Equality: Harmful and Helpful Behavior

Equality is an important concept in America. If equality can be respected and actualized to any degree across a country, it cannot mean equality of circumstances. Without someone being in control (and above other members in society—inequality), citizens will receive different pay for different jobs, experience different climates, interact with different people, be subject to different crimes, etc. Inequality of circumstance is a matter of degree; equality of circumstances is all or nothing.

Equality of status can be respected by a government in actuality. Since human actions can be at least conceptually divided into the categories of ‘harmful’ or ‘helpful’, these categories can aid an understanding of equality and liberty. First, instigating harmful behavior is unjustified. People do not own each other. Instigating harm against another is acting as if one has more value than another or as if another is one’s property. This is directly against democratic principles.

Most Americans would agree with that, but what equality says about helpful behavior is more controversial. Equality does not forbid helpful actions or charitable causes, but it disallows forcing others to perform any given positive action for the good of another. Just as two people cannot justifiably demand that someone give $500 to a charitable organization, so too a whole country cannot justifiably demand a humanitarian ‘donation’. It is wrongheaded to think that the statuses of individuals in groups are tallied and weighed against the status(es) of the targeted individual(s) to determine whether the desired coercion is acceptable. The prohibition of instigating harm precludes taxation to promote ‘charitable’ goals. Money is a good, and taking it away to give to others is harmful.

One can consistently hold that one person is morally obligated to be charitable to others whenever possible and that government has no right to demand people’s money for humanitarian causes (for our citizens or nations across the world). Demanding money for an admittedly good cause surely requires the government coercion respect equality. Many Americans seem satisfied that they support the cause without being concerned about unjustifiable government force.

Many who support government-run projects giving aid to unfortunate people stress the interconnectedness of individuals in a society as a justification for such a government program. “No man is an island,” they say. This is true, but it does not support their conclusion: we can justifiably impose taxes on citizens, especially the rich, to pay for good causes, i.e., efforts to help fellow citizens. The rich “can afford to give a bit more back,” as Obama recently stated. In the same sense, the rich can more afford for their cars to be blown up because they will be able to purchase another. “Afford” suggests choice, and none is found here. More accurately, their justification is, “The rich have more money than they need, and we want some of it."

In what universe is that equal?

Rights

A right concerns the relationship between individual people. A right is just a reference to a fundamental rule of interaction between people. Having a right is holding a position relative to others. It is the situation regarding another where a given action ought not to happen.

Retributive Theory 2

I've been talking to my friends about retributive, proportionate sentencing, and I have changed my mind about what kind of proportionality I favor. It is EPro, but it is not equal to the offence. EPro punishment ought to be equal to the seriousness of the offence, which is composed of the nature of the offence and the culpability of the offender. The nature of the offence would include the harm done by the crime and the intended harm caused by the crime. The culpability has to do with the offender's mindset at the time of the offence, i.e. whether the criminal intended to harm the victim, the reason it was done, etc.

My Theory I - Right to Life, Equality

I have lots of related ideas floating around in my head. I am going to try to develop them logically here. For all these posts, I am talking about responsible adults.

My theory logically starts with the right to life. A friend asked me, 'What is the right to life?' and I didn't know well enough to answer her. So I want to think about that here.

A Right -- A right is an intangible; it is an idea. It is an idea governing human inter-action. Further, it is an idea which causes some inter-actions to be deemed unjustified. Unjustified actions infringing on a person's life would violate a person's right to life.

Let's take a second to think about what rights a person has or ought to have. Autonomy and equality are important in understanding this. In Western society, it is a common belief that Random-Citizen-A is not qualified to command Random-Citizen-B to believe X. It is up to individuals to decide what they want to believe. People decide for themselves. Additionally, it is generally believed that every person in the world is unjustified in demanding that Random-Citizens-A or B believe X. This is because each person's mind is not to be governed by another. Each of us is autonomous because we are equal.

Right to Life -- As we are autonomous and equal, the right to life is seen when we realize that, just as no one else can rightfully impose his or her beliefs on another, no one can justifiably impose harm on another (except under certain circumstances which I hope to explore later). The unprovoked killing of someone would violate his or her right to life because this would be acting in a way that denies his or her autonomy and equality.

Retributive Theory

Retributive justification for state punishment of criminal activities emphasizes proportionality between the punishment and the crime being punished. There are three options for proportionality in a given case. There can be Equal Proportionality (EPro), Lesser Proportionality (LPro) and Greater Proportionality (GPro).

EPro is represented by 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth'. If someone commits a criminal wrong against someone else, the punishment should be equal against the offender, sometimes taking the same form. It is intuitive and has the strength of an appeal to justice, balancing the scales.

LPro maintains that the punishment should be proportionate, but it denies that it needs to be the equal. This is sometimes justified by saying that a state's punishment is justified because it censures and condemns the offender, and it sends a message to the offender and others that the act is not tolerated. LPro theorists also sometimes argue that strictly equal punishments are barbaric. How is a government justified in doing to the offender what the offender did to others if it is an offensive act?

GPro is less popular than I think it should be. I do not know of a pure retributivist who advocates GPro. How would one justify the GPro position from a purely retributivist perspective? I think the general flow of the argument is pretty simple. A infringes on one of B's human rights without provocation, and this offence has a severity of 2, on a scale of 1-5. This is wrong; it is unacceptable. The state with jurisdiction should, after a fair trial resulting in a jury verdict and so forth, find a sentence with a severity of 2. However, it should sentence A to more than a level 2 punishment. This is due to its justified role in punishing such an offender. An equal-consequence response by the state to an offence would not be equal because the offender was not justified in his infringement on B's human rights but the state is justified in its punishment. Therefore, in order for it to be equal in all respects, the punishment must add to the equivalent-consequence sentence an addition for the unjustified violation of B's human rights. So, GPro can be justified if punishment is understood to be properly equal to unjustified crime.

Banks and (Other) Corportations

Something just occurred to me, and I wonder what you think of it.

It seems the liberals and Washington are talking from two perspectives on what is really one issue. Are we in favor of big corporations or not? We bail out the banks. You might say, 'Well, "our" banks are the foundation of doing business in the US.' We also bailed out GM, and we have many non-GM cars all over the country.

On the other hand, Wal-Mart is the great evil. It's a big corporation and, therefore, evil. We want small businesses who pay good wages, not Wal-Mart who can force people to take jobs at low costs.

What is the difference between banks and car companies on the one side and Wal-Mart on the other? They both make profits in general, quite a lot I would guess. If you work for a bank, are you getting paid a large amount of money? If you work at a car factory, are you raking in the dough? Why are there opposing views of these big businesses?

Criminal vs. Civil Law

Once again, start with the terms. It is typical to say that the criminal law is the part of the law which forbids or commands behavior because behaving in that way or not behaving in another way is disadvantageous to the larger community, not just the two parties involved in the initial behavior. Civil law is said to deal with disputes between individuals where there is a disagreement or an allegation of negligence which may or may not have caused harm to someone (http://www.cscja-acjcs.ca/criminal_civil_law-en.asp?l=4).

I just want to suggest another way of defining criminal and civil law for a government who takes its job to be to punish those who infringe on the rights of others. Criminal law would consume careless negligence resulting in harm because one cannot be allowed to be thoughtless with the lives and welfare of others on the line. It seems civil law would be reserved for contract negotiations (before there is a breach).

As it is today in America, as I understand it, criminal cases can result in various forms of punishment, any goods or resources that are transferred away from the defendant go to the state. Most civil-case settlements or rulings, on the other hand, transfer goods from the defendant to the plaintiff. This would change. Even assuming states can actually be offended, disadvantaged, or harmed by a crime, appropriate criminal cases would include transfers of goods from defendant to victim(s). The damage done to X by Y when Y steals X's $100 (assuming it is not traumatizing, etc.) is mostly remedied when Y is commanded to pay X $150, $400, whatever. Perhaps there would be an additional penalty for the effect the defendant had on the larger society or on the state.

It seems to me that criminal law should include more behavior, that civil law should include less, and that criminal law should include a new type of punishment in its courts: restitution directly to the victim.