But the United States Bill of Rights does not ban cruel and routine punishment, such as the use of solitary confinement, often against political prisoners. Herman Wallace and Chelsea Manning being two prominent recent victims.
Of course the comments are overrun with twisted ones, who tell themselves only the worst people get imprisoned, and only the worst of the worst get tortured in this way, ignoring all evidence to the contrary.
This is the guy who came up with the formula of humanity, and yet, somehow, he decides not to treat humanity as an end in itself, but to treat punishment as an end in itself, and the humanity of the victim and the criminal [and the inevitable unfortunates caught in the web] only as a means. This is so wrong, this desire to inflict suffering, to seize on any excuse to inflict suffering, makes me wonder what can make anyone so twisted and what could help anyone come back from it.
And further suppose there was some economic experiment that stood a decent chance of generating a financial black hole that could destroy the enfranchisement and well-being of future generations. If someone deliberately set up a toxic asset investment scheme or fraudulent housing bubble, I could see that being the kind of supercrime that would justify an eternal sentence.
While I’m not a fan or retribution either, a lot of people think that way, so I think the discussion engendered (here and elsewhere) is useful. I can’t speak to the quality of thought of this particular person (I’m not familiar with her), but I’ve still find the whole discussion interesting.
There’s not much continental philosophy going on in the US (or so I’m told by the folks who study/studied it at the academy); it’s mostly analytic (which is a bit boring, IMO, but it obviously floats some boats).
tend to agree. What novel was it where the victorious general kept the disembodied, upside down head of his vanquished foe as a punching bag, kept alive and on pain intensifying drugs as I recall.
Would humans have the capacity to handle that sort of imprisonment? Our minds degrade over time (not just strictly due to physical degradation with age), as does our capacity to recall new information.
Also, seeing as our perspective on time is shaped by how much we’ve experienced (time feels like it passes faster as you age), wouldn’t this just make the released prisoner experience ‘real’ time as a blur? Is the goal is to shape them into being seemingly apathetic and unfeeling?
yeah well, thanks to those eggheads for their really creative input on the future of torture and generally contributing to human misery. this is just the kind of irresponsible anything-goes political consulting that gets me all whipped up in a righteous anti-intellectual frenzy.
Marlboromonk’s is a creative twist. Probably more readily achievable too. It even offers the immense pleasure of pitting Big Pharma vs Big Penal.
The original article presumes that; 1) the the greater the punishment, the more effective the deterrent, and 2) we know what constitutes an optimally hellish punishment for any given person. The record on each of these isn’t too encouraging.
Consider also whether to design the ‘hellishness’ to personally suite the hideous perp or just to appear most hellish to all prospective perps-in-waiting. Given enough monkeys with enough philosophizing…
Those who righteously insist on 7th level Inferno-style retribution yet are unwilling to rely on Dante’s accuracy might then confidently begin the re-animation of Hitler, Bin Laden, etc in order to dole it out personally. What could possibly go wrong?
Yep. Timothy Leary tried using LSD for exactly this in the sixties. His experiment (which was never successfully repeated) found that a small dose of LSD gave people in prison a feeling of ‘connection’ with the rest of mankind, or God, or whatever, which made them less likely to re-offend. He claimed some thing like a 30% rate of ‘going straight’ which is miles above conventional prison treatment. This may not be so, because no-one has ever repeated it. However, if iit was as never repeated because it was suddenly and arbitrarily decided that drugs were baaad, and what was pharmaceutical research was now a crime, and no more research should ever be done. We have just had the first LSD trials since then, after a 50 tear pause.
I hope and trust the paper is a thought experiment. It is a reasonable idea to consider the possibility of a chemical prison sentence to expose the fallacy of a real prison sentence as a cure.
Roache: “Suppose there was some physics experiment that stood a decent
chance of generating a black hole that could destroy the planet and all
future generations. If someone deliberately set up an experiment like
that, I could see that being the kind of supercrime that would justify
an eternal sentence.”
It would certainly take a pretty sick f*** to continue inflicting punishment on a being that had long ago lost any memory of what it was being punished for. I don’t care if the drooling old fossil in the life-support chair was once Adolph Hitler—if he doesn’t know anything beyond his current suffering then the person keeping him there is a sicko.
