But how do you explain the millions of acts of theft of music and video via the internet? Are these thefts poverty motivated? How about the 250 billion dollars in business profits lost due to employees who “steal” time or take off work for dubious reason? (Don’t start rationalizing here, be honest with yourself).

The root cause of theft is greed and that 3 letter word…SIN. Yes, some steal to survive, but most steal because they can, and thereby enrich themselves at the expense of another. Socialogists must consider all the facts and not just the ones that agree with their premise.

“Anarchism, in my view, is an expression of the idea that the burden of proof is always on those who argue that authority and domination are necessary. They have to demonstrate, with powerful argument, that that conclusion is correct. If they cannot, …

see:

http://danieltaghioff.blogspot.com/2006/01/respect-its-social-contract-stupid.html

And where is the social contract in all of this?

Our 48 th step into hte breach that is the Britblog Roundup, you nominations for the best blog posts of the past week from the four nations on these Isles. You can make your nominations for next week’s simply by

For example, here:
“No, I am saying that we reduce inequality in our society, and we reduce crime by reducing the number of people with criminal character that we produce.”

I admit that the conjuction is “and”, not “so” or “therefore”, but it is really jolly close in his inference throughout. I know that I am about to embark on probably the biggest straw man argument ever to have graced the pages of the sharpener, but this is not far away from the overall theme of this discussion: that material inequality causes crime and/or envy/jealousy and hence anti-social behaviour.

BEGIN STRAW MAN:
I suggest that this is total rubbish . Firstly total and complete equality is not possible because individuals have different choices. I (currently) prefer beer to wine. I prefer gin to vodka. I like to have the thermostat in my house set at around 18 degrees: comfortable but not stuffy. Others may like it cooler or hotter. Those who like their houses hotter may be prepared to do a bit of overtime, or a paper round to fund their heating bills. Those who do not may prefer to go for regular bracing exercise to warm themselves up in order that they may forgo the warmth without too much discomfort.

How, exactly and precisely, does arrange for a situation where total and complete equality exists when individual choice affects every single aspect of life? Even if you could, would it be a good thing? I would resent being required to heat my house to a different degree than I choose simply to be equal to the next man.

But just supposing it were possible to have such equality: what happens when a tsunami strikes and inequality rears its ugly head? Or someone comes up with a brilliant new way to do something that saves them (personally at first) time or money or resources and as a result is materially better off? Such equality is very very brittle and, given the desire in human nature to differentiate and to attempt to gain status, is a classically unstable system.

OK, so just supposing that it were possible and you had found a way to lock it down so that we all remain materially equal, I challenge you to do this without a seriously unpleasant authoritarian regime.

OK, OK, OK, so just supposing that it were possible to achieve the equality (globally, despite all the differences in culture and environment and diversity, and crop failures) and that you could sustain it and that it could be sustained without repression of a really epic Stalinist death squad, IT STILL WOULDN’T WORK.

Where everyone was equal, humans would still find the minutest differences (hair colour, or foot size, or preference for beer over wine or whatever) to squabble over in an attempt to gain advantage, to be able to attract the prettiest girl to marry or whatever. The more level the playing field the more minute differences will be exaggerated.

Bingo, Andrew’s Criminal Character would be back.

END STRAW MAN.

It is also interesting that Andrew talks of Criminal CHARACTER: a predisposition towards crime. There is still a gap between character and individual actions of that character even within one person. On one day, your burglar may choose not to do a job (a burglary that is, not honest paid employment) say, because there is a large police presence and he reasons that he has a greater chance of being caught. On another he may see the risk as lower. This is a freely made decision. He decided – weighing the external factors such as police presence – whether or not to commit a crime. The police presence (or lack of it) is not the cause of the crime. It is the burglar’s thought processes that are on a minute by minute basis. At any and every stage of committing a crime, the criminal can decide to desist. No-one else can take responsibility for that. That society and external factors have a bearing on the thought processes at a very very high level is totally divorced from the criminal’s responsibility for his actions at the minute by minute level.

It is your failure to distinguish between these that is at the very heart of your confusion.

Which brings me back to Hobbes and Chris Brooke:

“The long-run solution to the problem is to have a society where not quite so many people are in the grip of the false beliefs that generate vainglory / crime, and Hobbesian politics are supposed to provide the framework in which on the whole true beliefs will find support and false beliefs won’t.

A shorter-term solution is for public policy to help foster material equalities among the citizens – e.g., through state-sponsored redistributive politics – as fostering equality helps to make vivid to citizens the idea that they are all one another’s equals, and should therefore treat one another as such, as well as reducing the kinds of material inequalities that foster envy, jealousies, and the like. ”

State sponsored redistributive politics does not make vivid to the citizen’s that they are all one another’s equals: it does the reverse. It highlights to individuals that any inequality is “unfair” and that there is therefore no (or certainly less) moral outrage at forcible equalisation by extra-state means (or crime as we call it).

To me, your short term idea is a false belief and, by your invocation of Hobbes, is less likely to allow us to get to his longer term goal or reducing vainglory.

By contrast, insisting that individuals are entirely responsible for their own actions by showing that individual effort generates reward, and by protecting and upholding property rights on the results, you might get a bit closer a more sustainable behaviour:

“he has more than me: perhaps he works harder, or spotted something I didn’t, or made something more efficiently and so garnered customers for his product at a competitive price.”

Let’s draw an analogy with the epidemiology of cancer. Of 100 people exposed to a suspected mutagen, 5 get cancer. The testimony of the other 95 does remove from the mutagen the charge of being a significant cause of cancer. For the cancer still needs a cause – nothing is acausal.”

Debatable in the case of cancer. A mutation in the replication “switch-off” mechanism is what causes cancer. What causes that mutation? Yes, it could be a carcinogen (a mutagen wth a particular propensity to cause this particular mutation) or it could be an entirely random mutation unaffected by any mutagen. In the modern age, one could say that this is less likely, but it is statistically relevant.

This is why you cannot say that this individual got lung cancer from smoking, secondary smoke or car exhaust fumes. In an individual, there is no way of telling what sparked that particular cancerous growth. One can say that these could be causative factors but, in an individual case, we just can’t know. Anyway, I digress…

“DK could be an entirely usual example of someone living in – in this case temporary – poverty.”

Or I could not. One could say that I would be more likely to commit crime because I am accustomed to having the latest film or the latest Depeche Mode CD. As for my poverty being temporary, well, possibly. I don’t know whether it will be or not. At present, whether my company continues or not, my personal debt – tied both to myself and my personal liabilities for the company – is about £10,000. The chances are that, whatever happens, I shall be in a certain measure of poverty for a good few years yet.

But still I won’t go around nicking things. Because I take personal responsibility for my behaviour. That’s what moral agency is.

People tend to take much more care of their own possessions that they have bought with money that they have earned. This is because they are aware of how much personal work when into being able to afford that particular object.

When the money to buy objects is given to people without their actually having to work to afford it, then naturally they respect its value less, because the value is not personal. People don’t graffiti their own houses, nor set fire to their own possessions.

Benefits, i.e. free money, destroy the link between personal effort and material wealth. Thus they break the link between personal responsibility and value. In this way, they make people less respectful of other people’s property.

For the record, I don’t see it that way. I think that the psychological effects of benefit dependency, chiefly infantilisation, remove a sense of responsibility from the claimant.

Precisely.

DK

No Andrew, let’s not draw an analogy with epidemiology of cancer. That is exactly my point. You cannot extrapolate from a microbe to a human being. Why not? Because human beings have moral agency where cancer does not. It was PRECISELY this analogy that you used against DK (re lung cancer and cigarettes) that I objected to.

The social impact at a statistical level is clear. If educational provision is poor or whatever in a given area you are going to have a higher number of people who do not understand their own responsibilities and have a marred understanding of the fact that burglary is a crime.

Ergo, you will get more crime because there are more people who, when each makes their own independent choice regarding their actions, do not factor into their decision that it is wrong or who do not care or (more probably) do not care about their victims. Society and external factors have a play here, BUT THEY ARE NOT THE PRIME CAUSE. The prime cause is that, amongst the millions of possible things that an individual could do at a given moment, that individual chooses to arm themselves with a jemmy and go and breaking and entering.

It is at the point that the individual chooses to do that that there is a break in the causal chain between society and the individual.

“We need not say that material deprivation makes all people criminal, nor that material deprivation makes most people criminal. We are simply saying that material deprivation is a causal factor in making some people criminal.”

Then why is that causal factor not a valid defence? Each individual crime is a decision by an individual. To suggest otherwise, as you do here, is to suggest that some people cannot help but commit crime. By your view of the world such people are not safe to be at large until such time as their moral compass has been set straight as they have no understanding of their detrimental effect on the rest of society. That this may not be their fault (and I would be reluctant to concede this entirely) is irrelevant. They would be a danger to society – and would have to have their freedom curtailed – until such time as we can find a way to persuade them to change their ways.

Or is that not your point? I suspect that it isn’t.

Every single crime is the result of an individual’s moral agency – fine, a perfectly reasonable moral and political statement. But the next statement is an expression of nonsense. If you do not think that there are extra-individual causes of character and behaviour then you are left in an errationalist position. Not just because you deny causation, but in denying the external causation of behaviour you deny the philosophical possibility of empiricism – the generation of ‘true’ belief by the stimulus of the outside world. This would be the ultimate in irrationalism.

“DK is on his uppers but does not resort to crime. AB poo-poos this as a statistical outlier. AB is wrong.” AB would be, if Ab had said that. I did not say that he was a statistical outlier. We need not say that material deprivation makes all people criminal, nor that material deprivation makes most people criminal. We are simply saying that material deprivation is a causal factor in making some people criminal. DK could be an entirely usual example of someone living in – in this case temporary – poverty. That tells us nothing about the causation of crime.

Let’s draw an analogy with the epidemiology of cancer. Of 100 people exposed to a suspected mutagen, 5 get cancer. The testimony of the other 95 does remove from the mutagen the charge of being a significant cause of cancer. For the cancer still needs a cause – nothing is acausal. We use comparison, and find that in 100 people who had not been exposed to the mutagen we find that only 1 developed the cancer in question. And, we might examine 100 people with that cancer and find that 95 had been exposed to that mutagen. Then we suggest, not ‘prove’, causation.

If you do deny the external causation of behaviour, not only do you fall into utter irrationalism, but you also have no means of explaining variations in crime rates, or changes in levels of anti-social behaviour, or any change in behaviour at all. As, if people only differed internally, if the only cause of behaviour were internal, then the behaviour of each generation, in each culture (which, of course, could not exist, as behaviours would be internally caused) would be stable, with variation only possible from the slow shift of genetics.

Of course, this is all nonsense, but this is the nonsense position you attempt to cling to. If, as I wrote to Michael Howard, “teaching people that are entirely responsible for their own actions” made any difference, it would demonstrate CONCLUSIVELY that the levels of crime and anti-social behaviour were the result of social factors.

Read my letter to Michael Howard, addressing his irrationalism.