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Stoicism and Punishment (Episode 89)
703 Plays1 year ago
Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael
“It’s worse to be the thief, than the person who has their things stolen from them”
In this conversation, Michael and Caleb talk about how Stoics think about anger, revenge, and justice.
They cover common philosophical views of punishment – and note where the Stoics would disagree. This topic is important in many areas of our lives. It's about how we handle situations when someone has treated us badly, how we think about guilt, and how we can build just communities.
(00:35) Introduction
(06:55) Common Accounts of Punishment
(15:51) Stoicism and Anger
(25:47) Epictetus on Punishment
(32:26) Responding as a Stoic
(33:56) The Stoic Review of Everyone Else's Take on Punishment
***
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Transcript
Character Reform vs. Beyond Hope
00:00:00
Speaker
We must therefore take care to distinguish those characters which admit of reform from those which are hopelessly depraved. Neither ought we show an indiscriminate and general, nor yet an exclusive clemency, for to pardon everyone is a great cruelty as to pardon none. We must take a middle course. But as it is difficult to find the true mean, let us be careful. If we depart from it, to do so upon the side of humanity.
00:00:29
Speaker
Welcome to Stoa Conversations. My name is Keira Bontaferras. And I'm Michael Trombley. And today we're going to be talking about punishment, crime and punishment.
00:00:42
Speaker
more the abstract issue, like what is the stoic view about punishment?
Stoic Views on Punishment
00:00:47
Speaker
Is it ever permissible? Is it something that's obligatory? This is a topic that comes up both, I think, for ourselves. Do we ever deserve to be punished, but also, of course, for others? So that's what we're going to be talking about today.
00:01:04
Speaker
Yeah, and if punishment sounds a bit abstract, that kind of general idea of getting back at somebody, maybe some revenge, this idea, does punishment have a place in justice? Is it ever right to even the odds or get back at somebody that's harmed you or somebody you care about? I think these are things
00:01:28
Speaker
I know I don't go around and think about like, think about punishment that often, but I do think about this idea of revenge or, you know, in order for justice to happen, there needs to be some sort of evening, but this person needs to kind of get what they deserve in some way. And so these are interesting questions. I guess they're kind of ethical questions, but they're also important questions about how you live your life and what you should do and what kind of, what kind of tasks you should set for yourself and which are not worth your time.
00:01:54
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, so I think what we'll do is we'll go through some of the different theories about punishments and then talk through what the stoic view on the matter is and how it compares with those different theories.
Defining and Exploring Punishment
00:02:08
Speaker
But I think before that, it is just sort of worth emphasizing what are we talking about when we talk about punishments.
00:02:14
Speaker
I think defining it here, we can say the deliberate infliction of suffering on someone who has done wrong or on a supposed or actual offender for an offense.
00:02:28
Speaker
This matters because there's this question, you know, what do you do when you believe others have wronged you when you've been mistreated? Is there, as Michael is saying, some sense in which you need to reset the balance of things, get back at them somehow? And of course there are questions about what sorts of attitudes are permissible. We know the Stoics aren't a fan of anger. Is there anything else we can say about that though?
00:02:53
Speaker
And then you can also ask, you know, what do you do with the feelings? Sometimes we all feel, maybe this isn't like the precise language we'd stated in, but we feel like we deserve punishment or there's some amount of shame in some acts we've done. So I had a conversation with Dana Joya about the madness of Hercules and Hercules goes mad.
00:03:14
Speaker
In his fit of fury, he mistakes his children for enemies and he kills his children. And when he wakes up, he's in a state where he thinks he deserves punishment. And none of us have done anything as drastic, but I expect that each of us can, to some extent, emphasize with that feeling that, oh, I've done something terrible and I think I deserve punishment.
00:03:41
Speaker
Yeah, so I think there's these kind of three things. There's when somebody's harmed you, then when you need to punish them, there's when you think you deserve punishment, or is there ever a time when you think you should suffer where it's right for you to suffer because of something you've done wrong?
00:03:57
Speaker
And then there's, I just also want to include this idea of punishing somebody who's done harm to somebody else because it's one thing to say, you know, I don't care if you insult me, but you know, what if someone insults your friend? What if someone, you know, attacks your child, something like that? Well, then this kind of view of punishment maybe opens up a lot more for some people and people put a lot more ideas of punishment on the table.
00:04:19
Speaker
I know people who are very gentle, docile people, but they think if you deliberately hurt a cat or a dog, they're coming for you.
Intent vs. Action in Punishment
00:04:28
Speaker
All of a sudden, that punishment is coming. So expanding that frame in those multiple ways. I also think an interesting ancient Greek context for punishment, which I think the example of Hercules does a really good job of, you raised Caleb, is that
00:04:42
Speaker
I think in contemporary Western philosophy, we think of this idea or contemporary Western culture, we think of this idea as punishment being correlated to intent instead of action or instead of results. You deserve it because you tried to do something or you intended to harm somebody.
00:05:03
Speaker
And I think maybe this is a Christian background, this idea that like, maybe I deserve punishment even for something I just thought about. You know, I didn't even do it and I deserve punishment just for having the thought. But in ancient Greece, they were much more open to this idea and much more natural, this idea of punishment for something you didn't intend to do.
00:05:20
Speaker
So something like Hercules, Hercules killed his children in your example, and there's the, he was out of his mind, right? He was not intending to do so, but there's still this idea of deserving punishment. Or I think of the idea of Oedipus from Oedipus Rex and ancient, ancient play.
00:05:37
Speaker
who ends up, I think he sleeps with his mother and kills his father, and Oedipus gouges out his own eyes, even though he didn't know that that was either his father or his mother, but there becomes this thing that happened. So even though I didn't have the intention, I still deserve punishment. So keep that in mind, I would say when we're talking about the Stoics, that the Stoics are responding to a tradition that I think was maybe more liberal or thought more people deserved punishment than even today.
00:06:06
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great point. And I think there's a number of these different topics around what's the role of intent, how wrong the act is, and we'll touch on some of these, but I imagine several of them will also just have to remain in the background. Another related issue are many contemporary debates over criminal justice and reform. Many of those debates hinge on views on justice and
00:06:31
Speaker
whether justice requires particular punishments or perhaps forbids particular kinds of responses to crime. So we won't touch on that exactly, but I think, or at least I don't intend to touch on those issues exactly. Maybe we will, who knows? But those are certainly in the background and I think many of those discussions have philosophical assumptions that we will in fact touch on.
Justifying Punishment
00:06:54
Speaker
course let's jump into it. Before going through the stoic theory it would be useful to go through some common accounts of what justifies punishment. So I have a list of five accounts here that I think are worth
00:07:11
Speaker
reviewing and we can go through those and then contrast and compare these with the stoic view. So the first one is punishment as deterrence. So this is just the idea that you should inflict suffering on people just to ensure that others are incentivized to act correctly. You should deter others from wrongdoing. So what do you do? The reason you give someone a time out, a kid a time out when they've misbehaved.
00:07:41
Speaker
is to deter them from misbehaving in the future. That's all it is. You're just trying to provide a little bit of that stick, as it were, to shape someone's character and just do it in a way that appeals to some common incentives and disincentives for behaviors.
00:08:00
Speaker
The other role punishment plays is that it communicates what is right and wrong. So of course, by putting the child into a timeout, you're not just deterring them from misbehaving or whatever they may have done, but you're also communicating that they in fact misbehaved. And you can think about this in the broader social context as well. I think one reason many people believe it's important that people are served justice is that
00:08:30
Speaker
If there's no response to someone doing wrong, in what sense as a community are we communicating our values? Are we expressing our values? So I think that's another important common line.
00:08:44
Speaker
I think about this also in terms of the death penalty, or maybe it's tough to think about if somebody deserves it or not. Maybe that's part of it, but also this idea of signaling, what you did is really not welcome here. What you did is so abhorrent to us that we will
00:09:08
Speaker
basically inflict the death penalty on you. So I feel that is kind of like a signaling mechanism for the morale of a country often than an individual basis, you know.
00:09:17
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. Both of these, I think, deterrence and communication can play a role in sort of what's sometimes called utilitarian justifications of punishments, which is saying, you know, we don't really care so much about what people deserve or not. We're just trying to create the best society and that involves communicating the right values through tools like punishment and ensuring that people are incentivized to behave well.
Balance and Fairness in Punishment
00:09:43
Speaker
And you can think about that in the social level, but also, of course, in the personal level.
00:09:47
Speaker
But that moves us to the accounts that are less utilitarian. One is that you should punish people because of matters of dessert. And we're not talking about Sundays, we're talking about a single S here. It's just the fact that the wrongdoer deserves it. I think a lot of people have this base intuition that someone has
00:10:13
Speaker
You know, if you're a child, you get hit when you're playing, you might strike back. Why? Just because the other person hit you and that's what you do when you're hit. The other person deserves to suffer some amount of harm because we've been harmed or someone we care about has harmed.
00:10:30
Speaker
That's related and sometimes it's difficult to tease these apart, but I think it's also related to this other idea of balance, an eye for an eye or payback, which states, I think on one hand you have the dessert account of punishment, which is you punish people because they deserve it. It's because of some fact about the wrongdoer. This other account of balance gets into intuitions about fairness or sort of the sense that something has been
00:10:57
Speaker
the world has become unbalanced in some way after someone does something wrong and you need to restore it. One way to restore it is to inflict suffering on the other person and of course also restore whatever bad thing the person has done.
00:11:11
Speaker
Maybe I can think of an interesting example here where you can think of maybe some intergenerational punishment where maybe somebody is punished for the sins of their parents. They don't deserve it in some sense, but there could be this sense of balance, this sense of, well, we're writing in the wrong, we're rebalancing the scales by maybe taking back what was taken from us or something like this.
00:11:37
Speaker
So I, I agree. Those, those are two difficult things to pull apart desert or well, who deserve, they deserve it versus balance. But I do think you get that kind of idea of balance.
00:11:48
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. I think if you think about many revenge films, so if you think about The Revenant, if you've seen that a man watches his son be killed, and the rest of the film, it's a mix of a survival film and a revenge film, I would say, has a very nice score, highly recommend it, very well done. But one has a sense that
00:12:11
Speaker
this person is driven to set things right. And he's not interested in deterring someone from their wrongdoing. He's interested in getting back at what the other person did and restoring insofar as he can what was taken from him by inflicting punishment on the other person.
00:12:33
Speaker
We can also think of this in terms of self punishment, right? Maybe you don't think you deserve to suffer, but maybe you think you, if you've done something wrong, you owe some sort of suffering or some sort of sacrifice to balance things back.
00:12:48
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So those are four.
Reforming Wrongdoers
00:12:51
Speaker
You've got deterrence, communication, desert, and balance. The last one here is around transformation. So here, punishment is about reforming the wrong juror. It's about correcting an error. And this gets the closest to
00:13:07
Speaker
how I would consider the Stoics account. So we have a story about Lycurgus, which is mentioned positively by both Epictetus and Musonius, where there's a young man who injures Lycurgus's eye, and he was sent by the people to be punished in whatever way Lycurgus wanted, but he did not punish him.
00:13:32
Speaker
Instead, he educated him and made him a good man, after which he led him to the theater and exclaimed, this person I receive from you as an unruly and violent individual, I give him back to you as a good man and a proper citizen. So here the focus of inflicting punishment is
00:13:54
Speaker
perhaps is related to changing the person's character, reforming them, and doesn't connect that well with sort of standard ideas of how we deliberately inflict suffering, but instead is focused on fixing an error.
00:14:17
Speaker
How is that? Would you say that's different from the utilitarian view put above? Like is, for me, it seems like transformation is in there with communication and deterrence. Hey, this is a way to help somebody or to help the deterrence and communication kind of help the external world transformation helps the individual. Is there something different there that's not making it utilitarian or what do you think?
00:14:39
Speaker
No, I think a utilitarian, if they're in interest and if they think about punishing people, they want to deter people from doing wrong, communicate what is right and wrong. And also, if someone has done wrong, they want to ensure that they don't do that in the future and that can look like.
00:14:58
Speaker
incapacitating people via prison, if you're thinking about the justice system, or it can look like changing their character, helping them change their character so that they're the kind of person who does not do wrong again. And I think, but all of those can fit into a utilitarian picture of punishment. Yep.
00:15:20
Speaker
The one idea that's worth mentioning here that I haven't actually listed is just that people don't ever deserve to be punished.
Stoic Perspectives on Anger and Punishment
00:15:28
Speaker
They don't ever deserve to have harm deliberately inflicted on them. And there could be a variety of different reasons for that, but that's at least worth putting on the table and serious challenge to many of these other theories.
00:15:45
Speaker
That would be the sixth theory of punishment. The sixth is, it's just always bad. It's just always bad, right? So what's the Stoic theory? I think it's important to ground the Stoic theory of punishment.
00:16:00
Speaker
by reference to their view about anger. So Seneca defined anger as a desire to inflict harm on another for a real or perceived wrong, and the Stoics believe that this form of anger is never justified.
00:16:18
Speaker
They had a categorical view. We talked about this in the past episode, but the categorical view that essentially said anger is no good. That's an additional view. It's never okay to be angry. At least the sage wouldn't be angry.
00:16:34
Speaker
And so kind of the, I mean, just to connect what we talked about earlier, Seneca defined anger as a desire to inflict or harm another for a real or perceived wrong. And we defined punishment earlier as to deliberately inflict suffering on somebody for a real or supposed offense. So if you putting those two together,
00:16:57
Speaker
The Stoics defined anger as a desire for punishment, right? Yeah, it's a desire for... There's a desire to inflict harm, and now I guess there's a question. The first definition was, is suffering the same as harm? And I think we'll get into that a little bit, but on the first pass,
00:17:18
Speaker
I think the right response to this is it sounds like the Stoics are very close to that sixth view we mentioned, which is that punishment is never justified because it's related to anger and anger itself, or just the desire to inflict punishment is anger and anger is never justified. Cool. And so why is anger never justified?
00:17:45
Speaker
I'm curious how you put this, but I would say there's two key reasons why the Stoics believe anger is never justified. The first is just that it's born out of a false view of reality. So much of our anger is caused by the fact that we expect to do whatever we like often without being harmed. We go through traffic and expect there will not be any
00:18:12
Speaker
traffic jams because if we were expecting traffic jams, we wouldn't be so frustrated when they were encountered. But this sort of thinking is a kind of odd optimism. Now, if you remember Marcus Rayleigh's famous quote, when you wake up in the morning, you should expect to meet with the busy body, the meddling, and so on. We are human. Other people are human. People will hurt us. That's something we should expect.
00:18:34
Speaker
But just because they will inflict pain on us does not mean that they will harm us in the sense that they will do things that necessarily results in us becoming unhappy. Because the stoic view of happiness is that happiness is up to us, not circumstances. It's merely a matter of
00:18:55
Speaker
being excellent people, living according to nature, and those are domains of life that we are fully responsible for. Others cannot touch. So not only should we expect people to hurt us, but in a real sense, moving from people's wrongdoing to the idea that people will prevent us from being happy is a mistake on the Stoic theory of value.
00:19:24
Speaker
So in those in those ways, it's born out of a false view of reality. Yeah, I think that's number one. I guess I think that's the right reason. One of the reasons is that look, you know, we can't be harmed. So there's nothing that you're desiring to get back at people for or if there is you've distorted it or you've got the picture wrong. I'm going to push it a little further here just for fun. Is this though a view that nobody can be harmed because I'm even thinking about
00:19:51
Speaker
You know, we can't be harmed because we're rational adults, but what about animals? Surely animals can be harmed, right? In that they're beings that exist in the level of sensation and you can make them suffer at the level of sensation. And by the same reason, can't children be harmed? They're pre-rational. So if you do things to children, likewise, they're not kind of robust adults who have this ability to
00:20:19
Speaker
I guess I want to say like, it's one thing for us, you know, to adults to be saying, nobody can harm me, but is it the case that nothing can be harmed in the world? And if so, and if things can be harmed, shouldn't people deserve punishment for those things?
00:20:33
Speaker
Yeah, I suppose it's true that other people can be harmed, and we in fact can be harmed by ourselves. And then I suppose moving to the case of others, third parties, and I think that's especially where many people's intuitions for justifying punishment comes into the picture, right? In the revenant, the person is trying to get back for the death of his son. In Gladiator, Maximus is trying to get back for the death of his family as well.
00:20:58
Speaker
And you have the case you mentioned earlier of docile people who all of a sudden when people are harming cats and dogs, turn into people who are much more excited about punishing others.
00:21:10
Speaker
those people. So I think other animals can be harmed. And then the question is, what's the right response? And is the response to make others unhappy? The stoic view, I think, to that is no, because you can't actually do that. In a real sense, you can't
00:21:31
Speaker
You can do wrong to others, but you can't prevent them from achieving happiness, just as they can not do the same for you.
00:21:44
Speaker
So there is that, but I suppose there is also the other question, well, what's the right response? And perhaps this might, I think we'll definitely get into this later, but this might be a place where this division between harm as preventing someone from being happy in a deep sense versus suffering or inflicting pain, perhaps those sorts of things are sometimes justified, but we'll see, we'll have a chat about that.
00:22:12
Speaker
Cool. I'm happy talking more about anger, but did you want to push on? Well, we can chat more about anger. Is there something else you want to say? I was going to list out the other stoic reasons that they're not so happy about anger. Maybe list out some of the...
00:22:26
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I was gonna say that I think I think there's two main reasons to counter that the soaks counter anger. One we've already talked about is that a lot of the harms aren't real harms. The second and we end to the lingo here is anger is a desire to inflict harm on another for the wrong that they've done.
00:22:44
Speaker
And that's a specific way of interacting with somebody is trying to harm them because they did a harm as opposed to, you know, we go back to those utilitarian views and I'm sure we hit it. We'll hit on those later, but there's this idea of like, I'm harming you to deter you in the future. I'm harming you to send a message to other people, but it's that real idea of inflicting harm because they did a harm full stop, not for any other purpose. And it's, so it's that anger is that is, is not.
00:23:14
Speaker
Anger is not defined by the action. I mean, I, I do martial arts. I fight, right? Like we punch each other, but we don't punch each other because we hate the other person or because we're angry, the other person we're trying to achieve. We're doing it. We're playing our sport where we're trying to better ourselves. So you can do the similar kind of action for different reasons. And it's really that, that's the reason of being motivated just by the fact that somebody harmed another is the one that they want to kind of call attention to as being a really nasty reason. You know?
00:23:42
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's a great point. And I suppose if there's one theme we're sort of nudging up against is that the precision of these definitions does matter.
00:23:54
Speaker
Another reason that I do want to put on the table is that anger does distort our decision making, which you should expect because it's born out of false views of the world. Seneca has that great passage on anger where he lists out all the terrible evils anger is responsible for, naming it as one of the worst emotions because it's responsible for the sacking of great cities, deaths of innocents.
00:24:24
Speaker
And indeed, you know, the ruining of particular relationships. So I think that's another reason. It's not, perhaps not the key reason, but another reason to keep in mind is when people are thinking about justifying anger, often they have in mind something usually very specific, a clear wrong and then a clear response to that wrong. Whereas the typical case of anger is
00:24:49
Speaker
you know, anger is a state of madness and it's unclear whether there has been an actual wrong in many cases and it's unclear very often, in fact, on reflection, clear that the response was not justified. So I think that's important to keep in mind, I think, especially when people make pro-anger cases that are usually tied to very specific instances as opposed to the general phenomenon of being angry.
00:25:16
Speaker
I guess it's just like, it's just to come back to that reason of like, it's not, and Seneca is responding to something very particular here, or at least this idea that anger is a benefit. It's a motivator. It's a tool. And he's just calling out, it's a very terrible tool. It's a, it's, it's something that distorts and often leaves you down the wrong leads you down the wrong path. So it doesn't, anger doesn't have a utilitarian function.
00:25:42
Speaker
that you think it might have, or a lot of people suppose it does. Right, right. Yeah, if we think about, say, fair judges or what have you, we don't imagine them as angry.
00:25:55
Speaker
Excellent. Well, I do want to read out some Epitetus here, just because he... I would not expect you to say no. He touches on a lot of what we've mentioned here in the discourses. And I'll read a section from a dialogue about how to respond to thieves and robbers.
00:26:18
Speaker
Anyway, why do we get angry? Because we value the stuff others take from us. I mean, look, place no value on your clothes and you don't get angry at someone for stealing them. And then his student responds, but there are thieves and robbers, aren't there?
00:26:34
Speaker
and Epictetus replies, what does it mean to call people thieves and robbers? They're mistaken about good and bad. So do they deserve anger or pity? Show them where they've gone wrong and you'll see them desist from their mistakes. If they don't see what you're getting at, they remain bogged down in their mistaken beliefs. Should we do away with this person because he's mistaken and misled about matters of supreme importance and because he's become blind?
00:27:02
Speaker
not in the sense that he's lost the ability to distinguish white and black by sight, but because he's lost the mental ability to distinguish good and bad. If you put the question like this, you'll realize how inhumane it is and see that it's no different from saying, shouldn't we kill this blind person or this deaf person?
00:27:20
Speaker
If a person is injured most by the loss of the most important things, and if the most important thing in every individual is right, will, what's the point in getting angry with someone if he loses it? Okay, that's great. That's a great quote.
00:27:36
Speaker
It's an excellent dialogue. First, there's this point that there's this intellectualism, which is that people do wrong out of ignorance.
Ignorance and Wrongdoing
00:27:45
Speaker
It really makes you question the sense of punishment. You're not punishing somebody who is some sort of demon or wrongdoer. You're punishing somebody who's ignorant, who's lost a capacity that's beneficial to them,
00:27:56
Speaker
the same way, you know, if someone in Epictetus's example is, you know, they're blind and then they can't see, you don't punish them for being blind. That's, that's, they want to be able to see, they're unable to in the moment. And then what I was thinking is he was like, look, you're upset because you care about your clothes. So when your clothes get stolen, you get upset. I was thinking, well, what about something you should care about? Like your,
00:28:18
Speaker
Like if you think you deserve punishment because you were a terrible person in the past or you did something wrong, but then his follow up point is, look, we should forgive or at least not be angry with wrongdoers because they've already suffered, right? They suffer because they've lost this thing that benefits them, the capacity to see they're ignorant and then the capacity to see good and evil and to understand how to live well. So they're already suffering from their own ignorance.
00:28:46
Speaker
And so in that sense, if you apply that to yourself backwards, you would say, well, I did what I did because I was ignorant. I did what I was did because I couldn't understand the difference between what was right and what was wrong in that situation. I did what I thought was right, but, but I was wrong. And I recognize that now.
00:29:05
Speaker
then what more punishment is there to do? You suffered by being the bad person because you had to experience being the bad person. The same way you'd forgive the robbers, you should also forgive yourself. I think there's a lot of really good ideas tied up in that such a short passage.
00:29:27
Speaker
Yeah, I think he clearly captures the stoic view on the fundamental objection to anger, namely that
00:29:37
Speaker
often it's the result of us placing value in the wrong things. And then, as you say, yes to this point about how we treat wrongdoers, whether it's ourselves or others, and moves the focus to thinking about wrongdoing more as a matter of error. There's that explicit analogy to people who are blind.
00:30:00
Speaker
And one wouldn't go after trying to inflict harm on the blind because they bumped into someone that would be silly. In the same way, one should treat wrongdoers as people who have made mistakes, not people who are, say, especially vicious, or perhaps even deserving of suffering.
00:30:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think in Christianity, we get this idea of being deserving of suffering or being inherently flawed in some capacity. It's also tied into these ideas of kind of shame. There's something inherently wrong with you. And what we're getting is we're getting just like the stoics are just really rejecting this in a really liberating way, right? Like we're just, you were flawed at the time.
00:30:50
Speaker
But there were these, these, these robbers or people that had harmed you or flooded time, but they were also doing what all humans do, which is like act on the knowledge they had in the moment. And, you know, they're the people. There's something that a friend of mine says when, you know, I think we, we talk about people that have done wrong and they go, well, that person has to live with.
00:31:09
Speaker
being themselves for the rest of their life. You know, it's kind of this consolation that deflects your anger and it's like, that's a good point, right? If one of the justifications of punishment is people getting what they deserve and people who do bad things deserve to suffer in some sense, then there's kind of a way in which people are already getting punishment without any of your involvement by having to be
00:31:32
Speaker
some bad people by having to be the kind of people that make these mistakes. They're already receiving the punishment. They're already getting balances already achieved. Eye for an eye is already achieved. You just need to view their corrupted souls, their internal madness. You just have to view that as a punishment. But once you actually view that as a punishment, once you think, oh, poor them, they have to live with themselves, then you're getting that eye for an eye, right?
00:32:04
Speaker
And I will get to this as we go through the different theories of punishment, but the idea that punishment is demanded because it restores the balance. The stoics just see the weight of good and bad completely differently from the intuitive response, I think. Yeah, totally. So they'll see that and I think urge that we see those kinds of situations completely differently.
00:32:27
Speaker
Right, right.
00:32:33
Speaker
So before we move on to going through these other accounts of punishment again, I think one way to frame the Stoic account of punishment is that Stoics cannot desire that others be unhappy. That doesn't make sense on Stoic philosophy. How we respond to wrongdoing is a matter of, as the Stoics would say, using indifference well.
00:33:01
Speaker
We can be wronged by others. The question is, how do we respond to that? Not by seeking revenge for its own sake and especially not by doing anything that would render, attempt to render that person unhappy.
00:33:18
Speaker
But it's still an open question, well, what kinds of responses are permissible? Is it permissible to cause them pain, even if not, do them harm in a deep sense? Whatever the answer is, it's a matter of using these indifference well and the stoic focus is always on, you know, what's my, how can I be
00:33:37
Speaker
virtuous here, what does that look like in this specific circumstance, what's required of me in this specific circumstance, given who I am, who others are, and what actually occurred, and so on. I think that lays out a good picture of the stoic view of punishment. Let's connect that back with the definitions we provided to start.
Deterrence and Rational Punishment
00:33:56
Speaker
Okay, cool. So first we have deterrence, deterring people from doing wrong. That's why we punish people. So I would say this response to wrongdoing, here we're thinking about inflicting pain on, deliberately inflicting pain on others for their wrongdoing. This can be legit on the stoic accounts, maybe thinking from the broader social perspective. If you're coming up with a system of criminal justice, deterrence is probably going to be a part of that.
00:34:26
Speaker
But I would note, often I think in our personal lives, deterrence isn't usually what's grounding feelings of anger, at least when I reflect personally, when I reflect on the stories from others' lives, what they've experienced. Usually, I think it's something closer to these other justifications of punishment. What do you think about that?
00:34:50
Speaker
I mean, I would argue we got to get really an integrated with the definition of someone who I used to work with kids a lot. And I would argue that like deterrence doesn't, it feels like punishment in one sense, but it doesn't feel like you hate the, or you're angry at the, at the, the, your student or the, the child at all. It feels like, look, I just, I have a, I have a job to play.
00:35:12
Speaker
Part of my job is developing your character and helping the other kids, helping maintain a good, you know, a good class and deterrence is part of that role. So in one sense, it's punishment. It corresponds. If you do a, you'll receive B deterrence. And in that sense, it's punishment, but it's not connected with anger at all. It's not motivated by anger, at least not when it's, when it's done in, I would say, a healthy way.
00:35:37
Speaker
Yeah, that's crucial. And I might even argue, okay, deterrence can be legit, but if you are angry and thinking about punishment in this way with this kind of justification, perhaps you should pause because deterrence is done for the sake of preventing further wrongs. That's what matters here. Yeah.
00:35:59
Speaker
I think of like an angry parent, you know, and the child's crying and they think, well, I'm going to give you something to cry about. Is that deterrence? Yes. Is it done out of anger? Yes. And it's probably wrong. He probably acts as deterrence, but is wrong if it's done out of anger. You know, um, something I guess what I'm saying is punishment can be deterrent, a deterrent can be deterring
00:36:23
Speaker
Even if it's done for any of these other reasons, you know, eye for an eye can act as a deterrent, but be done out of anger. And then in that case, it's still wrong. Even if it has this extra goal, but if it's done solely as a deterrent, it feels very, it feels very stoic to do in the moment. Right, right. Yep. The other justification of punishment, punishment as communicating what matters, what's right and wrong.
00:36:47
Speaker
Again, this one to me, it seems like you could have good reasons perhaps to punish someone in order to communicate what's right or wrong, especially when you're thinking about those broader social questions. You're thinking about, you know, what's the just city? What's the right response to, say, thieves and robbers at the level of a state or a city?
00:37:08
Speaker
you do want to express your values through law. But as you mentioned, disgust and deterrence, the Stoics are going to argue that these acts of punishment in order to communicate what's right or wrong should never be grounded in feelings of anger.
00:37:28
Speaker
And I think there's also this push to, especially when you move out of the social level and down to the personal level, if you want to communicate what's right or wrong, punishment is probably not in the top three ways in which you express that to others. You know, there's your own actions. There's what you explicitly say, communicate to others, and that doesn't need to involve any kind of
00:37:55
Speaker
punishment on the face of it. And so perhaps there's also going to be this extra push, okay, maybe in some cultures, punishment is important too, as maybe perhaps also when you're dealing with children, this is one fact that matters is punishment communicates what's important. But nonetheless, is it going to be the top one of the top three strategies for dealing with people? Perhaps not.
00:38:22
Speaker
Yeah, there's something to me about punishment is communication that almost seems unjust. Like I'm trying to think of it. I'm trying to ground this in an actual example, right? Like, I don't know if you have an example in mind, but I'm thinking of times when you would say, like when I was going back to a kid example, I was thinking of like a no fighting policy. So, you know, two students getting a fight and both get expelled regardless of who started it or who was doing the bullying because the school is trying to send a message to everybody.
00:38:48
Speaker
that, you know, no, no physical contact. It almost seems unjust. It seems like the wrong way of divvying out punishment in that situation because you're not doing it. It's not done with consideration for the situation. It's almost like you're making a scapegoat or an example of somebody almost feels disproportional. But I'm not sure if you have a better example. Do you have an example of kind of a good communication punishment? Well, I suppose sometimes people will say you do this when
00:39:15
Speaker
other people, whoever did wrong, understands the language of the carrot and the stick, I suppose. So usually you're thinking about children or perhaps even animals, but perhaps there are also people who just don't have, don't share your values.
00:39:37
Speaker
And if you're thinking about, you know, how can I express that this is something I care about? I might need to talk in their, I need to talk in their language. And if they communicate by, you know, very simply expecting that pain is bad and pain means something is bad, then maybe that means I need to respond in kind. I think one should be careful with that. But I think that's, that's how one would justify this kind of, this kind of thing.
00:40:03
Speaker
Okay. So you're, you're at a bar and somebody pushes into you and you push them back.
Punishment as Communication
00:40:10
Speaker
And it's like, it's not because you're angry. It's not, maybe it's a kind of deterrence, but it's also a communication of like, Hey, you cross the line and you don't, you don't cross that line with me. Is this something like this? I mean, it's a bad example. I'm just trying to get around this. What's in it? What's a, is that what you meant?
00:40:28
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think it's something like that. Maybe, especially bars are useful because other people are, are, are, you know, they're not, they're fully rational. Yeah, exactly. They're not firing all the rationals. You're not thinking of desserts in that moment. You're not thinking of balance and eye for an eye. You're just thinking of like, look, I'm going to, you, you, you inflicted harm on me. I'm going to inflict it back to communicate something to send a message. If that message is as simple as don't, don't mess with me or something.
00:40:55
Speaker
Right, right. But even there, you know, you need to be careful. I think bars are notoriously places where things escalate for no reason whatsoever. That's not the perfect stoic example. I was just trying to think of a single one that would make some sense. Yeah. So maybe if you're large and the other person's small, then you can adequately communicate that way. But be wary of advice in general. All right. I'm not advocating for bar fights here.
00:41:23
Speaker
So that's the communication. We've also got dessert. Others, this is just the idea that people deserve to be punished. That's basically it. The Stoics don't think like that as we covered. Others do wrong out of mistakes. Wrong is
00:41:40
Speaker
its own harmed and as such you're not going to be motivated to seek revenge. This story's going to see many of these revenge stories differently than the typical person, I think.
00:41:59
Speaker
Socrates has a great line on this which is one of a kind of a Socratic paradox or which is this idea that it is better to be harmed than to do harm that was something Socrates was committed to is this idea that it's better for me to be punched than to be the person go around punching people right this is like turn the other cheek kind of things and the idea there was just that
00:42:23
Speaker
If somebody harms you, you just have a series of unfortunate circumstances, which you're able to navigate, you're able to circumvent. But if you harm somebody else, at least in a proportionality, you've compromised your
00:42:39
Speaker
your character you've gone into in the stoic view you've gone into a madness or you lack the capacity to see the difference between good and evil as Epictetus says I think about this sometimes it's much worse to be the thief than the person who gets your things stolen from you right is the stoic view I used to have this question or this thought of you know is it better to be the
00:43:00
Speaker
the slave or the slave master. And I don't mean to trivialize slavery when I, when I asked that question, but I think it's this view of like, is it better to have incredibly awful external circumstances, but your character composed or good external circumstances, but a terrible character. And the stoic view has to be that it's better to be the person having harm done to them than the person doing the harm.
00:43:26
Speaker
And so in that sense, there's no further punishment needed, right, as we talked about? Right, right. Yeah. And I think the essentially, I think it's largely the same when it comes to this other account of punishment balance, you know, eye for an eye.
00:43:41
Speaker
Perhaps in some cultures, if you're in an honor culture, other people might expect you to get back at some other person when they've harmed you, especially these Roman cultures, some other more warrior-related cultures, probably not most people in modern day they don't live in.
Social Roles and Culture in Punishment
00:43:59
Speaker
groups that have are inflicted with the same amount of this, you know, the force of reputation is not as strong. Your reputation is not something you live and die by, but it could be the case that, you know, if someone is wronged, if other people, if you don't get back at that person,
00:44:15
Speaker
Other people are going to think less of you, they'll exile you, they'll exile your family, you'll get bullied and so on. Sometimes you have the advice that you should stick up to bullies, of course, because otherwise you will be picked on and so on. It'll be easy pickings. But I think, again, though those sort of responses might be related to balance, what they're ultimately focused on is playing your social role.
00:44:40
Speaker
well. So if you happen to be in an honor culture, perhaps taking something that from the outside looks like revenge is going to be justified, but it's, yeah, I think the stoic would not do it out of blind anger or a sense of getting justice for the fact that they've been wrong. Rather it's a matter of this is what's required of being in this circumstance in order to
00:45:08
Speaker
ensure that I do right by myself, by my family and what other social ties I have. So I think it's a little bit difficult to walk that line, as it were, between seeking punishment because you, out of anger, out of the sake of revenge, while also realizing, look, we're not saying that stoics can't respond. Yeah, I mean, I think the through line through all of these is
00:45:38
Speaker
punishment done without anger seems to be okay. Let me correct me if I'm wrong here, but it's this idea of like, if you're doing it in a rational state, so you're not overcome by the desire to get back at someone for harming them, you're not overcome by anger. So it's grounded in a different reason, whether that's deterrence, communication, or balance, but balance grounded in your social role, not balance grounded in like,
00:46:06
Speaker
a sense of fragility, like I'm, you know, I'm not, I'm not a real man. If after this person insulted me, unless I get back to them, I need to restore that balance or something. That's a sense of fragility that doesn't make sense. That overestimates your own fragility. So I think punishment, not grounded in anger is sometimes allowed. And I think one of the ways to tell if it's that kind is to just make sure you're not in a state of anger when you're doing it as at least that at least gets you most of the way there, I think.
00:46:38
Speaker
Right, right. I should say the fifth account of punishment is transformation. I would say for the Stux is perhaps the paradigm account of why you might inflict harm on someone. It's so that they can see the truth.
Transformative Punishment
00:46:52
Speaker
And for some people, you know, maybe you lacked
00:46:57
Speaker
Uh, maybe you have a habit of showing up late or something like that. And the other person says, you know, it doesn't really, it doesn't really feel good when you show up late. I prefer if you didn't do that, you keep on doing it. And then on one day the other person strikes back at you and is certainly late to your meeting or something like this. Some cases that can be petty, but then other cases you might think, Oh, now I understand that is.
00:47:20
Speaker
a real harm. It makes, or I shouldn't say it's a real harm, but it makes our meetings much less pleasant. And I wish. Who's hurt you, Caleb? Who's starting up your meetings late? I'll get them. I'll restore balance. Yeah. Yeah. That's maybe it's a amusing example. I think many of these examples probably are really when they're made explicit or amusing, but
00:47:49
Speaker
I think one way in which punishment can be justified is when you're focused on that transformation. The other person's seen as morally blind in some way. Perhaps you are morally blind. Now the question is, okay, what's required to get you in the right state, get the other person in the right state?
00:48:08
Speaker
I mean at first I was thinking about this meme there's this meme maybe it's just I think it might actually just be a family guy joke it's just like I never thought I'd bring up a family guy joke in a philosophy podcast but there's this guy who's like he's gone to jail for stabbing people and then I think he's sitting in the jail cell board and then he stabs himself and he's like oh this is what I've been doing to people this is terrible I had no idea this is why nobody likes me
00:48:31
Speaker
Just this idea of maybe a perspective shift. But what I want to call into, what I want to call attention to here is the difference between result and intention. Like I think it's really easy to say, oh, well, I just yelled at that person and now they learn what it feels like to be me. It's like, well, you might've had the result of transformation. You might've had the result of deterrence or communication, but was your intention, deterrence, communication, or more importantly, transformation. I think to actually.
00:49:01
Speaker
To have someone harm you and to say, I'm going to set a boundary now for their sake because I care about them is quite a transformative way to approach a harm. It's quite a high bar to approach a harm. And it's not something I think I do very often. I think I do it sometimes.
00:49:21
Speaker
But I don't think I do it very often. And I don't I wouldn't want people to accuse themselves and be like, well, I lost my temper, but it's transformed them. They've learned to lessen now. And that's very different. Right. Because there's just a difference between result and intention. Anything you could do could have all kinds of results. But it was your intention transformation. And it's a it's a pretty high bar. Yeah, I suppose as we're wrapping up one of the shifts the Stoics challenges to take is that
00:49:50
Speaker
Whether you punish someone or not, anger is not appropriate. See the other person as someone who is in error, as making a mistake, rather than someone who fundamentally deserves unhappiness. And as such, punishment is, if we punish at all, it should always be about
00:50:12
Speaker
doing so rationally, doing so with the aim of transformation and being excellent in our roles. So we can end here with a line from Seneca on clemency. So he's talking about this issue of when should you pardon others?
00:50:28
Speaker
And he says, we must therefore take care to distinguish those characters which admit of reform from those which are hopelessly depraved. Neither ought we show an indiscriminate and general, nor yet an exclusive clemency, for to pardon everyone is a great cruelty as to pardon none. We must take a middle course. But as it is difficult to find the true mean, let us be careful. If we depart from it, to do so upon the side of humanity.
00:50:58
Speaker
So here, I note him reading that there's this separation between how we respond to people, whether we pardon them or not, and our ultimate intentions to be acting on the side of humanity. And he notes that sometimes pardons clemency, it's not going to be appropriate, but perhaps, as he discusses in many kinds, many
00:51:27
Speaker
areas of life it is. And we ought to be the kind of person who walks the middle course, as it were.
Punishment in Organizational Structures
00:51:40
Speaker
So that might be, if you realize there are certain cases where you tend to get angry too often, think less about punishing others or punishing yourself. On the other hand, if there are cases where perhaps you ought to be
00:51:56
Speaker
You're thinking about, you know, what's the right way to structure an organization, structure my life, structure the city. Punishment probably just is going to play some amount of role, either whether it's for those reasons of deterrence or transformation. And thinking about what the right role is, is a matter of, you know, cool-headed thought, not seeking revenge.
00:52:17
Speaker
So like most things, we, we end up at an Aristotelian mean at the end there, you know, not too much, not too little, just right. Goldilocks of punishment. But I think that's a good point to end on because that's the skill part of stoicism, right? Is like figuring out what that middle ground is. You know, you don't, we don't talk about this for, we don't talk about punishment for an hour. We go. Okay. We punish in cases, ABC, and we don't in cases and in other cases, what we're left with is guides.
00:52:46
Speaker
kind of signposts that we then need a skill to navigate between. I also like that we're hanging on this idea of forgiveness, because maybe that'll be a different podcast episode we can do, because it seems to me that's the other side of this conversation. If you have punishment, then you also have clemency, you also have forgiveness, and those go hand in hand. And I'd be interested in chatting about that with you, Caleb, sometime.
00:53:07
Speaker
Yeah, we should do that. Excellent. We'll also have an upcoming conversation with Jeremy Reed on anger and forgiveness. So stay tuned for that as well. Awesome.
00:53:19
Speaker
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00:53:49
Speaker
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00:54:08
Speaker
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