a major Western government is repudiating the utilitarian “whatever you like as long as no harm is done” argument.

Michael Kiok, of Zoophile Engagement for Tolerance and Information, was incensed by the decision. Mr Kiok, who lives in a “relationship” with an 8½-year-old Alsatian (no, I am not making this up), estimates that there are 100,000 badly misunderstood zoophiles in Germany. "We don't have anything to do with people who abuse animals," he said. "We only want what's best for the animal.”

However, under pressure from animal rights activists, the government’s view is that whether or not animals are harmed is irrelevant. A government official says that animals must not be used "for personal sexual activities or made available to third parties for sexual activities… thereby forcing them to behave in ways that are inappropriate to their species".

Any discerning utilitarian can read the writing on the wall: “natural law” has sprung like a phoenix from the ashes. The German government believes that it is not natural for animals to have sex with humans. Some things are so terrible that they are always wrong. It’s only a straw in the wind, but it suggests that there’s a limit to nihilism. People are longing for the old certainties of good and bad, right and wrong. Consent, no matter how well informed, cannot turn darkness into light.

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.

Are all Bioethicists Crazy?

The next crazy idea from bioethicists involves children.  They want to genetically engineer our children so they will be environmentally friendly.  This obvious lack of common sense characterizes the transhuman and utilitarian ideology that is so common among bioethicists these days.

As Michael Cook, the editor of MercatorNet, explains: "A utilitarian bioethicist is always going to be a loose cannon, rolling wildly around the deck in ethical storms, splintering and smashing the fragile public image of his or her profession. If other bioethicists want to repair their dented prestige, shunning utilitarian colleagues would be a good place to start."

Consider Oxford bioethicist Rebecca Roache, who told the Guardian that most great ideas seem preposterous at first.

“Human engineering may seem bizarre and unrealistic, but this does not mean it could not turn out to be feasible and promising: telephones, ‘test tube babies’, and personal computers are all important aspects of modern life that were once regarded as bizarre and unrealistic.”

My Argument with Bentham’s View of Incarceration

Shane Bennett


Jeremy Bentham was a notable philosopher who lived during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. He is best known in philosophy and ethics for utilitarianism. Due largely to the advocacy of Bentham, utilitarianism influenced many social reforms in Great Britain, most of which took place after Bentham’s death.

His basic principle of philosophy can be found in the opening paragraph of his An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation:

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we out to do as well as to determine what we shall do. (Bentham, 1780)

For Bentham the pain and pleasure principle was a blueprint for social and legal reform in Great Britain. He viewed the idea of punishment and reward as a means for legislators to control an individual’s pursuit of happiness. To Bentham, punishments seemed to be the more important method of enforcement. He believed that through the infliction and threat of great pain, individuals would be provided motivations for refraining from harmful behavior.

Bentham’s emphasis on law and punishment of law-breakers, reflected the doubts he had towards the ideology of natural rights, which basically states that individuals had unlimited rights to “liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression” (Lafayette, 1789). His philosophy had direct bearing on his ideas about criminal justice.

He focused on the prevention of crime through the creation of Panopticon penitentiary systems. In his own words, Bentham describes the Panopticon penitentiary as a system that would be run according to “rules of lenity, severity, and economy” (Bentham & Mills, 1987). This system stated that the prisoners would not be physically harmed, but also would not be afforded more luxury than the members of the lowest social class. Bentham’s design of the prison would severely limit the necessary staff to operate the facility, which would enhance the economic feasibility of the system. For instance, Bentham designed the architecture of the penitentiary to be rounded allowing one guard to view and monitor several rooms at the same time, while thanks to screens and lighting, the inmates would be unable to know if someone is watching. This gave the inmates “an impression of invisible omnipresence” (Bentham & Mills, 1987).

Bentham’s ideas regarding prison reform laid the foundation for what was to become the Prison Act of 1835. This act, while not resulting in a penitentiary like the Panopticon, used his system of lenity, severity, and economic approach to prisons quite successfully.

My disagreement with Bentham involves his view of the prison system. In his view, inmates were discouraged from deviant acts due to the threat of consequences associated with them. This led Bentham to design a prison system where all the inmates are housed in a circular building and are unaware of how often they are being watched over by guards. This Panopticon would benefit society because it would cost very little money to run the facility and would be successful because the inmates would never know if a guard is on or off duty.

In my opinion, however, inmates need rehabilitation and socialization while in prison rather than just fear and consequences. There are currently many experimental prisons operating in the US that attempt to do this very thing while maintaining a low cost to the community and tax payer. These facilities (mostly rehab) run at no extra cost because they are operated daily by the inmates. The facility employs a low number of guards to maintain supervision and order, but the day-to-day operations are left up to the inmates. Cleaning, maintenance, supervision, activities, and services are all carried out by the prisoners themselves. They help organize and operate a strict rehab facility for drug users. Their days are structured with equal parts exercise, education, reflection, meditation, and socialization. They perform services at the facility such as auto-mechanical which also helps to bring in income to the prison to pay for the food (not processed junk) and facility operation. This type of prison allows the inmates to still feel hopeful about life after prison. They also acquire the treatment they need to break troublesome habits and nearly all acquire new skills and education that will make them successful contributors to society once prison is over.

I agree with many of Bentham's ideas regarding the motivation of pain and pleasure. However, fear can motivate only so far. Assuming that inmates are eventually going to be integrated back into society, they must be helped and given a chance to be successful, otherwise every sentence to prison becomes a life sentence. Prisoners must pay for mistakes they have made, but they also should receive tools while paying their debt to ensure that the majority don't fall into the same harmful patterns that landed them in prison. Fear works in the short term, but begins to fade over time. Teaching skills and providing prisoners with knowledge is the only way to rehabilitate them and prepare them to be contributing members of society.

Shane Bennett is a former Ethics student at Midway College.

The Dark Side of Utilitarianism

Some time ago I reviewed a book by David Benatar, a South African utilitarian, whose view of life was so bleak that the headline was "the ultimate miserabilist". The theme of Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, is that we all would be better off had we never existed. As the old Jewish joke goes, "Life is so terrible, it would have been better never to have been born. Who is so lucky? Not one in a hundred thousand!"

It turns out that the same utilitarian argument can be applied to animals. Jeff McMahan recently argued in the New York Times that carnivores cause such dire suffering in the animal world that we (homo sapiens) should organise their extinction as soon as possible.

I highlight this only to suggest that the "felicific calculus" of utilitarianism can produce peculiar answers. The ultimate utilitarian, Peter Singer, has become the guiding light of the animal rights movement because he wants to decrease suffering in chicken farms and laboratories. However, the same principle also leads to McMahan's extinction idea.

It seems to me that utilitarian thinking, however compassionate it may sound, has a dark side. Taken to its logical extreme, the best way to eliminate the suffering of living beings is to eliminate the living beings. Does this say something about utilitarian arguments for euthanasia? Should we look elsewhere for an answer to the perennial problem of pain?

Michael Cook
Editor of Bioedge

Ethical Language

Here is an interesting piece about ethical language:

What we need is a language of ethics that both the religious and the secular feel easy with. The ethical language of rules, which tells us that certain categories of behaviour (such as killing, lying, and adultery) are always wrong, is one that some Christians favour. But Jesus taught, and Paul consistently confirmed, that rules such as the Ten Command­ments should point us towards developing character — becoming more gentle, trustworthy, and faithful people — rather than just keeping outward regulations. Rules certainly have no attraction for modern secular people.

The ethical language of conse­quences — do whatever has the best outcome for the most people — similarly underestimates the richness of the Christian concept of love, and can easily slip into a sort of hedonism that is of little help in building common values.

THE ethical language that seems best suited for pluralistic democracies is the language of rights. But, for people of faith, this sits uneasily with the idea of the need for detachment from self-centredness, which features prom­inently in the ethics of all the main world religions, and with the idea of a holy sovereign creator, which lies at the heart of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
The language of rights has been hailed as the perfect ethic for modern liberal democracies, where people with different secular and religious world-views live together, and where one of the highest values is the freedom of individuals to live as they choose. But it does seem to have failed us. When virtues such as honesty, faithfulness, and kindness are no longer regarded highly, what we think of as “a good life” starts to slip away.

The language of rights asks us to consider the basic freedoms that people need in order to live well — the freedom to choose when to die, for example, or to publicise one’s own views in the ways one wants to.

These rights have to be balanced with the rights of others, but, in order to live well, we need to know more than this. While, in the language of rights, it may be entirely just to help someone die, or put a potentially offensive play on the stage, in some cases it might also be a cowardly, selfish, unwise, or cruel thing to do: it might be destructive rather than creative of a society where people can flourish.

Many people in the West simply assume that the language of rights is the only valid ethical language there is, and that they must, for the good of humanity, impose it on the rest of the world. Many Muslims, however, see it an alien imposition. If you believe that your sovereign creator has revealed his will for your life, and your only hope of reaching your potential is by humble submission and the reception of his mercy, how can you base your ideas about living well on what people perceive as their rights?

Some Christians come into conflict with this ethical system, too, when the right to equal access to employment clashes with what they see as the Bible’s teaching about gender roles and sexual practices, or when the right to free speech leads to public blasphemy.

There is, however, an emerging language of ethics that is ideally suited for a common discussion about the meaning of a good life and community. This is the language of virtues. This system of ethics, which predates the modern era, focuses not on how to decide which categories of behaviour are not permissible, which actions are right or wrong in a particular situation, or what some- one’s rights may be, but, as so much of the New Testament does, on what a good person is like. Ethics then becomes centred not on good rules or happy outcomes, but on good people.
All that is helpful in the language of rules, consequences, and rights can be turned into the language of virtues. Freedom, justice, and toler­ance can remain on the list of virtues to be promoted in our common life, but to this can be added honesty, gentleness, kindness, gener­osity, pa­tience, faithfulness, responsibility, and care.

If people of faith could stop talk­ing, as Jesus’s most vigorous op­ponents did, about universal moral prohibitions, or, as hedonists do, about love being all you need, and start talking about the virtues their faith traditions endorse, they would find people willing to listen. Although the media often mocks such ideas, I find there is considerable nostalgia for integrity, generosity, patience, faithfulness, gentleness, and humility.

To the discussion about legislation and shared values, people of faith can feed in their common insight that the main ethical project is the over­coming of egoism, and that for this to work there needs to be some element of transcendence — a commitment to something bigger than the self, to inspire and motivate people to live well.

The shrinking world urgently needs a global ethical language that both secular and religious people feel easy with. Sticking with the old languages of rules, consequences, and human rights makes it hard for the wisdom of people of faith to be heard. But, if Christians could begin to see the distinctive ethics of the New Testament in terms of the ethics of virtues, they would find they have something to con­tribute that is both compre­hensible and at­tractive to their fellow citizens.

Claire Disbrey was an Associate Lecturer for the Open University, and is now the Associate Warden of Readers for the Edmonton Area of the diocese of London. She is the author of Living in Grace: Virtue ethics and Christian living (BRF, 2007).

Read it all here.

Note that consequentialist, deontological and virtue ethics are all mentioned. None of them are "new". The writer overlooks the definition of ethical behavior as involving recognition of and respect for God-establish boundaries and binary distinctions. When we fail to recognize these, we trepass against God and against other.

Stand Firm Against Culture of Death

Last year, the Italian poet Piergiorgio Welby announced at a press conference that after battling muscular dystrophy for four decades, he would discontinue his ventilator as an act of “euthanasia.” While the ventilator was being stopped, he received large doses of morphine, which could have been independently lethal rather than simply pain-relieving. Welby was a leader of the euthanasia movement in Italy. He seemed to be trying deliberately to blur distinctions and to provoke controversy.

Popular confusion, sensationalistic journalism, and crazy statements on all sides of the case gripped the Italian media for weeks before and after Welby’s death. Vatican officials said that it would be morally licit to stop the ventilator if Welby and his doctor were to decide that the ventilator had become an extraordinary means of care. But by declaring his intent to euthanize himself, Welby had put the church in a difficult position. Finally, the church felt pressed to deny him burial in order to affirm its teaching against suicide. The case was bigger in Italy than Terri Schiavo’s was in the United States.

This controversy-among others-formed part of the backdrop to the Vatican’s September statement on the morality of providing feeding tubes to patients in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). Writing in response to questions from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) regarding the treatment of PVS patients, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) ruled that, in such cases, feeding tubes must be considered, “in principle, an ordinary means of preserving life.” The statement seemed to clarify John Paul II’s much-debated 2004 allocution on PVS, in which he referred to artificial nutrition and hydration as “normal care.” Since that statement was delivered in the throes of the Schiavo debate, one could perhaps be forgiven for believing the CDF is responding mainly to the U.S. situation. Yet Vatican statements on PVS must be understood in their proper context. More than most Americans appreciate, that context is shaped by European politics-especially Italian politics and the broader European debate about euthanasia.

The Vatican’s interest in PVS is also driven by its reaction to utilitarianism-especially in English-speaking nations and particularly in Australia, where philosophical utilitarian ethics is perhaps most radical. Utilitarian philosophers have argued in scholarly journals that it would be more morally appropriate to conduct painful experiments on human beings in PVS than on dogs or porpoises, since those in PVS cannot feel pain and have ceased to be persons. This is not a view that is congenial to Catholic thinking and a group of very influential prelates has pressed for doctrinal responses to such utilitarian claims.

In addition, prolife groups have increasingly turned from the frustrating task for which they were originally founded (namely, promoting more conservative laws against abortion), to work for the eradication of all traces of “softness” on prolife issues inside the church. Obviously some theologians have taken positions that are antithetical to church teaching, but in the view of some extremists within the prolife movement, “heresy” simply means disagreeing with one or another of their own extreme positions. Moved by great religious zeal, well-organized, exceptionally skilled in the use of the Internet, highly influential with bishops and in Rome, but largely untutored in formal theology, members of these movements have occasionally lobbied strongly within the church for very specific causes. A few years ago, for instance, in response to forceful lobbying to the contrary, the Vatican was forced to make an official statement that it was morally acceptable for Catholics to treat their children with vaccines produced from cell lines that originated with tissue that had been obtained from fetuses that were aborted more than twenty years ago. Despite the declaration that using these vaccines would not constitute an immoral form of cooperation in the evil of abortion, zealous lobbying on this issue continues. The use of feeding tubes for patients in PVS has been another one of these causes for many years.

Read it all here.

C.S. Lewis on Capital Punishment

The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment
By C. S. Lewis

In England we have lately had a controversy about Capital Punishment. I do not know whether a murderer is more likely to repent and make a good end on the gallows a few weeks after his trial or in the prison infirmary thirty years later. I do not know whether the fear of death is an indispensable deterrent. I need not, for the purpose of this article, decide whether it is a morally permissible deterrent. Those are questions which I propose to leave untouched. My subject is not Captial Punishment in particular, but that theory of punishment in general which the controversy showed to be almost universal amony my fellow-countrymen. It may be called the Humanitarian theory. Those who hold it think that it is mild and merciful. In this I believe that they are seriously mistaken. I believe that the 'Humanity' which it claims is a dangerous illusion and disguises the possibility of cruelty and injustice without end. I urge a return to the traditional or Retributive theory not solely, not even primarily, in the interests of society, but in the interests of the criminal.

According to the Humanitarian theory, to punish a man because he deserves it, and as much as he deserves, is mere revenge, and, therefore, barbarous and immoral. It is maintained that the only legitimate motives for punishing are the desire to deter others by example or to mend the criminal. When this theory is combined, as frequently happens, with the belief that all crime is more or less pathological, the idea of mending tails off into that of healing or curing and punishment becomes therapeutic. Thus it appears at first sight that we have passed from the harsh and self-righteous notion of giving the wicked their deserts to the charitable and enlightened one of tending the psychologically sick. What could be more amiable? One little point which is taken for granted in this theory needs, however, to be made explicit. The things done to the criminal, even if they are called cures, will be just as compulsory as they were in the old days when we called them punishments. If a tendency to steal can be cured by psychotheraphy, the thief will no doubt be forced to undergo the treatment. Otherwise, society cannot continue.

My contention is that this doctrine, merciful though it appears, really means that each one of us, from the moment he breaks the law, is deprived of the rights of a human being.

The reason is this. The Humanitarisn theory removes from Punishment the concept of Desert. But the concept of Desert is the only connecting link between punishment and justice. It is only as deserved or undeserved that a sentence can be just or unjust. I do not here contend that the question 'Is it deserved?' is the only one we can reasonably ask about a punishment. We may very properly ask whether it is likely to deter others and to reform the criminal. But neither of these last two questions is a question about justice. There is no sense in talking about a 'just deterrent' or 'just cure'. We demand of a deterrent not whether it is just but whether it will deter. We demand of a cure not whether it is just but whether it succeeds. Thus when we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what wil cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether; instead of a person, a subject of rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a 'case'.

The distinction will become clearer if we ask who will be qualified to determine sentences when sentences are no longer held to derive their propriety from the criminal's deservings. On the old view the problem of fixing the right sentence was a moral problem. Accordingly, the judge who did it was a person trained in jurisprudence; trained, that is, in a science which deals with rights and duties, and which, in origin at least, was consciously accepting guidance from the Law of Nature, and from Scripture. We must admit that in the actual penal code of most countries at most times these high originals were so much modified by local custom, class interests, and utilitarian concessions, as to be very imperfectly recognizable. But the code was never in principle, and not always in fact, beyond the control of the conscience of the society. And when (say, in eighteenth-century England) actual punishments conflicted too violently with the moral sense of the community, juries refused to convict and reform was finally brought about. This was possible because, so long as we are thinking in terms of Desert, the propriety of the penal code, being a moral question, is a question on which every man has the right to an opinion, not because he follows this or that profession, but because he is simply a man, a rational animal enjoying the Natural Light. But all this is changed when we drop the concept of Desert. The only two questions we may now ask about a punishment are whether it deters and whether it cures. But these are not questions on which anyone is entitled to have an opinion simply because he is a man. He is not entitled to an opinion even if, in addition to being a man, he should happen also to be a jurist, a Christian, and a moral theologian. For they are not questions about principle but about matter of fact; and for such cuiquam in sua arte credendum ('We must believe the expert in his own field.'). Only the expert 'penologist' (let barbarous things have barbarous names), in the light of previous experiment, can tell us what is likely to deter: only the psycholtherapist can tell us what is likely to sure. It will be in vain for the rest of us, speaking simply as men, to say, 'but this punishment is hideously unjust, hideously disproportionate to the criminal's deserts'. The experts with perfect logic will reply 'but nobody was talking about deserts. No one was talking about punishment in your archaic vindictive sense of the word. Here are teh statistics proving that this treatment deters. Here are the statistics proving that this other treatment cures. What is your trouble?

The Humanitarian theory, then, removes sentences from the hands of jurists whom the public conscience is entitled to criticize and places them in the hands of technical experts whose special sciences do not even employ such categories as rights or justice. It might be argued that since this transference results from an abandonment of the old idea of punishment, and, therefore, of all vindictive motives, it will be safe to leave our criminals in such hands. I will not pause to comment on the simple-minded view of fallen human nature which such a belief implies. Let us rather remember that the 'cure' of criminals is to be compulsory; and let us then watch how the theory actually works in the mind of the Humanitarian. The immediate starting point of this article was a letter I read in one of our Leftist weeklies. The author was pleading that a certain sin, now treated by our laws as a crime, should henceforth be treated as a disease. And he complained that under the present system the offender, after a term in gaol, was simply let out to return to his original environment where he would probably relapse. What he complained of was not the shutting up but the letting out. On his remedial view of punishment the offender should, of course, be detained until he was cured. And of course the official straighteners are the only people who can say when that is. The first result of the Humanitarian theory is, therefore, to substitute for a definite sentence (reflecting to some extent the community's moral judgment on the degree of ill-desert involved) an indefinite sentence terminable only by the word of those experts - and they are not experts in moral theology nor even in the Law of Nature - who inflict it. Which of us, if he stood in the dock, would not prefer to be tried by the old system?

It may be said that by the continued use of the word pinishment and the use of the verb 'inflict' I am misrepresenting Humanitarians. They are not punishing, not inflicting, only healing. But do not let us be deceived by the name. To be taken without consent from my home and friends; to lose my liberty; to undergo all those assaults on my personality which modern psychotherapy knows how to deliver; to be re-made after some pattern of 'normality' hatched in a Viennese laboratory to which I never professed allegience; to know that this process will never end until either my captors have succeeded or I grown wise enough to cheat them with apparent success - who cares whether this is called Punishment or not? That it includes most of the elements for which any punishment is feared - shame, exile, bondage, and years eaten by the locust - is obvious. Only enormous ill-desert could justify it; but ill-desert is the very conception which the Humanitarian theory has thrown overboard.

If we turn from the curative to the deterrnet justification of punishment we shall find the new theory even more alarming. When you punish a man in terrorem (to cause terror), make of him an 'example' to others, you are admittedly using him as a means to an end; someone else's end. This, in itself, would be a very wicked thing to do. In the classical theory of Punishment it was of course justified on the ground that the man deserved it. That was assumed to be established before any question of 'making him an example' arose. You then, as the saying is, killed two birds with one stone; in the process of giving him what he deserved you set an example to others. But take away desert and the whole morality of the punishment disappears. Why, in Heaven's name, am I to be sacrificed to the good of society in this way? - unless, of course, I deserve it?

But that is not the worst. If the justification of exemplary punishment is not to be based on desert but solely on its efficacy as a deterrent, it is not absolutely necessary that the man we punish should even have committed the crime. The deterrent effect demands that the public should draw the moral, 'If we do such an act we shall suffer like that man.' The punishment of a man actually guilty whom the public think innocnet will not have the desired effect; the punishment of a man actually innocent will, provided the public think him guilty. BUt every modern State has powers which make it easay to fake a trial. When a victim is urgently needed for exemplary purposes and a guilty victim cannot be found, all the purposes of deterrence will be equally served by the punishment (call it 'cure' if you prefer) of an innocent victim, provided that the public can be cheated into thinking him guilty. It is no use to ask me why I assume that our rulers will be so wicked. The punishment of an innocent, that is, an undeserving, man is wicked only if we grant the traditional view that righteous punishment means deserved punishment. Once we have abandoned that criterion, all punishments have to be justified, if at all, on other grounds that have nothing to do with desert. Where the punishment of the innocent can be justified on those grounds (and it could in some cases be justified as a deterrent) it will be no less moral than any other punishment. Any distaste for it on the part of a Humanitarian will be merely a hang-over from the Retributive theory.

It is, indeed, important to notice that my argument so far supposes no evil intentions on the part of the Humanitarian and considers only what is involved in the logic of his position. My contention is that good men (not bad men) consistently acting upon that position would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants. They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may somteimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of thier own conscience. They may be moe likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be 'cured' against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because 'we ought to have known better', is to be treated as a human person made in God's image.

In reality, however, we must face the possibility of bad rulers armed with the Humanitarian theory of punishment. A great many popular blue prints for a Christian society are merely what the Elizabethans called 'eggs in moonshine' because they assume that the whole society is Christian or that the Christians are in control. This is not so in most contemporary States. Even it it were, our rulers would still be fallen men, and, therefore, neither very wise nor very good. As it is, they will usually be unbelievers, And since wisdom and virtue are not the only or the commonest qualifications for a place in the government, they will not often be even the best unbelievers.

The practical problem of Christian politics is not that of drawing up schemes for a Christian society, but that of living as innocently as we can with unbelieving fellow-subjects under unbelieving rulers who will never be perfectly wise and good and who will sometimes be very wicked and very foolish. And when they are wicked the Humanitarian theory of punishment will put in their hands a finer instrument of tyranny than wickedness ever had before. For if crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call 'disease' can be treated as crime; and compulsorily cured. It will be vain to plead that states of mind which displease government need not always involve moral turpitude and do not therefore always deserve forfeiture of liberty. For our masters will not be using the concepts of Desert and Punishment but those of disease and cure. We know that one school of psychology aleady regards religion as a neurosis. When this particular neurosis becomes inconvenient to government, what is to hinder government from proceeding to 'cure' it? Such 'cure' will, of course, be compulsory; but under the Humanitarian theory it will not be called by the shocking name of Persecution. No one will blame us for being Christians, no one will hate us, no one will revile us. The new Nero will approach us with the silky manners of a doctor, and though all will be in fact as compulsory as the tunica molesta or Smithfield or Tyburn, all will go on within the unemotional therapeutic sphere where words like 'right' and 'wrong' or 'freedom' and 'slavery' are never heard. And thus when the command is given, every prominent Christian in the land may vanish overnight into Institutions for the Treatment of the Ideologically Unsound, and it will rest with the expert gaolers to say when (if ever) they are to re-emerge. But it will not be persecution. Even if the treatment is painful, even if it is life-long, even if it is fatal, that will be only a regrettable accident; the intention was purely therapeutic. In ordinary medicine there were painful operations and fatal operations; so in this. But because they are 'treatment', not punishment, they can be criticised only by fellow-experts and on technical grounds, never by men as men and on grounds of justice.

This is why I think it essential to oppose the Humanitarian theory of punishment, root and branch, wherever we encounter it. It carries on its front a semblance of mercy which is wholly false. That is how it can deceive men of good will. The error began, perhaps, with Shelley's statement that the distinction between mercy and justice was invented in the courts of tyrants. It sounds noble, and was indeed the error of a noble mind. But the distinction is essential. The older view was that mercy 'tempered' justice, or (on the highest level of all) that mercy and justice had met and kissed. The essential act of mercy was to pardon; and pardon in its very essence involves the recognition of guilt and ill-desert in the recipient. If crime is only a disease which needs cure, not sin which deserves punishment, it cannpt be pardoned. How can you padon a man for having a gumboil or a club foot? But the Humanitarian theory wants simply to abolish Justice and substitute Mercy for it. This means that you start being 'kind' to people before you have considered their rights, and then force upon them supposed kindnesses which no one but you will recognize as kindnesses and which the recipient will feel as abominable cruelties. You have overshot the mark. Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful. That is the important paradox. As there are plants which will flourish only in mountain soil, so it appears that Mercy will flower only when it grows in the crannies of the rock of Justice; transplanted to the marchlands of mere Humanitarianism, it becomes a man-eating weed, all the more dangerous because it is still called by the same name as the mountain variety. But we ought long ago to have learned our lesson. We should be too old now to be deceived by those humane pretensions which have served to usher in every cruelty of the revolutionary period in which we live. These are the 'precious balms' which will 'break our heads'.

There is a fine sentence in Bunyan: 'It came burning hot into my mind, whatever he said, and however he flattered, when he got me home to his House, he would sell me for a Slave.' There is a fine couplet, too, in John Ball:

Be war or ye be wo;
Knoweth your friend from your foo.

Obama Med-Care

Instead of doing health care reform big, if elected, Mr. Obama will have to settle for doing it cheaper. But that fiscal austerity will also be used to justify more controls on health care delivery and access to drugs and devices. Ultimately, patients will face fewer medical options.

Mr. Obama will start by growing existing government programs, expanding Medicaid eligibility and enlarging the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which provides coverage to low- and middle-income children. Mr. Obama said he'd also create a federally subsidized reinsurance program to cover "catastrophic health" expenses in employer plans.

Next, the would-be president would move on to the centerpiece of Obamacare, the creation of a "national exchange" offering a selection of insurance options that meet new federal "standards." The candidate has promised to make a Medicare-like public program one of the "national" options.

But the 10-year cost of Obama's plan is pegged at $1.17 trillion, and that's according to one of the lower estimates (from The Lewin Group.) Mr. Obama's under-65 Medicare option is a big part of those costs, and the piece of his plan most likely to invite intense industry opposition. Given these factors, and mounting government debt, don't expect him to follow through on it.

Instead, Mr. Obama will use his "pay or play" tax on employers that don't offer health insurance to partially offset peoples' cost of purchasing coverage from a menu of closely-regulated private insurance plans. The tax would be levied on some portion of an employer's payroll, ultimately translating into lower wages from employers who would pass on these costs to workers. Obama hasn't specified the regulations he'd apply, but he supports "guaranteed issue," which compels insurers to accept all comers, and says he'd require plans to offer benefits similar to those that federal employees receive.

The exchange would be open to individuals, the self-employed and small employers. Larger employers, and new businesses, would weigh the costs of continuing to provide employee-sponsored health care or funneling employees into the "exchange" and paying the new taxes. Mr. Obama hasn't said what the tax rate would be. Chances are it would initially be priced in a way to make it a wash for employers presently providing health care. Many would continue providing their own coverage for the time being. Democrats won't want a politically ugly exodus of people moving from employer-sponsored coverage and into the public plan. But over the long run, there will be a steady migration into the tax-subsidized national exchange.

What does this mean for patients, providers and medical product developers? Some healthy people who don't qualify for Obama's subsidies could face higher premiums once insurers are required to sell policies to all comers. Also, wider access to government-sponsored health insurance is likely to come at the price of more federal restrictions--imposed in the name of fiscal austerity--on medical treatments and patients' access to new medical products. The national exchange empowers the feds with greater leverage over private health care.

Sen. Barack Obama has proposed to save families up to $2,500 on their health care premiums through a series of measures he says will cut health care costs. It comes to almost $300 billion annually based on census data on the number of American households. But there's little reason to believe the candidate's proposals for the adoption of electronic medical records or his gauzy ideas on improved "efficiency" will approach his whopping figure.

Instead, Obamacare is likely to control spending by "managing" it, and in some cases rationing drugs, procedures and medical devices. To affect these goals, the candidate proposes a new federal agency charged with developing "research" to empower government payers like Medicare with making more "efficient" and eventually "cost-effective" decisions about the medical products they purchase and the health care procedures they pay for.

Read it all here.

Paglia Advocates "Absolute Control" of Her Body

In an article focusing on newly appointed vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, prominent feminist Camille Paglia admits that, much like Gov. Palin, she also believes abortion involves the murder of an innocent life - but unlike Palin, Paglia says she is a “firm supporter” of abortion.

Paglia’s piece, which appears on Salon.com, is the latest indication that “utilitarian” philosophies that no longer recognize the “right to life” as being the most foundational human right are gaining ground in some liberal circles. Under these philosophies even murder can be advocated as long as it protects what is deemed to be an even more important “right” - in Paglia’s case the sacrosanct “right to abortion.”

Paglia, the University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, is well-known for her non-conformist approach as a lesbian social critic and as a popular journalist and author. Her latest article, "Fresh blood for the vampire", largely addresses the Republican's surge in the polls after choosing Palin as VP-nominee, but also touches on abortion.

"Let's take the issue of abortion rights, of which I am a firm supporter. As an atheist and libertarian, I believe that government must stay completely out of the sphere of personal choice. Every individual has an absolute right to control his or her body," said Paglia...

Read it all here.