True Knowledge

Life is a process of breaking down and using other matter, and if need be, other life. Therefore, life is aggression, and successful life is successful aggression. Life is the scum of matter, and people are the scum of life. There is nothing but matter, forces, space and time, which together make power. Nothing matters, except what matters to you. Might makes right, and power makes freedom. You are free to do whatever is in your power, and if you want to survive and thrive you had better do whatever is in your interests. If your interests conflict with those of others, let the others pit their power against yours, everyone for their selves. If your interests coincide with those of others, let them work together with you, and against the rest. We are what we eat, and we eat everything.

All that you really value, and the goodness and truth and beauty of life, have their roots in this apparently barren soil.

This is the true knowledge.

This passage from The Cassini Division by Ken MacLeod states the basic philosophy of a fictional post-capitalist future society that had arisen after many wars and a post-human singularity in other parts of the solar system, in part as a response to that singularity and the necessity to integrate alien relations into human socio-political thinking. In the novel the basic ideas were distilled from the works of Darwin, Marx and Stirner by very bright and highly educated Korean indentured laborers, political prisoners really, with limited choice of reading material.

As Cosma Shalizi speculates:

OK, I can't resist talking about the true knowledge. It's one of the most seductive ideas I've run across in a long time. (I'm a sucker for neat, big ideas.) Why bother with all that lovey-dovey morality rubbish, this left-over rubbish of religious taboos? The alternative is ever so much cleaner...

I don't know whether MacLeod really believes the true knowledge; I rather doubt it, on the basis of his posts to rec.arts.sf.written. (His serious socialist ideas are more or less in line with Alec Nove's The Economics of Feasible Socialism.) I probably won't in a week, though I will keep it as a fail-safe position in ethics: any niceness which you can sustain within that is absolutely secure...

I would be more than half-surprised if something like the true knowledge doesn't develop, only I suspect the founders aren't going to be Korean indentured laborers with nothing to read but Darwin, Marx and Stirner, but western academic evolutionary game theorists and behavioral economists. You can already find socialist (or ex-socialist) economists like Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis arguing for egalitarianism on the grounds that there's a natural, demonstrable human propensity to go to great lengths to punish people who violate norms of fairness; we get something out of doing this...

A few more decades of similar tough-mindedness and heavy borrowings from evolutionary theory, and the true knowledge will look like common sense...

See Strong Reciprocity for a survey of the thinking on this subject and descriptions of the research that supports the concept that the glue that holds societies together is an evolved preference to cooperate with other humans and to punish non-cooperators.

Could competition between small groups of our ancestors somehow have turned them into strong reciprocators? Gintis, Boyd and their colleagues believe so. What's more, subsequent research by Fehr, working with economist Urs Fischbacher of the University of Zurich, suggests that as humans came to live in larger groups, their attitudes towards reciprocity may have become even more hard-line. Using a similar model to Gintis and the others (Nature, vol 425, p 785), they found that cooperation can become the default behaviour in large groups provided punishers are willing to punish not only those who cheat, but also those who fail to punish cheats (see Graph). "In this case," Fehr says, "even groups of several hundred individuals can establish cooperation rates of between 70 and 80 per cent."

This is an interesting subject in these bellicose times as some struggle to justify loosing the dogs of war yet again, terrorists roam the world killing people and breaking things without remorse, and the status quo of parts of the developing world are highlighted on the evening news shows - bringing genocide, torture, slavery, famine, plague and the rest of old testament reality into our homes.

Few grapple with these issues in an informed and thoughtful way, and most strive to do so with a limited arsenal restricted to their familiar ways of knowing. Lawyers make legal arguments, historians make historical arguments and political thinkers argue from an ideological perspective of some sort as do philosophers.

An example of grappling thoughtfully with an aspect of this issue can be seen in Burke's comments on the recent Volokh controversy.

I am going to gingerly attempt to be one of about three people to not simply condemn Eugene Volokh’s now-infamous “bloodlust” post...

The cultural and social specifics on such issues were often very different in non-Western societies before 1750, but the relative alienness of those pasts to liberal-democratic sensibilities in the present day is often equally pronounced. We’re accustomed to shuddering in horror at the prevalence of human sacrifice in some of large-scale pre-Columbian societies, but it’s fairly clear that our moral understanding of such practices didn’t exist within those historical worlds. It’s fairly clear that it took the violence and destructiveness of the Atlantic slave trade to turn the practice of kinship slavery in West and Equatorial African societies into a moral issue instead of an ordinary part of social practice.

I’m not saying here that because modern ethical frameworks did not exist in the past that we cannot judge those past societies as immoral. But I am saying that to judge commits one to a narrative of progress, to an acceptance of the present as superior to the past. The crowds who gathered at hangings in England before 1750 were not barbaric or savage within their own context. They can only become so from within our own contemporary frame of mind, our own understanding of human progress. To successfully curl our lips in disgust at the past in this respect means not just that we accept that we are different than they, but better.

That has some tricky implications when it’s brought into the framework of the case that Volokh cited, because here we are dealing not with the past, but with two different framings of the present. I hasten to say that the Iranian case cited is not “backward”: in its own way, it’s as modern as we are. The world lives in simultaneous modernity now. But it is different, and it’s a form of difference that I think at least some of those condemning Volokh might otherwise show extraordinary wariness about judging or attacking. Nobody among those to attack Volokh is quite saying, “Those Muslim barbarians!”: they’re very carefully keeping their eyes on Volokh himself. But you almost can’t attack Volokh in this case without committing to a vision of human progress that suggests the Iranian judicial system and even the ordinary Iranians who participated are in some way barbaric.

In a subsequent post Volokh sharpens his point.

Retribution:

Mark Kleiman's post, which has persuaded me to change my views on the advisability of deliberately painful executions also has an excellent discussion of retribution as a goal of punishment. Mark points out that many recent blog posts have argued that retribution -- as opposed to just deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation -- is simply not a legitimate goal of punishment.

Usually the arguments are cast as deprecating "revenge," "vengeance," and the like, and by their nature they are not limited to criticizing deliberately painful executions: They would apply equally to normal executions as well as prison sentences, if the purpose of the sentence is retribution (again, as opposed to the utilitarian purposes of deterrence, incapacitation, or rehabilitation).

Here I've agreed with Mark all along: It seems to me that retribution is a fundamental and entirely morally proper goal of punishment; and deriding it as some atavistic desire for vengeance is a mistake. It is a desire for vengeance, it is indeed psychologically deep-seated, but it is entirely just. Mark makes many excellent observations about this -- read his whole post -- but let me just quote the conclusion:

[V]indication of the victim and the expression of social disapproval of the act both strike me as perfectly sound reasons for punishment, independent of its function in controlling crime. . . .

Perhaps you disagree; if so, you're in the majority, in Blogland though not in the larger world. But if you disagree, then . . . could you explain to me why we kept chasing Nazi war criminals well into the 1990s? Was the Third Reich likely to come back? Were we hoping to deter the next round of mass murderers?

Or if the Nazis are too special a case to deal with, what is the deterrent and incapacitative justification for pursuing Augusto Pinochet? Isn't it obvious that Pinochet's victims deserve to have it shown to the world that what he and his goons did to them wasn't all right?

Looked at from the perspective of true knowledge and supported by the work of experimentalists and game theorists working to establish the evolved nature of humans both Klieman and Volokh are, as Shalizi puts it, making common sense observations. Of course the relatives and friends of the victims of a serial murderer want to participate in his execution done in a painful way to punish him fearfully for his crimes. That's how humans are, though that isn't a compelling argument for how humans ought to be. But when we add the social effects of punishment in increasing social cooperation the argument becomes more compelling. It's not simply a matter of indulging atavistic impulses, it's also a way to increase social harmony and so have broad benefits for all members of society.

I'm willing to entertain these ideas but still have doubts and conflicts. Perhaps the science will become clearer in future and we will be better able to trace social problems in the putatively more modern, or at least alternatively modern, west to false ideas about punishment and deterrence.