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Hunt the Wild Justice

By on July 11, 2010 4

C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis’s article “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” is simultaneously an excellent argument against the rehabilitative or therapeutic approach to punishment, and a lousy argument in favour of the retributive approach to punishment. Lewis makes a compelling and eloquent proto-Szaszian case for the thesis that punishment not based on responsibility is wrong; but, never examining his implicit premise that punishment must be justified somehow or other, he then slides without much reflection into the conclusion that punishment based on responsibility must be right. So when I read this article I’m cheering half the time and tearing my hair out the other half.

Of course that’s often my reaction when reading Lewis – as when reading Nietzsche, another writer who to my mind tends to mix together equal parts of the magnificently right and the horribly wrong (though his points of rightness and wrongness seldom coincide with Lewis’s). Anyway, Lewis, like Nietzsche, is generally worth reading even when he’s wrong.

While we’re at it, here’s another fine Lewis piece, “The Inner Ring,” that has a good deal less wrong in it.

Ideas That Stick With You

By on July 10, 2010 5

Under the feudal system, rights to one’s person were alienable (swearing fealty to a lord was irrevocable) while rights to land often weren’t (a feudal lord couldn’t sell his estate, as it belonged in perpetuity to his heirs) – the exact reverse of the rights system that most libertarians advocate. Forbidding the alienation of rightfully alienable property is as much a violation of property right as any other.

Now even libertarians who defend IP generally regard it as alienable; so the current move by the IP lobby to attack the voluntary alienation of IP rights should be something that pro-IP and anti-IP libertarians can agree in opposing.

An argument one sometimes sees for the inalienability of IP is the consequentialist one that if IP is treated as alienable then creators will be exploited by big companies. It’s certainly true that under the current IP system, the chief beneficiaries of copyright tend to be not the original creators but instead large publishing and recording companies; and making IP inalienable is one way to address that. Yet inasmuch as IP, whether alienable or inalienable, constitutes both protectionism and censorship, it remains objectionable on both rights-based and consequentialist grounds. A better solution to the exploitation problem is to replace IP-based business models with ones that secure compensation to creators in nonviolent ways.

Seeing Like a State

By on July 3, 2010 9

I was just watching part of a Congressional presentation on C-Span honouring the slaves who built the u.s. capitol – not by making restitution to their heirs, of course, but by setting up some sort of plaque. What especially bugged me was the speakers’ continual references to expressing “thanks” and “gratitude” for the slaves’ “sacrifices” and “contributions.” If I take your wallet at gunpoint, it would be rather a euphemism to call your handing it over a sacrifice, and what I owe you is not gratitude. (Of course the language of sacrifice and gratitude is also used in connection with conscript soldiers shipped off to die in lands they’ve never heard of.)

Puzzlement

By on June 20, 2010 46

For some reason I can’t post comments on Gene Callahan’s blog, so I’ll put the comment here. In response to the post where Gene says:

Obligation is the crucial idea denied by libertarian political theory. We can have obligations that we did not agree to take upon ourselves.

I reply:

I can think of hardly any libertarian political thinkers who say that we have no unchosen obligations. (Rand says it, but that has more to do with her metaethics than her political commitments.) Most libertarians would say that we have a) some enforceable obligations we didn’t choose (like the obligations not to kill, steal, assault, etc.), plus b) plenty of moral obligations that aren’t enforceable.

Of course it’s true that libertarianism denies the existence of various enforceable obligations that other theories assert; but libertarianism also asserts the existence of enforceable obligations that other theories deny.

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