| | Regarding Michael's post #19 (go back and reread it):
"Retribution" is the act of exacting justice against a wrongdoer, i.e., a response commensurate with the harm done to the victim -- a response that visits back upon the victimizer harm proportionate to what he has caused.
There are both moral and practical reasons for retribution, as I indicate in my various articles refuting anarchism. Moral, because it upholds the vital principle of causality in human relationships: that we should treat people according to the good or evil they have caused. Practical, because reflecting proportionate harm back onto a victimizer defeats his aim, which is: to gain something at someone else's expense.
In contrast to retribution, "prevention" -- the anarchists' preferred method of dealing with the threat of crime -- requires that the potential victim bear upon himself all the costs of crime (see again Michael's post #19): buying alarm systems, electric fences, patrols, and generally turning his home into a high-tech fortress, and defending his person with the purchase of weapons, karate classes, body armor, armored cars, bodyguards, etc. We are not to focus on punishing criminals after the fact; we are not to reflect proportionate harm back onto evildoers; we are simply to try to make it harder for them to hurt us. And if they manage to hurt us anyway? We are simply to endure it, let them get away with it, then spend more on improving our "defenses."
There is a reason why anarchists have come to reject retribution. It's because they have discovered that to be objective, proportionate, and thus just, forcible retaliation against criminals requires a government: a final arbiter of law and the use of force. So rather than accept government (horrors!), they are logically compelled to reject retribution.
In rejecting retribution, Michael -- like most contemporary anarchists -- is actually rejecting any just, proportionate response to evil -- because that is exactly what "retribution" means. Calling retribution "irrational" -- or equating it with "vengeance" (which is personal, emotion-driven, and often DISproportionate retaliation) -- amounts to calling justice itself irrational. It amounts to writing justice out of the list of Objectivist virtues...and Ragnar and Judge Narragansett out of Atlas Shrugged.
Note that the moral priority for anarchists is not really the protection of the individual right to life, but rather, the obliteration of government. Note that in any case in which the protection of individual rights requires a government, they are happy to sacrifice those rights in order to get rid of government. And note that in any case in which someone (or some nation, like Israel) seeks self-defense through retribution and retaliation, anarchists inevitably denounce him as an "aggressor."
Exaggeration? Go to anarchist scum-sites such as LewRockwell.com and Antiwar.com, and observe who they constantly attack as "aggressors," and who they sympathize with as "victims." The moral inversion you will see is utterly consistent with the preceding argument.
P.S. Let me add something in anticipation of a counterargument. Many anarchists proclaim that the alternative to retribution is "restitution" -- getting the criminal to pay back the victim for the harm done. While the idea is nice in principle, there are several practical problems.
1. Criminals, by and large, do far more damage than they can afford to pay back. Most criminals are low-skilled and thus low-income, while the costs of their crimes to victims are often huge, far-flung, and sometimes catastrophic.
2. Some crimes -- murder, rape, assaults -- inflict the kind of damage, physical and psychological, that can never be properly calculated or repaid. They also inflict damages on the loved ones and friends of immediate victims that are similarly huge, but intangible.
3. There are costs to the community generally from the predations of criminals: costs in fear of a lack of safety, in adopting preventive measures, in altering routines, perhaps even in moving to a safer place.
4. Some anarchists (e.g., economist Bruce Benson) argue that in the face of these intangibles, the victims of criminals must be willing to give up retribution and accept some reasonable financial settlement, in the interests of keeping the peace. When pressed, they make it clear, however, that victims will be compelled to accept the "settlement" offer -- and that should they seek to employ retaliation instead, the private "protection agency(ies)" will use force to keep the peace. Need I point out that this option transforms "private protection agencies" into de facto governments, using force to compel non-participants to accept their arrangements? Need I also point out that the underlying premise of this utilitarian argument is that "social peace" trumps individual rights?
5. Finally, there are the many intractable problems of enforcing restitution arrangements:
a. Criminals will certainly not show up to work and pay restitution if they are allowed to run free on the streets: most will skip town, or simply thumb their noses at the "private collection agency."
b. Suppose the miscreant refuses to comply. Under anarchism, who has the moral right to enforce such a judgment, anyway? The very term implies the use of coercion. Who is the enforcer? What degree of coercion is appropriate? What are the limits? Who decides?
c. What profit is there for a private company in pursuing most criminals? Who pays them, and how? Are crimes to be addressed, and criminals pursued, on the basis of justice -- or of utilitarian, cost-benefit analyses?
d. If the criminal is to be confined in order to work off his debts, under what conditions is he to be held? Who would have the right, under anarchism, to set and enforce standards of treatment, or penalties for non-compliance?
e. If criminals are to be confined in private, secure work facilities, how is the system to sustain itself financially? Since the criminal's labors would not only have to pay for his own food and housing -- plus the whole system that catches, tries, and holds him -- what would be left over for "restitution" for his victim(s)? How could a private collection company possibly make money via restitution...apart from a governmental legal system that has the ultimate power to lower the boom on a criminal if he refuses to comply, or tries to flee?
Clearly, policies such as restitution and prevention are inadequate to address the problems of crime and criminals. Worse -- they are utilitarian strategies intended to evade the one policy that only a government can enforce: retributive justice.
(Edited by Robert Bidinotto
on 7/14, 1:51pm)
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