I regularly see on Reddit and recently around here too ideas like “there is no free will hence nobody deserves anything, good or bad, no merits etc.” and I am puzzled by them, because to me it is so that merit or desert or even justice means roughly like incentives that happen to work. If a reward makes people behave the way I want them to, I call the reward merited or deserved. Basically a sound investment. “you deserve punishment” is nothing more than “I think punishing you will make you or others behave the way I want to”. “this punishment is just” means “it works, and it is also not harsher than necessary” i.e. executing pickpockets would likely work but unnecessarily harsh. “you earned your wealth” largely means I don’t think your behavior or other people’s behavior would become more desirable to me if I took away your wealth and gave it to someone else.
Maybe I am overly cynical as my account does not have an ethical aspect. I think it is rather than other people expect cosmic justice where there is none. People were said they merited and deserved medals for burning hostile soldiers to death alive with a flamethrower in war and I shouldn’t be cynical about this?
OTOH almost everybody seems to disagree. People think deserving, earning, merit, justice, things like this have some “cosmic ethic/justice” to them and are very upset when they learn about determinism and figure it is not the case.
Punishment is complicated. As far as I can tell, punishment only works if the person being punished sees themselves as being in the same social system as the punisher. If the person being punished doesn’t see it that way, then the “punishment” just looks like an attack.
I think the evolutionary origin of ideas of “deserving punishment” is basically a need to incentivise others not to defect against you, but the actual intuition in most people’s heads is just to assign utility to the suffering of “bad people” in some proportion with how bad whatever they’ve done is. Also the concept of free will as most people use it is pretty confused and gives confusing results if you have it interact with other concepts like “incentives”.
but the actual intuition in most people’s heads is just to assign utility to the suffering of “bad people” in some proportion with how bad whatever they’ve done is.
Of course, for the incentives to work you need a precommitment to punish, but once the person has defected, that’s done and punishing him no longer benefits you. Hence the requirement to assign utility to the suffering of bad people.
There’s a radiolab episode about blame that glances this subject. They talk about, for example, people with brain damage not being blamed for their crimes (because they “didn’t have a choice”). They also have a guest trying to explain why legal punishment should be based on modelling probabilities of recidivism. One of the hosts usually plays (is?) the “there is cosmic blame/justice/choice” position you’re describing.
I have a nasty hunch that one of the social functions of punishment is to prevent personal revenge. If it is not harsh enough, victims or their relatives may want to take it into their own hands. Vendetta or Girardian “mimetic violence” is AFAIK something deeply embedded into history, and AFAIK it went away only governments basically said “hey, you don’t need to kill your sisters rapist, I will kill him for you and call it justice system”. And that consideration has not much to do with recidivism. Rather, the point here is to prevent further escalation: his relatives, in turn, cannot try to enact vendetta on the government. So it seems it is at least partially rooted in stopping blood revenge chains by the government actually performing a blood revenge, once. And thus if recidivism stats figure out 3.5 months in prison are enough, we see blood revenge coming back.
According to my Criminology courses the judiciary system serves both functions: channeling the vindictive intuitions of the victims (or their families) in a more peaceful direction and reducing future crime (both by scaring possible offenders and by punishing actual offenders).
It’s actually fairly explicit in the Torah, specifically in Numbers chapter 35. The Mosaic code there established cities of refuge to which killers were to be allowed to travel and be judged, where they would be free of revenge from those wronged until the priests decided whether their offense was murder, manslaughter, negligence, or accident, and imposed the appropriate penalty.
And thus if recidivism stats figure out 3.5 months in prison are enough, we see blood revenge coming back.
As well it should. Frankly 3.5 months aren’t enough for deterrent, and are almost certainly not enough to prevent recidivism. Let’s put it this way: if the stats say 3.5 months are enough to prevent recidivism then the most likely explanation is that the stats are bogus.
To explicitly answer your question: I don’t think you’re really missing anything. I suspect you just haven’t fully internalized the idea that other people are using “merit”/”desert”/”deserve” in a different sense to you. (You believe it, but don’t alieve it, in the local jargon.)
Edit: for what it’s worth, I think your understanding of “merit”/”desert” is the more robust one, precisely because it holds up better in the face of determinism. The lay meaning (“cosmic justice”) looks pretty shaky if one starts asking oneself questions like “Why is a paedophile whose paedophilia is caused by a brain tumour intrinsically more deserving of leniency than someone who’s just always been a paedophile?”.
I regularly see on Reddit and recently around here too ideas like “there is no free will hence nobody deserves anything, good or bad, no merits etc.” and I am puzzled by them, because to me it is so that merit or desert or even justice means roughly like incentives that happen to work. If a reward makes people behave the way I want them to, I call the reward merited or deserved. Basically a sound investment. “you deserve punishment” is nothing more than “I think punishing you will make you or others behave the way I want to”. “this punishment is just” means “it works, and it is also not harsher than necessary” i.e. executing pickpockets would likely work but unnecessarily harsh. “you earned your wealth” largely means I don’t think your behavior or other people’s behavior would become more desirable to me if I took away your wealth and gave it to someone else.
Maybe I am overly cynical as my account does not have an ethical aspect. I think it is rather than other people expect cosmic justice where there is none. People were said they merited and deserved medals for burning hostile soldiers to death alive with a flamethrower in war and I shouldn’t be cynical about this?
OTOH almost everybody seems to disagree. People think deserving, earning, merit, justice, things like this have some “cosmic ethic/justice” to them and are very upset when they learn about determinism and figure it is not the case.
Likely I am missing something. What am I missing?
Punishment as moral desert, and punishment as incentive lead to different results in some cases.
Punishment is complicated. As far as I can tell, punishment only works if the person being punished sees themselves as being in the same social system as the punisher. If the person being punished doesn’t see it that way, then the “punishment” just looks like an attack.
I think the evolutionary origin of ideas of “deserving punishment” is basically a need to incentivise others not to defect against you, but the actual intuition in most people’s heads is just to assign utility to the suffering of “bad people” in some proportion with how bad whatever they’ve done is. Also the concept of free will as most people use it is pretty confused and gives confusing results if you have it interact with other concepts like “incentives”.
Of course, for the incentives to work you need a precommitment to punish, but once the person has defected, that’s done and punishing him no longer benefits you. Hence the requirement to assign utility to the suffering of bad people.
Oh, yeah, I see why, tbh I thought /u/DeVliegendeHollander was being weird in not seeing things that way, but I didn’t want to typical-mind.
There’s a radiolab episode about blame that glances this subject. They talk about, for example, people with brain damage not being blamed for their crimes (because they “didn’t have a choice”). They also have a guest trying to explain why legal punishment should be based on modelling probabilities of recidivism. One of the hosts usually plays (is?) the “there is cosmic blame/justice/choice” position you’re describing.
I have a nasty hunch that one of the social functions of punishment is to prevent personal revenge. If it is not harsh enough, victims or their relatives may want to take it into their own hands. Vendetta or Girardian “mimetic violence” is AFAIK something deeply embedded into history, and AFAIK it went away only governments basically said “hey, you don’t need to kill your sisters rapist, I will kill him for you and call it justice system”. And that consideration has not much to do with recidivism. Rather, the point here is to prevent further escalation: his relatives, in turn, cannot try to enact vendetta on the government. So it seems it is at least partially rooted in stopping blood revenge chains by the government actually performing a blood revenge, once. And thus if recidivism stats figure out 3.5 months in prison are enough, we see blood revenge coming back.
The idea that punishment through a legal system exists to deter revenge is an idea I’ve been hearing for decades.
According to my Criminology courses the judiciary system serves both functions: channeling the vindictive intuitions of the victims (or their families) in a more peaceful direction and reducing future crime (both by scaring possible offenders and by punishing actual offenders).
It’s actually fairly explicit in the Torah, specifically in Numbers chapter 35. The Mosaic code there established cities of refuge to which killers were to be allowed to travel and be judged, where they would be free of revenge from those wronged until the priests decided whether their offense was murder, manslaughter, negligence, or accident, and imposed the appropriate penalty.
As well it should. Frankly 3.5 months aren’t enough for deterrent, and are almost certainly not enough to prevent recidivism. Let’s put it this way: if the stats say 3.5 months are enough to prevent recidivism then the most likely explanation is that the stats are bogus.
To explicitly answer your question: I don’t think you’re really missing anything. I suspect you just haven’t fully internalized the idea that other people are using “merit”/”desert”/”deserve” in a different sense to you. (You believe it, but don’t alieve it, in the local jargon.)
Edit: for what it’s worth, I think your understanding of “merit”/”desert” is the more robust one, precisely because it holds up better in the face of determinism. The lay meaning (“cosmic justice”) looks pretty shaky if one starts asking oneself questions like “Why is a paedophile whose paedophilia is caused by a brain tumour intrinsically more deserving of leniency than someone who’s just always been a paedophile?”.