Crime & Punishment: A Gandhian Perspective

I’ve been re-thinking my views on punishment of late, although the tentative and inchoate nature of these thoughts prompt me (for now at least) to refrain from sharing them, even in a blog post.[1] However, having recently posted on the Gandhian take (by way of Bhikhu Parekh) on classical Liberal—and capitalist—ownership and private property, I thought to share his ideas on crime and punishment as well. Once more we’ll rely on Parekh’s well-crafted summary.[2]

Three areas in particular in which Gandhi highlighted the indissoluble connection between violence and the modern State: war, the exploitative economic system, and the punishment of crime.[3] The violence in these three cases is also conspicuous for being tolerated by elites and masses alike. We’ll concern ourselves with the last. As you’ll see in the bracketed comments, I’m not too fond of the use Gandhi makes of an analogy between disease and crime (owing to his indiscriminately moralistic approach to the former), however much something might be learned from the comparison. Nevertheless, we should not permit problems with that analogy to detract us from a fair consideration of his views on crime and punishment.

“Gandhi was disturbed by the ‘silent’ and largely invisible but extensive violence daily committed by the state without a murmur of protest, namely the prisons. His views on the subject were derived not only from his theory of non-violence but also from his reflections on what imprisonment had done to him, to his political colleagues and the ordinary criminals who sometimes shared prisons with him during his nearly six years of incarceration in India and seven months in South Africa.

For Gandhi, there were only crimes, not criminals. To describe a man as a criminal was to imply that criminality was inherent in his nature and that he was nothing more than a criminal. A man committing a crime did not necessarily have a criminal disposition, both because an isolated act did not signify a pattern, and also because a crime was often the result of a number of factors only marginally related to the agent’s character. Even if he was in the habit of committing crimes, he did not cease to be a human being endowed with a moral and spiritual nature. He was always more than and must be separated from his actions and tendencies. While his crimes should be condemned and punished, he deserved to be treated with the respect and love due to a fellow human being. Rather than brutalise and degrade him, punishment should help him reclaim his humanity. Men were responsible for one another, and if one of them turned delinquent, the rest could not disown their equal responsibility for his behavior. Even as he must search his conscience, they must probe theirs.

Gandhi detected a deep contradiction between modern society’s attitudes to disease and crime. It viewed disease with a solicitous concern bordering on indulgence and devoted vast resources to inventing new drugs, instruments, more effective forms of treating and acquiring greater knowledge of the human body. Diseases owed their origins to such causes as overeating, unbalanced diet, bad habits, consumption of alcohol, excessive stress and strain and an undisciplined life, all of which were moral lapses showing weak will-power and bad judgment. [Needless to say, Gandhi’s views here are quite radical and probably unacceptable to most of us insofar as we recognize that at least some diseases have a not insignificant genetic component or may arise, as it were, unbidden (as when, in the jargon of pop psychology, ‘bad things’ happen to ‘good people’). Furthermore, his view cannot accommodate the cases of infants and young children afflicted by diseases through no fault or lapse—moral or otherwise—of their own. That said, there’s a fair amount of truth to this picture, as seen in the case of at least some health problems: cancer, heart disease, stroke, and Type 2 diabetes, for example. Yet even this truth takes insufficient cognizance of the role of socio-economic environmental factors in affecting behavioral problems ostensibly caused by bad habits, poor judgment, or weakness of will.] Society, however, attached no opprobrium to and imposed no punishment on them, and took no steps to strengthen the intellectual and moral fibre of those involved. [Again, in the time elapsed since Gandhi composed his thoughts on this topic, things have in fact changed, at least in this country, as opprobrium and informal sanctions are in place with regard, for example, to morbid obesity, the eating of “junk food,” smoking, and excessive drinking, although the social messages in toto are undoubtedly “mixed” and contradictory in the face, for instance, of mass media entertainment and advertising. This serves to weaken the strength of Gandhi’s analogical comparison between disease and crime.] By contrast, it treated crime with the greatest of severity. Even when petty and inadvertent, it condemned it in the strongest terms and punished it in a demeaning and degrading manner. Society devoted little attention to exploring effective ways of eradicating it, and continued with the same old method of imprisonment which not only did not reduce but even increased the incidence of crime.

For Gandhi there was no real difference between crime and disease. Both, alike, displayed poor self-discipline and a lack of social responsibility and concern for others, both were avoidable and both cost society a great deal of money. There was no reason to tolerate one and condemn the other or to treat one with indulgence and the other with severity. [….] Even as modern medical science pampered the body, encouraged self-indulgence, weakened self-control and allowed disease to continue unabated, the modern prison brutalised its inmates, weakened their self-respect and encouraged the recurrence of crime. [….]

For Gandhi crime was a moral lapse, a ‘disease’ [in a metaphorical sense], not the normal condition of a human soul. Most men never committed crimes, and those who did generally refrained from doing so when treated with love and understanding. In his view, man committed crimes for one of three reasons: first, to secure the basic needs of life; second, a weak will and the inability to resist temptation; and third, in rare cases ill-will or malevolence. In the first case, crime was a product of poverty, and in the other two bad social and economic conditions and poor upbringing. For Gandhi will-power and self-discipline were not natural endowments but products of upbringing and the dominant social ethos. As for malevolence it too was not natural to man, for even the most hardened and vicious criminals loved someone, at least their parents, wives, husbands, children or animals, and the question was one of widening the range of their capacity for love and goodwill. [I suspect Gandhi ignored or wildly underestimated the occurrence of psychopathic behavior.] Since crime was basically a ‘product of social organisation,’ it could be very considerably minimised by appropriately changing the latter.

[Imprisonment, Gandhi believed], was generally inspired by the spirit of retribution which was morally unworthy of and reduced the state to the level of its temporarily deviant member. It provoked the spirit of vengeance in the prisoner and perpetuated the vicious cycle of violence. Above all, it never solved the basic problem of reducing the incidence of crime in the long term. Once behind bars a man was generally ‘lost to society for ever.’ He rarely came out reformed but often worse. In locking him up the state did violence to and even killed the human being in him, a crime often worse than the one committed by him. Gandhi pleaded that a state calling itself civilised must put an end to the system of daily dehumanising and brutalising its members and find less violent and inhuman ways of coping with crime, even if that involved taking calculated risks and making bold experiments. He observed:

Quite a few people say and believe that many children have been reformed through beating. It is this belief which is responsible for the increasing burden of sin in the world at present. The use of force is soul-destroying and it affects not only the person who uses it but also his descendants and the environment as a whole. We should examine the total effect of the use of force, and that over a long period of time. The use of force has continued over a long period of time, but we do not find that those things against which force has been employed have been destroyed. Formerly there used to be heavy punishments for theft. It is the opinion of all expert observers that heavy punishments have not stopped thefts. As the punishments began to be tempered with mercy, the number of thefts declined.

Until such time as an alternative to prisons was found—and Gandhi confessed that he had not yet been able to come up with one—much could be done to improve them. The most important change should be at the level of attitude. We should see them as places for reforming, not punishing people. Since they could not be reformed unless kept under constant supervision, their movements had to be restricted. Even as keeping patients in hospitals or quarantining those suffering from infectious diseases was not imprisonment, keeping those guilty of crime in reformative institutions for the required period of time was not so either. [….] In his view much could be achieved if ‘prisons’ were to become workshops-cum-educational institutions encouraging their inmates in constructive and socially useful activities, providing for their moral education and building up their self-respect, sense of social responsibility and character. He thought they were more likely to be reformed if trusted and provided with privacy, a decent environment, healthy diet, proper rest and civilised relations with each other and their wardens. Every social order successfully moulded the character of its members along the desired lines. There was no reason why the ‘prisons’ could not learn from its methods and achieve the same results.”

Notes:
[1] I’ve been inspired most recently and in part, by Ted Honderich’s book, Punishment: The Supposed Justifications Revisited (London: Pluto Press, 5th edition, 2006). See too this earlier post on “Crime and Unusual Punishments.” I’ve since updated (and divided into two parts: 1. criminal law, and 2. punishment and prisons) my bibliography for “criminal law, punishment and prisons” and will send it along upon request.
[2] Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989).
[3] Far and away the most analytically satisfying and thorough treatment of Gandhi’s understanding of violence and nonviolence remains Raghavan Iyer’s formidable study, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi (Santa Barbara, CA: Concord Grove Press, 2nd ed., 1983, 1st ed., Oxford University Press, 1973). An introduction to basic literature on Gandhi's life and work is found here.

[cross-posted at ReligiousLeftLaw.com]

Private Property & Ownership: The Gandhian Critique

The following is Bhikhu Parekh’s pithy introduction to Gandhi’s critique of the Liberal—and capitalist—conception of private property and ownership:

“The logic of private property was logically incoherent for two reasons. First, there was no logical basis on which a man could claim exclusive ownership of the products of his labour. Born a debtor, he remained one all his life. His powers, capacities, character and energies were all socially derived, and hence not his private property but a social trust to be responsibly used for the well-being of his fellow-men. Second, the efforts of countless men and women flowed into one another to produce even a simple object, rendering it impossible to demarcate the distinctive contribution of each. Their efforts further occurred within the context of the established social order whose silent and unnoticed but vital contribution could not be ignored either. [….]

For Gandhi private property was subversive of the social order because it conflicted with the fundamental principles underlying and sustaining it. The customs, values, traditions, ways of life and thought, habits, language and educational, and other institutions constituting a social order were created by the quiet co-operation and the anonymous sacrifices of countless men and women over several generations, none of whom asked for or could ever receive reward for all their efforts. And their integrity was preserved by every citizen using them in a morally responsible manner. Every social order was thus of necessity a co-operative enterprise created and sustained by the spirit of sharing, mutual concern, self-sacrifice and yajna [‘sacrifice’ generally]. And its moral and cultural capital, available by its very nature to all its members as freely as the air they breathed, constituted their collective and common heritage to be lovingly cherished and enriched. The institution of private property rested on the opposite principles and breathed a very different spirit. It stressed selfishness, aggression, exclusive ownership, narrow individualism, a reward for every effort made, possessiveness and a right to do what one liked with one’s property. It was hardly surprising, Gandhi argued, that its domination in the modern age should have atomized and culturally impoverished society and undermined the basic conditions of human development.”

See Parekh’s book, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,1989): 134-135.

Image: The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City (‘Making a Fresco’) (1931) is one of four murals in the Bay Area painted by Mexican artist Diego Rivera (1886-1957).

Raising the flag

Tripoli, Berlin, Iwo Jima:

The “Truncated Autonomy” of Raz’s Liberal Perfectionism

The most explicit and thorough statement of Joseph Raz’s intriguing theory of “liberal perfectionism” is found in his invaluable book, The Morality of Freedom (1986) wherein “the end of liberal political morality is the good of an autonomous moral life.” In Constitutional Goods (2004) Alan Brudner proffers a succinct formulation of Razian liberal perfectionism:

“Autonomy…is essential to well-being, since personally endorsing one’s goods is essential to one’s deriving fulfillment from pursuing and accomplishing them. Because, moreover, the achievement of autonomy depends on the existence of a public culture offering a wide array of valuable pursuits, it is a common good requiring state action to realize it.”

But Brudner identifies, by my lights, a significant shortcoming in Raz’s formalist conception of autonomy that leaves us with a rather attenuated form of perfectionism: “Raz argues that, although a morally valuable goal is one that truly conduces to well-being, an agent can find valuable only what is socially valued.” Brudner labels this the “social dependency thesis,” as it relies on a formalist rendering of autonomy effectively “empty of specific content” insofar as it is without criteria whereby to independently (i.e., autonomously) assess the notion of well-being. His critique is as follows:

“This thesis implies that the ideal of well-being is attainable only in a well-ordered society where the available options are indeed morally valuable, for only there are the conventional fetters to well-being overcome. However, even in a well-ordered society, the social dependency thesis can avoid moral conventionalism only if it is possible for an agent to value a goal because it is independently valuable and not simply because it is socially valued. Raz affirms this possibility. He argues that goals are adopted because they are thought to serve well-being, and it is possible to have true and false beliefs about whether they do because well-being is distinguished from contentment. Yet that there is a distinction between the valued and the valuable will not by itself save moral autonomy from the clutches of the social dependency thesis. An agent will not be able to distinguish a false social belief about the goals that conduce to well-being from a true one unless he or she has an independent conception of what well-being is—independent, that is, of social opinion. If she does, it is difficult to see why the social dependency thesis should be true; but if she does not, then she will be dependent on social opinion after all. Raz himself offers no such independent conception, or rather he offers a circular and decidedly unhelpful one. Well-being, he says, consists in the successful pursuit of morally valuable ends, and a morally valuable end is one that conduces to well-being. But then the agent, who can value only what is socially valued and who has no way of connecting socially valued ends to a non-circular criterion of the morally valuable is effectively left with a morality of convention.”

Thus, writes Brudner, “Raz’s perfectionism, in failing to generate a rational content and scheme of fundamental ends, is not perfectionist enough given its commitment to autonomy.” Or, in other words, a formalistic conception of autonomy leaves us with an attenuated perfectionism. This may be analogous to, if not perhaps in some ways connected with, Isaiah Berlin’s influential (or infamous) analysis of freedom, at least as discussed by Jon Elster in Sour Grapes: studies in the subversion of rationality (1983). Indeed, it might be the case that Raz is assuming or perhaps influenced by Berlin’s (or something akin to Berlin’s) understanding of freedom:

“What is freedom, freedom tout court, being a free man? We may distinguish between two extreme answers to this question. One is that freedom consists simply in being free to do what one wants to do, irrespective of the genesis of the wants. In a well-known passage Isaiah Berlin argues against this notion of freedom: ‘If degrees of freedom were a function of the satisfaction of desires, I could increase freedom as effectively by eliminating desires as by satisfying them; I could render men (including myself) free by conditioning them into losing the original desire which I have decided not to satisfy.’ And this, in his view, is unacceptable. By this argument Berlin was led to the other extreme in the spectrum of definitions of freedom: ‘It is the actual doors that are open that determine the extent of someone’s freedom, and not his own preferences.’ Freedom is measured by the number and importance of the doors and the extent to which they are open [one might say this is Berlin’s version of the ‘social dependency thesis’]. Disregarding the last clause, which appears to conflate formal freedom and real ability, this means that freedom is measured by the number and non-subjective importance of the things one is free to do [emphasis added]. True, Berlin suggests that the notion of importance should also take account of the centrality of freedoms to the individual, but this would seem to smuggle in preferences again, contrary to his main intention. Importance, in his view, must be divorced from the individual’s own evaluation of importance.”

It seems Raz’s notion of autonomy is predicated upon or at least endorses Berlin’s understanding of freedom although Raz is, to be sure, sensitive to a welfarist conception of the satisfaction of desires or the value of individual preferences. As Elster explains, the degree of freedom depends on the number and importance of the things one (i) is free to do and (ii) autonomously wants to do.” The social dependency thesis appears in the end to make (ii) wholly dependent on or a function of (i) such that, for example, it’s irrelevant that I may “live in a society that offers me a great many important opportunities, which do not at all overlap with what I want to do.” Raz needs a more robust or substantive conception of autonomy that is able to invoke, as it were, independent criteria of “the good” or “the good life” which, in turn, allow for truly free individual judgment and assessment. The social dependency thesis and corresponding lack of an independent criterion or criteria of the good (or self-fulfillment) or what Brudner terms a “rational content and scheme of fundamental ends,” preclude full appreciation of the fact that “it is better to desire things because they are desirable than to do so because they are available,” or at least precludes the would-be autonomous person from knowing whether or not her choices are wholly determined by the latter condition. Perhaps, for example, I have inordinate desires for consumption based on the (possibly false) belief that it promotes happiness or well-being: how do I know that my desires are not shaped by the fact that I live in a society which provides a plethora of opportunities for consumption, the socially regnant or widespread de facto or default belief being that a life of consumption is conducive to or promotes well-being?

As Elster writes elsewhere, liberalism, in our case Razian perfectionist liberalism, “neglects the endogeneity of preferences. Liberalism advocates the free choice of life-style, but it forgets that the choice is to a large extent preempted by the social environment in which people grow up and live,” a social environment today that is defined by the ethos of the latest form of capitalism.* We might consider the possibility that there exists a space that might be carved out betwixt and between the liberalism of a capitalist democracy compatible with the truncated autonomy of Razian perfectionism, and a dictatorially or unduly paternalist (i.e. externally) imposed conception of the good life. Elster argues this space can be defined by a form of individual and collective self-paternalism: “If people do not want to have the preferences they have, they can take steps—individually or collectively—to change them.” Does the apparent widespread preference for (or belief in the good of) a life of consumption rule out the possibility of generating truly independent or substantively autonomous conceptions, and the preference for same, of the good life (Marxist or otherwise)? What steps might we take to generate truly autonomous conceptions of the good life (and preferences for same) beyond conceptions of welfare, well-being or happiness yoked largely to a life of consumption (including aesthetic pleasures and entertainment as well as material goods in the ordinary sense)? What might religious worldviews contribute to our understanding of the contours of “the good life?”

*See Elster's chapter, “Self-realisation in work and politics; the Marxist conception of the good life,” in Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene, eds. Alternatives to Capitalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Image: Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of (Earthly) Delights (c. 1500)

Saving Capitalism from Itself

The remarkable reformer, lawyer, and jurist, Louis D. Brandeis,* attempted to persuade the partisans of plutocracy that it was in their best interests to reform capitalism if they were concerned to save it: “the great captains of industry and of finance,” he warned them “…are the chief makers of socialism.” And of course Brandeis himself did much to humanize (in the broadest sense) capitalism in the first decades of the last century. But the truth of his rhetorical warning is an open question: does the behavior of corporate and finance capitalists contribute to rendering socialist theories and practices more palatable to masses experiencing the sudden thwarting of both their needs and fantasies? Is floundering in the conditions of material uncertainty and psychological insecurity conducive to rendering hearts and minds more receptive to utopian visions and radical socio-economic reforms and experimentation of socialist pedigree?

* See Melvin I. Urofsky’s biography, Louis D. Brandeis: A Life. New York: Pantheon Books, 2009.

American Violet: A Criminal Justice Story

The American criminal justice system is so dysfunctional that it presents well-intentioned people with a dilemma. Should good people cooperate with it? [….] My experiences as a prosecutor persuade me that prosecutors are more part of the problem than the solution. Many mean well, but the “lock ‘em up” culture is so pervasive that it defeats even people with the best of intentions.--Paul Butler[1]

The following is from the Wikipedia entry (notes and some links omitted) on a must-see film: American Violet. The movie is based on a true story. While it’s been out for a couple of years, we just got ‘round to viewing it on Sunday.

Plot
Set in the midst of the 2000 presidential election, American Violet tells the story of Dee Roberts (Nicole Beharie), a 24 year-old African-American single mother of four, living in a small Texas town (based after Hearne, Texas where the real incident took place). One day, while Dee is working a shift at the local diner, the powerful local district attorney (Michael O’Keefe) leads a drug bust, sweeping Dee’s housing project. Police drag Dee from work in handcuffs, dumping her in the women’s county prison. Indicted based on the uncorroborated word of a single and dubious police informant facing his own drug charges, Dee soon discovers she has been charged as a drug dealer.

Even though Dee has no prior drug record and no drugs were found on her in the raid or any subsequent searches, she is offered a hellish choice: plead guilty and go home as a convicted felon or remain in prison and fight the charges thus, jeopardizing her custody and risking a long prison sentence. Despite the urgings of her mother (Alfre Woodard), and with her freedom and the custody of her children at stake, she chooses to fight the district attorney. Dee works with an ACLU attorney (Tim Blake Nelson) and a former local narcotics officer (Will Patton) to take on the Texas justice system.

Historical Basis
The film is based on the civil rights lawsuit Regina Kelly v. John Paschall, filed on behalf of 15 African-American residents of Hearne, Texas who were indicted in November 2000 on drug charges after being rounded up in a series of drug sweeps the ACLU referred to as “paramilitary.” The lawsuit accused Paschall and the South Central Texas Narcotics Task Force of conducting racially motivated drug sweeps for more than 15 years in Hearne. In 2005, the ACLU and Robertson County settled and the plaintiffs agreed to dismiss the individuals named in the suit, including Paschall. The fictional Harmon County represents Robertson County, Texas, where John Paschall continues to serve as District Attorney. Regina Kelly continued to live in Hearne, Texas until 2009.

Comment:

Among the many issues raised by the film (e.g.: racism, poverty, the war on drugs, prosecutorial discretion), one has to do with what happens when poor people are charged with crimes in our criminal justice system. As Deborah Rhode forthrightly notes in her important book, Access to Justice (2004), the constitutional right to effective counsel[2] in criminal cases, “in practice…makes a mockery of formal guarantees.” The current structure of indigent defense gives, in other words, pride of place to ineffective representation. Thus, what Anthony Lewis wrote in Gideon’s Trumpet (1964) remains as true today as when it was first written:

“It will be an enormous social task to bring to life the dream of Gideon v. Wainwright [372 U.S. 335 (1963)]—the dream of a vast, diverse country in which every man charged with crime will be capably defended, no matter what his economic circumstance, and in which the lawyer representing him will do so proudly, without resentment at an unfair burden, sure of the support needed to make an adequate defense.”

Notes:

[1] A “Hip-Hop Theory of [Criminal] Justice” is outlined in chapter 7 (123-145) of Butler’s book (see ‘Essential Reading’ below). For a critique from the perspective of what purports to be a more accurate account of such a “theory,” see the student Note, “This is Real Hip-Hop…,” from the Georgetown Law Journal, 99.4 (2011): 1179-1225.

[2] Keeping in mind that even “grossly incompetent lawyering,” as Monroe Freedman says, “is not enough to establish ineffective counsel.” The current criminal justice system—especially for poor people—is, in Freedman’s pithy characterization, “unethical, unconstitutional, and intolerably cruel.”

Essential Reading:

Abramsky, Sasha (2007) American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Alexander, Michelle (2010) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press.

Banner, Stuart (2002) The Death Penalty: An American History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Butler, Paul (2009) Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice. New York: The New Press.

Cole, David (1999) No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System. New York: The Free Press.

Cusac, Anne-Marie (2009) Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Culture of Punishment in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Davis, Angela J. (2007) Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor. New York: Oxford University Press.

Garland, David (2010) Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Irwin, John (2004) The Warehouse Prison: Disposal of the New Dangerous Class. Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury Publ.

Mauer, Marc (2nd ed., 2006) Race to Incarcerate. New York: The Free Press.

Mello, Michael A. (1997) Dead Wrong: A Death Row Lawyer Speaks Out Against Capital Punishment. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Ogletree, Charles J., Jr. and Austin Sarat, eds. (2006) From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America. New York: New York University Press.

Patillo, Mary, David Weiman and Bruce Western, eds. (2004) Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration. New York: Russell Sage Foundation Publ.

Perkinson, Robert (2010) Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire. New York: Metropolitan Books.

Rhode, Deborah L. (2004) Access to Justice. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rhodes, Lorna A. (2004) Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Scheck, Barry, Peter Neufeld and Jim Dwyer (2000) Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted. New York: Doubleday.

Tonry, Michael (1996) Malign Neglect: Race, Crime and Punishment in America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Western, Bruce (2006) Punishment and Inequality in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation Publ.

The Smithian Categorical Imperative

The formulation of the Smithian Categorical Imperative is an attempt by the late Neil MacCormick in his last book, Practical Reason in Law and Morality (2008: 57-62) to combine Adam Smith’s “impartial spectator” with the Kantian “categorical imperative:”

“Enter as fully as you can into the feelings of everyone directly involved in or affected by an incident or relationship, and impartially form a maxim of judgment about what is right that all could accept if they were committed to maintaining mutual beliefs setting a common standard of approval and disapproval among themselves.”

Subsidiary Imperative:

“Act in accordance with that impartial judgment of what is right to do in respect of the given incident or relationship.”

The Ego, Vulnerability, & the Circumscription of Reason

The following passages are from John Cottingham’s, Philosophy and the Good Life: Reasons and the Passions in Greek, Cartesian and Psychoanalytic Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). I find them utterly persuasive on all counts and thus believe these propositions spell out at least one way we might take seriously the slogan that “the personal is political.” As such, they should be axiomatic to any Left-inspired emancipatory project.

“The fact is that vulnerability—to pain, to loss, to fear, ultimately to extinction—is not simply a function of psychological or developmental difficulties, but is part of our very nature as human beings—one of the signs of existence [dukkha] as the Buddhists have it. And unless moral life can be lived in a compartmentalized way, in a way that ignores or dangerously blindfolds us to that vulnerability (and this would involve a sacrifice of our wholeness, our integrity), then we are going to need an askesis [‘spiritual exercises’ as found, for example, among the Stoics and monastic and mystical traditions] that enables us to come to terms with it.”

“Before we can begin on the project of seeing how we should live, we first have to embark on the task of trying to understand ourselves. That much, at least, is fully in accord with a long classical tradition stretching from the famous injunction at Delphi right down to Pope’s Essay on Man: “Know then thyself.” But what is new is the insistence that the process has to begin with an attempt to come to terms with the darker side of our nature—the side which is not revealed by simple introspection and rational weighing of ‘what on balance we most want,’ but which will be grasped only at the end of a long process of recovery, rehabilitating those parts of the self which are initially submerged beneath the level of ordinary everyday awareness.”

“The problem of mastering, or at least accommodating, the passions was seen in both Greek and in early modern ethics as absolutely central to philosophy’s goal of teaching us how to live. But the solutions offered by both of these earlier systems were defective in important respects, and…the defects only begin to be remedied with the development of the unconscious—the notion that important parts of the self are not fully transparent to the deliberations of reason.”

Cottingham turns, rightly I think, to psychoanalytic theory to transcend (aufheben) the Enlightenment trajectory (with Greek pedigree) of a purely ratiocentric philosophy and ethics, endeavoring “to uncover the seeds of an approach which comes to terms with the incapacity of controlling reason to settle the conditions for human well-being, while at the same time not abandoning the values of systematic analysis and rational reflection [which are, of course, intrinsic to psychoanalytic theory and practice].”

For further reading, see here (this list has since been updated and I can send it along upon request).

Image: Freud’s psychoanalytic couch at the Freud Museum in London.