Omg yes… Besides I don’t need a government that offers me a lifetime subscription to torture porn for my angriest moments. Just because I feel angry at some one for their crimes that doesn’t mean my angry feelings actually justify state sponsored torture.
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Re the HMS Hell and the Brits other prison ships: Deceased prisoners’ bodies were thrown into the NYC harbor. Over the subsequent couple of centuries, their bones would be reclaimed, and all eventually ending up interred beneath the base of this stately monument. Being adjacent to the park and therefore having a clear view of the monument, our high school knew well its history and purpose.
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Both cruel and unusual?
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Well I picked Breivik here because of the Nordic context, but also because I was after someone whom I thought we might all agree had done something evil.
But I can easily offer more common examples of evil:
Think of a grandfather who sexually abuses one of his grandchildren over a period of years. By the time the case comes to light, the man is impotent and in a wheelchair. Should there be no punishment meted out to him because he can never do it again?
Or imagine the CEO of a company that poisons the groundwater and causes several fatalities in a local community. By the time it is discovered that the man falsified an environmental report, he has long retired and also lost most of his money in bad investments. Should nothing be done to him because he will never be in a position to repeat his crime?
I don’t think it does. Revenge is not the same as retributive justice meted out by a proper authority.
But retribution is very important to both society and individual victims. It tells victims that they matter and that the things done to them must be paid for somehow. It says that our society cares about things done, not just about future crimes that might still be committed.
Are you telling me you don’t think there’s such a thing as evil or that it’s all relative? Are you saying it’s wrong to think that there are wicked people who deserve to be punished by the law for their wrongs?
If that’s what you are saying, I have to say that the tone of many BBS discussions implies different answers: there are evildoers and they deserve to have bad things happen to them.
I think you are on the right track with “recompensation” – victims want some form of redress or scale-balancing, and they want to it to come from the perpetrator.
Me either! I’m talking about the basic idea of retribution, not every and any form of it. Though I am intrigued by whom you think would be better suited to distribute justice if not the government.
Huh! That’s very interesting. So what do you think should happen in the two examples above?
Would torturing or otherwise providing additional misery to Anders Breivik provide any material benefit to anyone?
Even if we did all agree, it’s not just a question of what bad people deserve. It’s a question of what kind of society we want to be.
Norway has decided to be a society that focuses on reducing harm. The United States has decided to be a society that focuses on punishing people accused and/or convicted of crimes. Going by the stats, I’d say Norway has had a lot better success with their approach than we have had with ours.
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I’m going to need you to expand upon what you mean by retribution.
To answer your question- no one is better suited to distribute torture.
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The idea of having professional torturers on the government payroll is sickening, much like the idea of hiring professional rapists to dole out “justice” to people convicted of sexual assault. It diminishes the humanity of the perpetrator as well as the victim.
(This is also one reason I don’t approve of capital punishment.)
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That’s not the point. How does MORE evil fix evil? And what is evil anyway? We all think we know it when we see it, but there are plenty of people who think that being trans, or a woman, or Black, or non-christian, or what ever is evil.
Yet here you are, advocating for it.
Don’t put words in my mouth. THAT shit is evil.
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I’m not going to answer those, but I will ask about two examples that affect me personally
First of all, Jamie Clark. I didn’t know him well, but he was a friend of my brother. He was a nice person. One day he was going to work when someone shot and killed him in the Cumbria mass shooting, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Secondly, I was harrassed by ideological fascists for over a year, physically attacked on a regular basis, got death threats through the door. I still have PTSD from it.
Can you tell me what I would get from having the perpetrators tortured in either example? Because I don’t know. As far as I can understand it would have stopped me from moving on, I would be trapped into being the victim forever.
Anyway, if I thought like that, wanting to punish everyone who wronged me, I would end up with the Khmer Rouge telling me that I might be going too far. That’s not me. I want to find a different way, and I don’t care if people think I am being naive or utopian.
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All of this.
And as someone mentioned already, in most civilized countries, losing one’s freedom is the punishment.
One of the many reasons US prisons are so horrible is because, without any social safety nets, the loss of freedom would be a small price to pay for food and lodging for some, so they have to make the prisons scary and dehumanizing to make them worse than living free in “the greatest country that ever was.”
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Hell yes. And… Also it’s always uncomfortable when people make unilateral statements about what all people want or feel about their victimization the course of dealing.
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As always… spot on!
Also… hugs!
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