October 6, 2010
Consequences bleg
I expect this week’s long Wednesday philosophy post is going to prompt people to call me an idiot. Please, try and be patient and recognise that I’m focusing on something quite specific, so pause before hitting your keyboards to decry my stupidity. This is a bleg rather than a blog; an appeal for the philosophically inclined who read this blog to try and help me out.
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Faisal Shahzad – the man who tried to blow up a car bomb in Time Square – has been sentenced to life in prison. Would he have received the same punishment if the bomb had successfully gone off, killing and maiming thousands? I ask because New York State has the death penalty, and despite being unused since 1976 it’s feasible it might have been revived in such an eventuality.
To tease out the underlying point I really want to get at: we tend to think that it is right for successful criminals to receive harsher penalties than unsuccessful ones, and indeed tend to cast greater moral condemnation on those who are successful than those who aren’t.
But things can start to seem odd if we ask why we feel this way.
To illustrate: imagine a parallel world in which Shahzad had the exact same motivations as in this world. However, imagine that this parallel world differs in one single respect: Shahzad makes a successful car bomb. Instead of his device failing to detonate, it goes off and kills hundreds.
Parallel World Shahzad is duly caught and brought to trial, just like Real World Shahzad. Yet the former receives a more severe punishment (the death penalty) than the latter (who gets life in prison). Yet Real World Shahzad did everything he could to achieve the results that Parallel World Shahzad actually brought about, namely mass death and destruction.
The motivation in each case is identical; the intent to kill is the same. But in one case people die and in the other they don’t. Yet it seems in some sense bizarre to say that Parallel World Shahzad is more evil than Real World Shahzad, simply because the former succeeded and the latter failed. Real World Shahzad wanted to bring about exactly the same ends Parallel World Shahzad managed to achieve, and indeed did everything within his power to do so. Real World Shahzad was thwarted by (let’s say) the bad luck of not setting up his bomb properly, which he would happily have corrected he’d been aware of it. And yet he receives a lesser punishment and less moral disapprobation simply because he failed even though he meant entirely to succeed.
To stop using silly abstract examples, a concrete illustration: I’m presuming that most people join me in having stronger feelings of moral aversion to the successful 7/7 tube bombers than the unsuccessful Glasgow airport terrorists, even though the intent to cause mass death and suffering was the same in both cases. The fact that one group succeeded, and the other didn’t, appears to carry important moral weight. Even if we condemn both groups, we apparently condemn the successful group even more severely because they were successful. Or even if people don’t quite share my moral intuitions here, it remains to be explained why legal punishments increase in severity for successful murders as oppose to unsuccessful ones, and why most people are apparently quite comfortable with that.
So to attempt (and probably fail) to avoid misunderstanding, the specific question I’m focused on is: why do we tend to think a successful terrorist is more evil than an unsuccessful one, even when they both have identical motivations and the latter failed only because of bad luck. What work in our moral thinking is the successful bringing about of consequences doing, even when that success (or unsuccess) is external to the agent, say because of uncontrolled luck?
Hume famously remarked that:
“`Tis evident, that when we praise any actions, we regard only the motives that produced them, and consider the actions as signs or indications of certain principles in the mind and temper. The external performance has no merit. We must look within to find the moral quality. This we cannot do directly; and therefore fix our attention on actions, as on external signs. But these actions are still considered as signs; and the ultimate object of our praise and approbation is the motive, that produc’d them.”
And this may look like no solution at all: haven’t we just established that consequences matter over and above the motives of evil-doers? But a solution perhaps begins to present itself if we recall the Humean observation that actual events have a stronger and more lively impact on the mind than mere imagination.
Seeing the attrocities of successful terrorism transports our ideas to the evil motives of the terrorist far more powerfully than merely imagining what the consequences would have been if the terrorist had been successful (knowing that they weren’t). Our increased disaprobation for the successful over the identically-motivated yet unsuccessful (reflected in more severe legal punishments for successful criminals than unsuccessful ones) can thus perhaps be explained. The difference lies not in the consequences themselves, but in the greater power of real consequences than imagined ones to excite moral disapprobation for another’s evil motives.
The problem, however, is that I’m not satisfied with that answer. It feels like what matters here is whether people really do die - and not simply whether the person who killed them had a motivation to do so, and that his success more effectively transports our thoughts to that motivation than if he had failed and the work was left to imagination.
And I’m not sure what to do about that, because I feel quite stuck and can’t get my head clear on exactly what work consequences are doing here – and at the very least, the Humean account needs to be expanded (though I would hope, not abandoned).
Thoughts, anyone?
Ronald Collinson said,
October 6, 2010 at 11:51 am
I just don’t think this is true – we don’t think that 7th July bombers were ‘more evil’ than the Glasgow bombers. We *do* [mostly] think that their actions such that greater degree of punishment would [if they had lived? I see some flaws with this example] have been desired, but this is quite different.
‘Evilness of x’, where x is an agent, is something that we treat as though there were objective criteria of comparison that could be applied. So it is common for schoolchildren to ponder – for example – whether Stalin was ‘more evil’ than Hitler. Science fiction magazines regularly produce ordered lists of ‘most evil’ villains. And I think that ‘evilness’ is something that most people would assess through assessment of revealed intention, rather than actual consequences. I’m pretty sure that if you asked the man on the street whether the Glasgow bomber was ‘more evil’ than the London bomber, the fact that he was unsuccessful would not – *in itself* – count either way.
Important qualifier, relevant in sentencing: I think that attitude towards consequences after-the-fact is also relevant – ‘remorselessness’ in the face of awful consequences is, I think, normally considered to be worse than remorselessness in the face of failure to achieve awful consequences.
But this question is only a part of the debate on sentencing. I have always been inclined to think that only intention [and perhaps attitude towards consequences], rather than the consequences themselves, should be counted in sentencing. But for most people, consequences matter, at least pre-reflectively.
This is entirely natural – if a person’s actions are associated with an actual death, clearly one is going to think worse about that person – not because that person might be compared to another and considered ‘more evil’, but because one simply thinks *more* about that person. He or she enters one’s life, disturbs one’s peace of mind, becomes an object of one’s thoughts, in a way that people who *don’t* kill our loved ones just don’t. And consequently – rightly or wrongly – society demands restitution, normally in the form of retribution against the malefactor.
Hume would, I think, endorse this account: the association of one idea with another often lends force and vivacity to that second idea. I’m busy reading Adam Smith, but I’m sure you can find a half-dozen relevant quotations without much effort.
How, then, do we interpret the passage you mention? I would suggest that that passage deals only with the ‘praiseworthiness/unworthiness’ of actions. People treat blameworthiness as an objective question, much like the ‘evilness’ attributable to agents that I dealt with above. And I think that the conventional morality does not treat the Glasgow bomber as any less *unworthy* than the 7th July bombers. But nonetheless, other considerations – which you might even call blameworthiness [which is not the opposite of praiseworthiness] – mean that we resent the 7th July bombers more.
I haven’t read it since first year, but the best neo-Humean account of these things is Peter Strawson on ‘Freedom and Resentment’.
Ed said,
October 6, 2010 at 12:07 pm
This relates to Williams and Nagel’s work on moral luck. One of the things Williams notes about it is that the notion of strict voluntariness, or focusing on intention alone, is problematic as it claims that,
“we might, if we conducted ourselves clear-headedly enough, entirely detach ourselves from the unintentional aspects of our actions … yet still retain our identity and character as agents. One’s history as an agent is a web in which anything that is the product of the will is surrounded and held up and partly formed by things that are not, in such a way that reflection can only go in one of two directions: either in the direction of saying that responsible agency is a fairly superficial concept, which has limited use in harmonizing what happens, or else that it is not a superficial concept, but that it cannot be ultimately purified – if one attaches importance to the sense of what one is in terms of what one has done and what in the world one is responsible for, one must accept much that makes its claim on that sense solely in virtue of its being actual. (ML: 29-30).
Does that help at all? I find it pretty convincing.
Best,
Ed
chris said,
October 6, 2010 at 1:07 pm
Isn’t there a bit of question-begging involved when you say “imagine a parallel world in which Shahzad had the exact same motivations as in this world.”
I suspect that one reason why, in practice, we judge the successful terrorist more harshly is that we believe that his very success is indicative of greater evil intent – the fact that his bomb went off shows that he took more care about making it.
If it could be proven that motivations were the same, would we really judge the “unlucky” terrorist less harshly? I’m not sure.
Peter said,
October 6, 2010 at 1:52 pm
Chris,
If we go to one of the standard moral luck examples – that of the drunk driver (one is fortunate and gets home safely, one is unfortunate and an innocent person happens to be in the way), the law certainly does judge the “unlucky” drunk driver worse than the “lucky one”. Or at least, the unlucky one gets a harsher punishment.
As for whether that’s right … well … I don’t think it’s wrong. People are punished for what they do, and the unlucky drunk driver has killed someone, the lucky one has not. Punishment should reflect the gravity of that.
Mark said,
October 6, 2010 at 3:05 pm
Our feelings regarding punishment (and reward) aren’t fundamentally based on moral considerations but on the level of pain we suffer.
Desire for revenge is largely an instinctive way to control other people, to deter them from harming us – given the difficulty in knowing others’ motivations, it makes sense that it’d be triggered by damage received rather than how evil the person was.
However, the law isn’t based solely on our personal feelings – wider concerns of evil and motivation also come into play at the social level.
David said,
October 6, 2010 at 6:51 pm
I once read someone claim that the difference between Labour’s concept of crime and the Conservatives’ was that Labour defined crime by thought, whereas the Conservatives did by action.
Now, I suspect in practice that is nonsense, but it is true that there’s a tension. Motivation does matter, but I think what you actually do matters as well. I think that it’s probable we all have the capacity to murder within us — sometimes even feel a desire to murder — yet no-one seriously thinks we should be punished unless it expresses itself in reality.
So even if someone is prosecuted for attempted murder, it’s for the practical side of having actually made a real attempt to enact their motivations, rather than merely their motivations.
Should a successful bomber receive a harsher sentence than an unsuccessful one? I think so — the factor of public protection in both cases is equal, so is the factor of the need for rehabilitation, but justice hasn’t.
Now, the idea of like-for-like retribution is controversial — I certainly disagree with the principle in many cases, such as torture, for example. And it is naturally limited itself — you cannot kill someone many times over. But I think in the case of “a life for a life”, there is a strong argument in principle. It seems inherently right that someone who would wilfully violate another’s right to life should forfeit their own, and it is not a policy to my mind which rejoices in pain and suffering in the same way as torture and possibly public execution do.
However, the reason I believe such a policy is rightfully limited is a more pragmatic principle, that of not entrusting too much power to the government. And “Innocent until proven guilty” it may be, but as a matter of cold fact that is impossible. So the death penalty is out of bounds from a matter of justice as well.
But essentially, I think there should be a reflection of actual harm caused in sentencing rather than merely motivation — not least because it’s impossible to quantify exact levels of motivation in each criminal.
john malpas said,
October 7, 2010 at 5:44 am
what a lot of words to describe the obvious.
It is revenge
- an eye for and eye etc. Why try to pretty it up?
If your enemies fear you not your house will fall.
Paul Sagar said,
October 7, 2010 at 12:45 pm
Cheers to everyone who’s replied – I’m rushed off my free ATM so sorry for not replying sooner.
Briefly: I’m torn between the position Chris Dillow (and Ronnie) appeals to and the observations of Peter (and Mark). By turns, I agree with Chris: when we describe the situation carefully the stronger feelings of disapprobation do seem to fade and we regard both sets of evil-doers with something like equal ferocity. However, i by turns lean the other way: it seems that we *do* treat actualised evil as having a big normative input, in a way that merely intended evil can’t match.
I’m tempted to think that Ed is right to bring agency considerations into this. However, whilst I think the quote he gives is interesting, it at best describes the situation and hints at ways forward, rather than actually giving us those forward paths.
Steve R said,
October 7, 2010 at 1:30 pm
Maybe a possible answer to your unhappiness with your ‘Humean’ explanation that successful malevolent action excites greater disapprobation than unsuccessful malevolent action could be to dismiss your feelings that ‘what matters is whether people really do die’ as the breakdown of a heuristic under certain circumstances? ie a cognitive bias.
Accepting that ‘the external performance has no merit, we must look within to find the moral quality’, doesn’t mean that we can look directly at people’s intentions. We have to use behaviour as a guide, and typically this works. This case is unusual in that it is a clear case of unsuccessful behaviour. Normally we just see what people do; either because they were successful or because failure isn’t obvious (ie when someone tries to do x but achieves y instead, we just assume their intention was to do y). So in most cases, a heuristic by which we judge the moral quality of a person by his actions is not contradicted.
This would imply that the reason you ‘feel’ that ‘what matters is whether people really do die’ is that we have a predisposition to focus on ‘external performance’ to judge the ‘moral quality’, which is what we really care about. In the rare case of a visible failure, this method of judging breaks down and we are left judging the successful murderer more harshly than the failed murderer.
Okay, this feels clunky; I’m making it up as I go along. Maybe Chris could come up with an actually identified cognitive bias to pin this story to? But if it is only your ‘feelings’ in your penultimate paragraph that are the sticking point, perhaps something like this could be useful? It fits with your comment above that ‘when we describe the situation carefully the stronger feelings of disapprobation do seem to fade and we regard both sets of evil-doers with something like equal ferocity’.
Paul Sagar said,
October 7, 2010 at 3:48 pm
Steve, thanks for that. I think you’re definitely on to something. I’ve run far too many things together, far too quickly, in the original piece (for example, emotive moral reactions and punishment are clearly separate, and each carry tonnes of philosophical baggage best kept likewise separate) but I hadn’t thought about the fact this is such an *unusual* example I’m picking on here – and like you I suspect that its unusual-ness *matters*.