You WILL Respect, respect Thomas Hobbes, that is
Here’s a scenario for you: you have a time-machine, but it will only travel back to Christmas 1996. Labour are obviously about to win next year’s election, and you’re allowed one bet, on this question: who’s going to be the most influential political philosopher of the next decade? Granted, it’s a funny sort of time-machine, but where does your tenner go?
You can quickly rule out Marx and a century-and-a-half’s worth of acolytes. (You’re not that naive.) Liberal-egalitarians like Rawls and Dworkin, too: the infernal Fabian (no, Tourettian) urge to twiddle and tinker isn’t dead yet. Maybe you’d go for someone new? John Kay, business economist, coiner of the “stakeholder society”, has been seen hanging out with the right crowd (but is just about to be dropped). And Anthony Giddens is probably too short a price to be worth a bet. With Clinton in the White House and the SPD sure to win in 1998, a Third Way three-way seems inevitable.
I tell you who you wouldn’t have picked, though: Thomas Hobbes. Which is a shame, because you could probably have named your price, and by next Christmas you’d be in Barbados with your feet up. Because he just keeps cropping up, again and again. You might even say that he’s enjoying a renaissance, if it weren’t for the fact that the old royalist was anything but a renaissance man.
Exhibit one: on scratching that itch to ditch habeas corpus resisted by every leader since Hobbes was still breathing. As I explained elsewhere, it’s straight out of Leviathan:
… nothing the sovereign representative can do to a subject, on what pretence soever, can properly be called injustice or injury
Exhibit two: in the return of the vendetta-from-above to public discourse:
The former head of the Metropolitan Police, Lord Stevens … says: ‘I genuinely never thought I’d say this, but I am now convinced that the monster who executed this young woman in cold blood should, in turn, be killed as punishment for his crime.’
And from Leviathan again, chapter 28:
It is manifest therefore that the right which the Commonwealth (that is, he or they that represent it) hath to punish is not grounded on any concession or gift of the subjects.
Which brings us to the re-re-relaunch of Blair’s (for his it must be, no?) Respect agenda. No need for theorizing this time. Blair’s citing Hobbes in his speeches. A closet Hobbesian no more:
From the theorists of the Roman state to its fullest expression in Hobbes’s Leviathan, the central question of political theory was just this: how do we ensure order? And what are the respective roles of individuals, communities and the state?
Which is about as good an ancient genealogy of fascism as you could manage in two sentences.
Actually, there’s a bit of tragedy in here, too. Scrape away all the quasi-totalitarian, communitarian-lite, speech-writer’s guff, and Blair almost gets it right. He flirts with the answer. He quotes R. H. Tawney approvingly. The same R. H. Tawney who in Equality (1931, p. 291) wrote:
Though an ideal of equal distribution of material wealth may continue to elude us, it is necessary, nevertheless, to make haste towards it
There’s more. Blair, from the same speech:
Poverty and exclusion from the material norms of a prosperous society provide fertile ground for crime. Anti-social behaviour is more common in poor areas. Richard Sennett has written persuasively about the way the basic courtesies diminish with increasing material inequalities. The social capital literature also provides a large body of data to show that respect and trust are less evident in areas of high deprivation.
But this suggestion is left to hang. The policy implications are ignored: not Blair’s “Neighbourhood Renewal” or “the New Deal for Communities”, surely, but straightforward redistributive taxation. The dirty word of noughties politics. Could it be true? That the PM suspects the answer to this drip-drip of low-level criminality and disengagement just maybe lies somewhere in the gross and increasing maldistribution of wealth and power? That he isn’t bold enough to do anything about it?
For me, that last parapgraph is the tragedy of New Labour in one easy to swallow pill.
Does Blair regard redistribution in much the same way as the prettiest girl at the school disco, do you think? He really, really wants to ask her to dance but is sure he’ll get laughed at for trying. In the meantime she’s wondering why no one will talk to her. He gets embittered and at the end of the night goes off with the weird bossy one nobody else likes who turns out to be a bunny boiler.
For me, one of the funniest aspects of the Relevance of Hobbes these days is that he’s most relevant at those moments when people deny that he is. John Gray wrote in the post-9/11 edition of the New Statesman that “24 September 2001 edition of the New Statesman, John Gray wrote that “Even Hobbes cannot tell us how to deal with fundamentalist warriors who choose certain death in order to humble their enemies”, which is a strange claim set against the concerns with religious fanatics which run right through Leviathan and arguments on any number of themes related to Gray’s concerns.
But I think you’re making the reverse error, seeing Hobbes where there isn’t anything to be seen. Stevens is making a retributive lex talionis argument; the relevant philosopher, if you want a distinguished philosopher, is Immanuel Kant, who had very firm opinions about the necessity of the public authority to kill murderers. In Leviathan ch.28, Hobbes denies that punishment is a kind of revenge:
*** “seeing the aym of Punishment is not a revenge, but terror…” ***
The point of harsh punishment on Hobbes’s account is to deter other people from doing the same thing, or to deter the same person from doing the same thing again. And that’s not the point Stevens is making, above.
On habeas corpus, sure, for Hobbes the sovereign is the proper judge of public safety, and the means necesary to secure it. But don’t paint Hobbes as the caricature authoritarian here: he was one of the only people to favour the rights of juries to disregard the instructions of judges, for example, in the years before Bushell’s case, and that’s often viewed as a classic safeguard of liberty against the oppressive state.
Finally, finally: a non-Hobbes point. Isn’t the reason young people are getting drunk a lot and being generally rowdy and throwing up in city centres more than they used to nothing at all to do with “declining respect” and everything to do with the fact that we’ve had pretty close to full employment over the better part of the last decade. Young people have money to spend, because they’ve got jobs, and they’re spending it the way young people with money to spend have always spent it. “Disrespect” is in many cases a symptom of national prosperity, not of national decline, or so it seems to me.
More Hobbes goodness, from Leviathan Chapter XXI: “LIBERTY, or freedom, signifieth properly the absence of opposition…”
Heh… On a more worrying note (from the same chapter):
“if we take liberty for an exemption from laws, it is no less absurd for men to demand as they do that liberty by which all other men may be masters of their lives. And yet as absurd as it is, this is it they demand, not knowing that the laws are of no power to protect them without a sword in the hands of a man, or men, to cause those laws to be put in execution.”
See – by opposing this, we’re actively ASKING asking to be mugged by hoodies. We’re poor, foolish, easily led idiots:
“it is an easy thing for men to be deceived by the specious name of liberty; and, for want of judgement to distinguish, mistake that for their private inheritance and birthright which is the right of the public only. And when the same error is confirmed by the authority of men in reputation for their writings on this subject, it is no wonder if it produce sedition”
(Apologies for the illiteracy in the second sentence of my comment, above. A botched cut’n’paste operation, I’m afraid. Still, the sense is clear enough.)
Poverty and exclusion from the material norms of a prosperous society provide fertile ground for crime. Anti-social behaviour is more common in poor areas … The policy implications are ignored: not Blair’s “Neighbourhood Renewal†or “the New Deal for Communitiesâ€Â, surely, but straightforward redistributive taxation.
I haven’t really read any research on this because redistribution has always struck me as inherently unfair unless practiced at a very low level (but hey, I’m rich – I would say that…), but it strikes me that there is some gun-jumping going on here. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, and all that. Does poverty cause anti-social behaviour, or does anti-social behaviour cause poverty?
All this redistribution stuff just seems to me to be a way to excuse people who do shitty things from the moral agency for their shitty behaviour, and is thus incredibly patronising. Anti-social behaviour? The chavs can’t help it, Tarquin (or other stereotypical Islingtonista name…). They’re poor.
Wow, that’s is, truly, a great way to reduce crime: simply brilliant, my dear!
Simply replace theft by individuals with theft by the state. Nice one.
I’m sorry, but I thought that we were ruling out Marx?
DK
Hey DK, you can always level up not down!
Correllation or causation is a diversion, and one I am not surprised to see raised by someone who sees redistribution as inherently unfair.
As crime rates vary over time, then, unless you hypothesise that the character of people is changing by virtue of some kind of non-social effect, we must suggest that the variation in crime rates is the product of social factors. Within societies (which minimises the confounding social factors that may differ between societies), material deprivation and inequality appear to be very strongly correllated with rates of crime.
Even if you do suggest that criminal character is inborn, you must account for the varying crime rates through modern history. A dsygenic explantion would satisfy, but, of course, it is not supported by the evidence.
You must conclude that, for the most part, criminal character is not inborn, that criminals are made by their society. So it is not, as DK asserts on his blog, the replacement of theft by individuals with theft by the state, but attempts to transform the conditions of people who have been unfortunate enough to in conditions that might shape their character along criminal lines. This improves their lot, and as their initial lot is no fault of ther own, their lot can hardly be held to be justified.
This does not absolve criminals of moral responsibility, merely points to the limits. A criminal is still, according to this simple analysis, the possessor of a criminal character and has committed criminal acts. It is not your or my ‘fault’ that he or she is criminal, but if we want to reduce the level of criminality, then the responsibility does lie with us, as comparatively more powerful political and social actors.
All this redistribution stuff just seems to me to be a way to excuse people who do shitty things from the moral agency for their shitty behaviour, and is thus incredibly patronising.
Quite.
I am, effectively, living in poverty at the moment and have been, really, for the last year (and certainly for the last 4 months). I have two potatoes and the end of a loaf of bread and not a single penny in my pocket, bank account or credit card. I have two arrestment orders against me and my mortgage is four months in arrears. I have lost half a stone in weight over the last few weeks.
I also have no real idea of when I will get any more money. All the money that I get goes into maintaining my phone, internet connection and my servers so that I can continue to work.
Have I mugged anyone yet? No.
Have I broken into a house or committed credit card fraud. No.
Have I become drunk and disrupted people’s lives? No (when you are truly in poverty, you cannot afford alcohol or drugs).
These scum want something for nothing, and giving them greater amounts of something to fuel their nothing is not going to modify their behaviour.
DK
(DK – Marx attacked those socialists who thought that redistribution by the state from the rich to the poor was the way to bring about social democracy, so it’s not clear to me what his relevance to your comment is.)
Andrew B, what you are effectively saying is that we should reward criminality; if you commit crime, we will give you some free money in order to persuade you not to commit crime.
So if people continue to commit crimes, do we give them yet more money? At what point do we stop? When everybody is earning exactly the same amount?
Justin, if we level up, where – exactly – does the money to level up come from?
DK
“These scum want something for nothing…”
So maybe you’re not so far from Marx yourself after all, DK: he called the Lumpenproletariat “the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society…” in the Manifesto, and wasn’t terribly polite about them in the 18th Brumaire, either.
Not by state intervention you can’t, the state does not create wealth so any redistribution that it does is zero sum. At best some go up and some go down, taking into account the inefficiency that always happens when the State gets involved you end up struggling even to make that.
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. This is not about rewarding crime. How does locking up criminals and reducing material inequality reward crime?
Mind, I doubt this will get through to you. Your argument is like the old smoking one: “my Grandma smoked 20 a day and lived to be 100 years old and died in an ice-skating accident. Therefore the idea that smoking causes cancer is nonsense.” Of course, to say this requires carefully honed stupidity. I am not saying that poverty and deprivation produces criminal characters in every person who lives in poverty and deprivation, merely that it produces these characters in greater amounts than found in more affluent population sections.
Chris – of course, a state-owned industry can create wealth.
No, I am saying that we reduce inequality in our society…
Since this is supposed to be a Hobbes thread, it might be worth saying something about Hobbes’s often under-rated egalitarianism. Hobbes thought that human beings were equals by nature, but he also thought that even if we weren’t, it was a law of nature that we should treat one another as equals in civil society.
Lots of strands of his philosophy point in s broadly egalitarian direction, but one of his arguments is this, that people tend falsely to believe that they are better than other people, and this generates what Hobbes calls “vainglory”, which he suggests in ch.27 of Leviathan is one of the chief causes of crime.
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.
And in Hobbesian terms that’s a good shorter-term solution, as fostering these kinds of equalities helps create the conditions which makes the longer-term solution possible, and that’s a good thing.
As crime rates vary over time, then, unless you hypothesise that the character of people is changing by virtue of some kind of non-social effect, we must suggest that the variation in crime rates is the product of social factors. Within societies (which minimises the confounding social factors that may differ between societies), material deprivation and inequality appear to be very strongly correllated with rates of crime.
That’s a nice wordy restatement of the claim that inequality and poverty cause crime, but it isn’t either proof or evidence of that claim. Note that I didn’t claim that criminality was inborn, nor did I say that social factors were not an issue. I just wondered which comes first: bad behaviour or poverty, chicken or egg? That’s a fundamental question that needs answering and without getting that answer, advocating policy to fix the problem seems premature.
Andrew, bad behaviour needs a cause. Unless you are some kind of obscurantist, all things have a cause in this universe.
I like the appeal to uncertainty to delay action. It is used to delay environmental action, health and safety legislation. If taken seriously, this would halt action permanently, and certainly halt all social policy, as proof in the strictest sense is more or less impossible to come by. You may as well simply say, I am a conservative.
But such political positions do not engage properly with the philosophical idea that they draw on – that assigning causation is a matter of human judgement, and that causation is a phenomenon the resists the demonstration of watertight proof. If they did, and still demanded an end to public policy that runs contrary to conservative ideas, they would, if they were honest, actually advocate an end, not just to policy, but all action that is performed with an end in sight. Such a position would be nonsense, which is why I stated that resolving this ‘chicken and egg’ scenario is diversionary rhetoric. We have to use our human judgement, and trust the human judgement of experts.
Of course, I would justify redistributive policies on the grounds of more than simply fostering public order – in particular, on democratic (building a body of equals), and human dignity (the market is only a judge of supply and demand even at its theoretical best, not human worth).
We have to use our human judgement, and trust the human judgement of experts.
A line one could use to justify almost any action, whether it is right or wrong. Indeed, our Glorious Leader has some form on this – hey, he’s a pretty straight sorta guy…
But I digress. I’m not saying that bad behaviour doesn’t have a cause. I’m just asking for evidence that the (primary) cause is poverty and inequality. Correlation doesn’t cut it.
Nor am I appealing to uncertainty to delay action. I just think the proposed action is wrongheaded. The fact that I disagree with redistribution doesn’t mean that I think we should do nothing about crime.
Andrew, you have set up an unpassable test for redistributive action designed to improve social order. This is not because poverty and inequality are, or are not, causes of crime, but because this could never be demonstrated to your satisfaction.
If I am wrong, suggest how causation could be demonstrated to your satisfaction.
And, given that you think we should do something about crime, would you mind telling me what that is, and what proof there is that it interrupts the causal pathways that produce crime?
“We have to use our human judgement, and trust the human judgement of experts.”
A line one could use to justify almost any action
A line that one has to use to justify any action. Have you read no philosophy of knowledge?
More, acknowledging that crime is not, for the most part, inborn, and then refusing to do anything about the [perceived] social causes of crime leads you down the path of being bound to view criminals as victims of society. “Yes, we know that the character of the criminal is not inborn. Yes, we know that it is the result of social factors. No, we refused to act to ameliorate any of the effects of these social factors. I am sorry that you have become a criminal.”
DK – ever the mischaracterisation of Marx based on the misinterpretations of Stalin and Mao, eh?
Let’s really bake a few noodles here.
Philosophically speaking Marxism and modern free market capitalism – as per Friedman and Fukayama – share common roots in positivism, which bequeathed to both the same basic flaw; a belief in perfect solutions to social problems.
Capitalism and socialism are mutually dependent on each other.
Socialism requires capitalism to generate wealth or there is nothing to redistribute in the name of social justice. Without wealth there is famine and starvation.
Capitalism requires socialism to redistribute an element of the wealth it generates in order to maintain social order.
Ideology, whether political or religious, provides a focus for revolution and disorder but in not the engine of revolt; that engine is poverty and rampant inequality.
That’s something that was recognised by Mikhail Bakunin when he predicted, successfully, that it would be agrarian peasant societies and not industrial ones that would foster Marxist revolutions – although that view is now more commonly associated with Trotsky and usually misattributed to him in the sense that its supposed that it was his own prediction and not one he nicked from Bakunin.
Why is this the case?
Because it is poverty, in the main, which temporarily lends to revolutionary ideologies their popular, mass support. That’s a truism that holds equally for the Peasant’s Revolt, English Civil War, the French Revolution, the American Revolution (where popular support for revolt was driven by excessive taxation), the Russian Revolution and functions still today, not only in the Islamic world where poverty and inequality drive Islamic fundamentalism but also in the US where it is no coincidence that the heartlands of the religious right and Christian fundamentalism are those states which rely substantially on agriculture as a means of generating wealth. The sole exceptions to this rule are the rise of fascism in the 1930’s, this being the sole occasion -to date – in which markedly industrial societies were hit hard enough by economic depression and poverty to spark popular revolt.
Socialism and the restribution of wealth is, in that sense, the price that wealthy capitalists pay so as not to wind up hanging from lamp posts.
For capitalism not to collapse under the weight of its own instabilities there must be some mechanism by which redistribution of wealth takes place within the system in such a way that the mass populace is maintained at a level sufficiently above subsistence to prevent widespead social disorder.
Quite what that mechanism should be and how best it may be effected is a matter for debate; the state may be an inefficient mechanism but it can perform that function. A completely unregulated free market cannot as such markets are blind to the social effects of their operation – such a market, in its pure form, says ‘if you can’t afford to eat, then starve’ to which the response of the people who are starving invariably involves the insertion of pitchforks into rich people.
What consumer-driven free market has done over the last 25 years is not only generate wealth but raise expectations across the board, it has raised the tipping point at which the mass population percieves itself to by be living sufficiently above subsistance levels to quell any poverty-driven tendency to disorder.
The more a capitalist society generates wealth and the more ostentatious that society becomes in its displays of wealth the more things get added to list of perceived essentials without which people see themselves as being poor and subject to an unjust degree of inequality, which is why Marx correctly identified that capitalism inherently contains the seeds of its own destruction if permitted to develop unchecked – a view accepted by economists on both left and right.
Redistribution of wealth is not wrong or undesriable, its essential to capitalism’s survival – the real questions are how much needs to be redistribute, how best it should be done and what it the optimum balance between wealth generation and redistribution.
Unless you’d prefer the pitchfork approach?
If I am wrong, suggest how causation could be demonstrated to your satisfaction.
Directing me to peer reviewed research that looks at all of the plausible causes of crime and analyses their effects in isolation would be a good start. I don’t think it is enough to look at the correlation of crime with one factor, then to suggest a plausible mechanism by which that factor could cause crime. That isn’t science. It’s propaganda with bad stats.
A line that one has to use to justify any action. Have you read no philosophy of knowledge?
Admittedly, no. Although I think it is my poor phrasing rather than the quality of my argument which is at fault. Yes, at some point one has to trust the experts to justify action. Clearly this is true. No, I don’t think that ‘Trust me, I’m an expert’ on its own is a convincing argument for that action.
More, acknowledging that crime is not, for the most part, inborn, and then refusing to do anything about the [perceived] social causes of crime leads you down the path of being bound to view criminals as victims of society.
But again, I’m not refusing to do anything about the social causes of crime. I just don’t agree with you on what they are. But I wouldn’t see criminals as victims of society. That, again, is removing agency from the criminal. The fact that society hasn’t provided sufficient disincentive for a specific individual to commit crime is not the fault of society.
And, given that you think we should do something about crime, would you mind telling me what that is, and what proof there is that it interrupts the causal pathways that produce crime?
Are we talking about crime, or anti-social behaviour, because the policy prescriptions would be different? On crime, I’d make punishments much harsher, build more prisons, and make sentencing longer and more transparent, remove early release schemes. Typical Tory stuff. The evidence: The drop in crime rates under Howard. Prison works.
For anti-social behaviour, I’d remove incentives for people to fuck about all day. Welfare to work schemes, time limits on benefits, cracking down on people inappropriately claiming incapacity benefit, lowering the age of criminal responsibility, building more facilities for the kids. More Tory stuff, but I’d guess getting to grips with benefit dependency would be my number one. There is plenty of info on successful welfare to work schemes on the web. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the Googler.
Reading that last bit back, it occurs to me that a casual reader could interpret it as an implicit admission that poverty causes crime. 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. The link with poverty is coincidental, in that it is the poor who are most likely to be dependent on welfare. My, don’t I sound authoritarian today? Extra Respect points for me in Blair’s Britain.
“The evidence: The drop in crime rates under Howard. Prison works.” This is correlation, not proof of causation.
And the rest of your proposals are either supported in a similar manner, or are proposals based on inference from social theory.
Now, I am not saying that you ought not to make policy proposals on the basis of such reasoning. I will leave that argument of delegitimation to you. Given that you are happy to do this for the policy you oppose, but not for the policies that you support, I assume that the ‘chicken and egg’ rhetorical tactic deployed in the arguments above is, as I thought, simply dishonest.
The truth is that policy arguments cannot be settled by technocratic reliance calls on proof. These are political, as well as scientific, arguments, and they are likely to remain so. Calls urging that we do not act because ‘things are not proven’ are the dishonest rhetoric of the conservative. If he were honest, he would refrain from putting forward his own proposals that bear similar uncertainties.
This is correlation, not proof of causation.
Given that it the stats show that all else being equal (almost, clearly some things change slightly), increasing the use of prison reduced the crime rate over time, I’d dispute that. I doubt you could point to similar stats showing an increase in redistributive taxation cutting the crime rate over time. 1997 to the present would seem to be a good sample…
Calls urging that we do not act because ‘things are not proven’ are the dishonest rhetoric of the conservative.
Yes, you have a point here, but it is with my careless use of the word ‘proof’. Perhaps ‘sufficient evidence’ would be a better term. I don’t think we should increase levels of redistribution without at the very least piloting a scheme to see what the effects are. You also misrepresent me again here – I am not calling for no action, just not your action.
1997 to the present would seem to be a good sample…
According to the British Crime Survey, which is the most sensible yardstick to use, crime has been falling steadily since 1995.
Chris Lightfoot has nice graphs here.
According to the British Crime Survey, which is the most sensible yardstick to use, crime has been falling steadily since 1995.
Let’s not get into this old debate about which crime stats are the most sensible. And actually, I’m again being careless with words. I should have said:
‘I doubt you could point to similar stats showing an increase in redistributive taxation cutting the ASB rate over time.’
crime being distinct from anti-social behaviour in this context, I believe. The BCS has only looked at the perception of anti-social behaviour rather than actual experience until recently, so there seem to be no trend stats to look at, although obviously the trend in perception is upwards much like with crime.
Far be it from me, but if crime’s been falling since 1995, and redistribution wasn’t significantly increased until (guessing) 1999 – and even then, not to the point of reversing the growth in income inequality – but tougher sentencing started around 1994, then we have a pretty good case for saying it was tougher policy and not redistribution that did the trick.
Re the equality/exclusion-crime link, if I recall correctly crime grew pretty consistently from the early 1950s (I blame Bill Haley) until the early 1990s. The first half of that period saw extremely low unemployment and growing income equality; the second half, rapidly increased unemployment and growing inequality. The growth in inequality has continued since then, even as crime has fallen (unemployment has fallen, though).
Doubtless, if you leave a part of society wholly segregated from the rest, getting them to see the law as ‘theirs’ is more difficult. But I find the notion that, outside of grotesque disparities or exclusions, material inequality is the primary driver of crime to be plain silly.
(Not to mention, a society of state-enforced equality quickly creates its own inequalities – political ones, rather than economic.)
Hang on a minute:
From Unity:
“Capitalism and socialism are mutually dependent on each other.
Socialism requires capitalism to generate wealth or there is nothing to redistribute in the name of social justice. Without wealth there is famine and starvation.
Capitalism requires socialism to redistribute an element of the wealth it generates in order to maintain social order.”
From Andrew:
“I think that the psychological effects of benefit dependency, chiefly infantilisation, remove a sense of responsibility from the claimant. The link with poverty is coincidental, in that it is the poor who are most likely to be dependent on welfare.”
I will go a bit further: the poverty-trap effect of many aspects of the welfare state is well known and is doubly damaging: at a rational level, there are disincentives to getting off welfare; at a “social” level, there is the weakening of responsibility for one’s actions. Put this all together and you can make a case for suggesting that socialism certainly perpetuates (if it does not actually cause…) poverty and crime.
As Andrew Bartlett says: “… and we reduce crime by reducing the number of people with criminal character that we produce. ”
I agree, but it is here that Andrew Bartlett’s castigation of DK is unwarranted. DK offers his own position as an example (I bet he never thought he would be held up as an example to society …) of moral agency: DK is on his uppers but does not resort to crime. AB poo-poos this as a statistical outlier. AB is wrong. EVERY SINGLE CRIME IS THE RESULT OF AN INDIVIDUAL’S MORAL AGENCY. There is no statistical effect here.
Children being taught that they are entirely responsible for their own actions would be a good start. Society needs to stop suggesting that poverty is an excuse for crime.
It is socialism that causes envy because it is socialism that suggests that there should be no inequality regardless of the actions or behaviour or effort of individuals. It is socialism that perpetuates the poverty whilst simultaneously seeming to absolve individuals of responsibility for their criminal actions.
Without socialism, individuals would see that if they want a new television, they have got to go out and EARN it.
Socialism – as so rightly said by Unity – could not exist without capitalism, but I think capitalism would do a great deal better – for everyone – without socialism.
“EVERY SINGLE CRIME IS THE RESULT OF AN INDIVIDUAL’S MORAL AGENCY. There is no statistical effect here.”
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.
“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.”
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.
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…
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.
Precisely.
DK
Andrew Bartlett (apologies for having to use your surname – it sounds a bit harsh. I do so only to avoid confusion with non-trivial-solutions-type Andrew) gets very very close to the suggestion that reducing material inequality will reduce the numbers of people of criminal CHARACTER.
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.”
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I agree with the whole Hobbesian commentary on Blair. However there is a wider global background to this: Free market policies have created the kind of ‘free for all’ that Hobbes based his ideas on, so Blair’s respect is part of a wider authoritarian trend.
see:
http://danieltaghioff.blogspot.com/2006/01/respect-its-social-contract-stupid.html
And where is the social contract in all of this?
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It is ludicrous to believe that the crime of theft is directly related to poverty. If that presumption is believed, then our economic system is to blame for the woes of people.
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.
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