The Causes of Human Rights Violations (33): Nefarious Political Metaphors

I want to go out on a limb here and argue that most if not all human rights violations as they have occurred throughout human history can be explained and have been directly caused by the persistent and widespread use of metaphors. (Which doesn’t mean that there are no other causes).

But before I list some of the metaphors I have in mind, a few general words that may help to explain why I think simple metaphors can do so much damage. The fact that we constantly use metaphors in language and thought may buttress the thesis that they have some effect on our actions. The same is true for the fact that metaphors are not just figures of speech but are cognitively important as well: by claiming that some things are alike – metaphors are descriptions of one thing as something else – they help us understand things.

For example, if we say that compound interest is like a snowball rolling off a snowy mountain side, we use something we already understand – the snowball – in order to understand something else that looked and sounded strange before the application of the metaphor – compound interest. And when we then understand things in a certain way, we act according to our understanding of things – in our example, we put our money in a savings account that offers compound interest rather than in one that just offers a fixed interest on the basic sum.

Or let’s use another, more appropriate example (one which I will return to below): if we have difficulties assessing the impact of immigration on our own society and culture, then the metaphor of the “tidal wave of immigration” can help us to “understand” this impact and to do something about it (stop the wave, for instance). Immigration is like a wave because it’s equally overwhelming and harmful. It’s clear from this example that the word “understanding” should not be understood (pun intended) in an epistemological sense: the point is not that understanding produces correct knowledge about the world, but simply that we believe it does. In this case, I personally think the wave metaphor does not help us to understand the phenomenon of immigration (on the contrary), but many people believe it does and it inspires their actions.

If all this has convinced you that metaphors can indeed cause political actions, then it’s now time to list what I believe have been and to some extent still are some of the most destructive political metaphors in history. (Do tell me in comments if you think of other examples).

Moral Balance

This metaphor is most clearly expressed in lex talionis – an eye for an eye – which is a form of criminal justice that claims to balance crime and retribution. A softer version is proportionality: even if people shouldn’t be punished in a manner that strictly balances out their criminal acts, they should get what they deserve and they deserve tougher sentences when their crimes are worse. There may also be a deeper metaphor at work here, one in which there is some kind of cosmic moral balance that shouldn’t be disturbed and that should be corrected when people do disturb it. Failure to correct it leaves moral imbalances intact, and that is damaging in some unspecified and metaphysical way.

Many people agree that the moral balance metaphor has done a lot of harm in the case of capital punishment, but I argue that it poisons our entire criminal justice system. We shouldn’t incarcerate people in order to punish those who deserve some amount of incarceration proportional to their crime. If we have to incarcerate, it’s because that’s the only way to protect other people’s rights. And this rule would drastically reduce the number of inmates currently in prisons all over the world. It’s fashionable to say that we have come a long way since the time of medieval criminal punishment, but I believe our current judicial practices – even those in “developed countries” – are still among the worst human rights violations in the world.

Bootstrapping

This metaphor is most harmful when it blocks assistance to the poor (and poverty is a human rights violation). It promotes an “understanding” of the phenomenon of poverty that paints the poor as lazy, self-destructive and undeserving people who only have themselves to blame and who could easily save themselves were they willing to invest the necessary effort. This “understanding” obscures many other and often more important causes of poverty and therefore perpetuates it.

Dirt

Genocide, mass murder, ethnic cleansing and other crimes against humanity are made easier when the target group is persuasively depicted as some sort of “dirt”, “cockroaches“, “vermin” or any other dehumanized entity. The best way to violate human rights is to deny people’s humanity. However, dehumanization also occurs on a much smaller and seemingly harmless scale, in advertising, gender stereotypes, popular culture etc.

The dirt example shows that people often don’t even realize that they are acting on the basis of a metaphor and actually view what is supposed to be a similarity as being an identity. Many Rwandan Hutus implicated in the genocide probably believed that Tutsis and cockroaches were quasi-identical.

The Family

The metaphor of the family of fellow citizens is often used to justify differential treatment of citizens and non-citizens. For example, social security offers protection to fellow-citizens who are nationally the worst off but who are nevertheless relatively wealthy when compared to the poorest in other countries. And development aid is usually much less generous than social security. I would argue for a more cosmopolitan stance as a better means to protect the equal human rights of all human beings.

The same metaphor is used to justify excessive patriotism and the wars that seem an inevitable result of it, as well as authoritarian government by a father figure or by people who think they know better.

The Wave

As mentioned earlier, this metaphor is used to counter immigration, when in fact increased immigration could do an enormous amount of good, not only for millions of poor people all over the world, but also for the populations in the more wealthy destination countries.

The metaphor does some more damage when it’s used in overpopulation discourse. Horrible population control policies are supposedly justified by the “wave” of overpopulation, and as if these policies aren’t harmful enough by themselves, they have disastrous side effects such as gendercide.

The Child

This metaphor has often been used to subjugate women, those supposedly childlike creatures unable to control their emotions or to marshal the forces – physical or mental – necessary for many social roles. Slaves and colonized peoples as well were often viewed as childlike beings in need of the White Man’s guidance.

Conclusion

So, what can we take away from this? It would seem that we can’t do much about human rights violations: metaphors are notoriously hard to weed out and if they caused rights violations in the past they will continue to do so. But that’s not entirely true. While we may not be able to remove certain metaphors from common language, we may reduce their impact on real life events and their salience in certain circumstances. We can chip away at their nefarious role in rights violations, and that’s exactly what we already did in the past.

For example, the child metaphor used to be an important conduit in the submission of blacks, but that’s no longer the case today. The metaphor is still there and is still doing damage (in criminal justice for instance, as an analogy for punishment based on a supposed lack of self-control), but its range has been curtailed. Curtailment of harmful metaphors often means dismissing the similarity between things that a metaphor has tried to establish. For example, if we can show that immigration doesn’t do the same damage to a society as a “tidal wave” but actually has a lot of benefits, then the metaphor of the “tidal wave” can be curtailed.

Other posts in this series are here. More on the effect of language on human rights is here.

What Are Human Rights? (26): The “Human” Part of Human Rights

Why do we need the qualifier “human” when we talk about human rights? Why is the word “rights” not enough? The obvious reason is that we want to broaden the class of protected persons to cover the whole of humanity. Traditionally, rights were accorded only to specific groups of persons, e.g. the nobility, guilds, citizens etc. The essence of human rights is their universality, which means that they are rights that belong to human beings whatever group they are part of and wherever they happen to live. People have certain rights for the simple reason that they are human; there’s no need for any other reason such as group affiliation, nationality, form of government, legal system etc.

Human rights can thus be seen as the end state of a long expansionary evolution during which ever broader groups of people acquired certain rights. However, the inclusiveness of human rights has often been countered by exclusionary movements. If some want to include a maximum number of people under the protection of rights, others have an interest in the continuation of rights violations. The latter have two options: challenge human rights directly (e.g. by claiming that they are western rights, godless rights etc.), or take the more indirect route: maintain the notion of human rights but at the same time exclude some categories of people from humanity.

Many rights violations are explicitly or implicitly justified by reference to an absence of humanity on the part of the targets of those violations. The terror inflicted by Al-Qaida, the televised beheadings of innocent hostages etc. proves that these people are less than human. They are “animals” and can’t therefore claim that their “human” rights are respected when they are executed extra-judicially, eliminated by way of targeted killing, tortured, or arrested indefinitely in Guantanamo. Perhaps people don’t mean it literally when they say that terrorists are animals. Perhaps they do accept that they are human – they look human after all – but at least they are lesser humans, and hence not deserving the same rights as the rest of humanity. Perhaps they are merely barbarians, a separate and inferior class of humans.

The same attitude is evident in certain non-consequentialist justifications of capital punishment: the people who are executed are “the worst of the worst”, “animals” that have proven their inhumanity by way of their crimes. Also the native populations of colonized territories were considered to be non-human or at least lesser humans. There was a time when westerners weren’t sure that these people had a “soul”, a classic if currently somewhat outmoded distinguishing mark of humans. For those who believed they didn’t have a soul, their enslavement and murder was as acceptable as keeping and slaughtering animals. It took a Papal Bull to attempt to reign in the more extreme colonizers, without much success by the way.

This raises the fundamental question: what is “human”, what does it mean to be human, what is humanity? Respect for human rights depends on the type of answer we can agree on. Ideally, we would like to have a broad definition that makes it difficult if not impossible to exclude large portions of homo sapiens from the category of humanity and to violate their rights as a result of this exclusion. Claiming that someone is human because of his or her “good behavior”, e.g. non-terrorist and non-murderous behavior, is not the right way forward. “Good behavior” is a moralistic notion that can be defined in lots of different ways. Hence we potentially exclude the large majority if not the totality of people from humanity if we go along that road.

On the other hand, a non-moralistic definition, for instance a naturalistic or biological one, isn’t necessarily better. Given the way in which we treat animals, it’s probably best to avoid a definition of humanity as a distinct animal species (in Plato’s phrase, the “featherless biped“). An animal species, however distinct from other species, still consists of animals that are in some sense like other animals belonging to other species. We don’t have moral rules that tell us to treat cats differently from dogs, so a definition of humanity as a distinct animal species is unlikely to yield moral rules that tell us to treat humans differently from cats or dogs.

However, biology can be a useful element in the definition of humanity since it’s biology that justifies some human rights. Some of the biological vulnerabilities that are distinctive of us featherless bipeds, and perhaps even some of the vulnerabilities we share with some non-human species (e.g. the ability to suffer) can be seen as reasons to respect certain human rights. (Although in the latter case the price to pay would be to grant the same rights to non-human species that have the same vulnerabilities; those human rights would then no longer be strictly “human” rights. But perhaps that’s a price we should be willing to pay).

However, for the reasons given above biology is hardly sufficient for the definition of humanity. I guess we also don’t want to use the concept of “soul” to define humanity, given its association with religion. Ideally, we want to be persuasive to the non-religious violators of human rights as well, and those won’t be swayed by soul talk (perhaps they won’t be swayed at all but at least we can try). “Human nature” is a discredited concept, dignity is excessively vague, and moral agency seems to be less typical of humanity than we once believed.

So what can we use? I’ve argued elsewhere that some values that are typical of and in certain cases exclusive to human beings – or homo sapiens – can be seen as adequate justifications of human rights, since these rights serve the realization of those values (examples of those values are the importance of thinking, of social and cultural life, of religion, of prosperity, peace etc.). Excluding certain specimen of homo sapiens from the category of humanity or “real humanity” is then an attack on values that are shared by all specimens; rights violators then unwillingly attack their own values.

However, one problem remains. People’s rights aren’t necessarily safe, not even if we can settle the question of humanity and define the concept in such a way that it becomes difficult to exclude people from humanity. Humanity itself can be the problem. If human rights can be violated when a person’s humanity is denied, it’s also the case that a person who’s merely human runs the same risk. Hannah Arendt has often cited the plight of stateless persons before and after WWII, people whose nationality had been taken away from them by their racist, fascist or xenophobic governments, and who therefore only had their “humanity” left. In the best of cases, they were refugees in foreign countries where their rights were far from safe given that many countries only protected the rights of their own citizens.

The notion of humanity inherent in human rights is also incompatible with widespread feelings of partiality: most of us care more for our family and friends than for the rest of humanity, and some of us also care more for fellow-citizens. Somehow that’s inevitable: not only is it psychologically impossible to care for all the misery in the world – there’s simply too much of it – but it also seems morally right to care more for those who are closer.

In all those examples, we see that human rights have to come back to partiality. Inherent in human rights is universal inclusiveness, but at the same time we see that human rights can only be adequately protected when they are at the same time rights of very specific subgroups of humans: citizens, soldiers, family etc.

More on dehumanization and universality.

Racism (12): Blacks and Apes

Historical representations explicitly depicting Blacks as apelike have largely disappeared in the United States, yet a mental association between Blacks and apes remains. Here, the authors demonstrate that U.S. citizens implicitly associate Blacks and apes. In a series of laboratory studies, the authors reveal how this association influences study participants’ basic cognitive processes and significantly alters their judgments in criminal justice contexts. Specifically, this Black-ape association alters visual perception and attention, and it increases endorsement of violence against Black suspects. In an archival study of actual criminal cases, the authors show that news articles written about Blacks who are convicted of capital crimes are more likely to contain ape-relevant language than news articles written about White convicts. Moreover, those who are implicitly portrayed as more apelike in these articles are more likely to be executed by the state than those who are not. The authors argue that examining the subtle persistence of specific historical representations such as these may not only enhance contemporary research on dehumanization, stereotyping, and implicit processes but also highlight common forms of discrimination that previously have gone unrecognized. (source)

Capital Punishment (25): Non-Contingent Reasons to Abolish Capital Punishment

Many people would agree that there are what we could call contingent reasons to abolish capital punishment:

• it’s practiced in such a way that it doesn’t meet basic standards of fairness and non-cruelty:
  • for instance the racial discrepancies in the system in the U.S.
  • the irreversibility in cases of miscarriages of justice
  • and the methods used in Saudi Arabia)
• and it also doesn’t do what proponents say it’s supposed to do:
  • it fails to deter crime when compared to life imprisonment without possibility of parole – see here and here
  • and it fails to be retributive because in many cases it could be argued that murderers for instance deserve a fate much worse than death – capital punishment is often much less than an eye for an eye; however, few proponents of capital punishment are willing to take that road.

However, is there an argument for abolition that does not depend on contingent facts? Or, in other words, even if the punishment would be administered in a totally fair, correct and non-cruel way, and even if every execution would deter n murders, would we still have reasons to abolish it? To put it in yet another way: is there something inherent in capital punishment, in the very nature of it, that justifies its abolition?

I think there is. Before I tell you, however, I just want to say that it is in a sense futile because the contingent reasons for abolition are so strong that they are enough. I don’t think we can ever find a way to apply capital punishment without discrimination, without the risk of killing innocent people, and without any cruelty (even painless executions involve psychological cruelty, often for years on end). Hence it isn’t really necessary to make the case that even in perfect circumstances – which will never pertain – capital punishment isn’t justifiable.

But I’ll make the case anyway, because it reveals something that is philosophically interesting, even if it’s not practically useful. Imagine the perfect but in my view improbably if not impossible circumstances in which capital punishment is used as a fair, non-cruel and correct way of punishing certain criminals (correct in the sense of avoiding miscarriages of justice) and thereby deterring further crime. The intention of being retributive is almost impossible, even in ideal circumstances, as I have argued above, unless we give up traditional notions of cruelty which few proponents of capital punishment are willing to give up, so we can leave that aside.

So the focus is on deterrence. What does it mean to deter? It means that criminals are used as instruments to advance the collective interest. They are sacrificed for the greater good and a resource for the benefit of others (namely the intended future victims of future murderers). When the state instrumentalizes people in this way, it sends a clear message that this is a normal way of treating people, with possibly disastrous consequences. One of the most important lessons we have learned from Immanuel Kant and others is that we should never use fellow human beings as means to an end. An offender, even the worst possible offender, has a certain value as a human being, a certain dignity if you want, which should be respected and which cannot be canceled in the process of punishment. An offender shouldn’t be a mere tool to send warnings and intimidations to possible future offenders.

Now, you could say: how is this different from life imprisonment without parole? Isn’t that also meant to deter and hence open to the same criticism? No, it isn’t. Life imprisonment is intended to stop the criminal from doing further crime, and hence the criminal isn’t used to deter others. Furthermore, life imprisonment is intended to give the criminal the opportunity to make amends.

The Ethics of Human Rights (25): Free Organ Trade and the Commodification of the Body

The case for allowing free organ trade seems like a no-brainer. Many countries, including the U.S., now forbid the sale and purchase of most organs, and, as a consequence, sick people die because of organ shortages, and poor people stay poor because they can’t “monetize” their organs. Poor people suffer a “double injustice”:

[We say] to a poor person: “You can’t have what most other people have and we are not going to let you do what you want to have those things”. (source, source)

However, when organs are freely tradable, many extremely poor people, especially those struggling to survive, will be tempted and even forced to sells parts of their bodies. Moreover, the rich will be able to benefit disproportionately from the market because prices will be high, given that demand will outstrip supply in an ageing society. The most obvious means to balance supply and demand, and to force down prices and allow the less than wealthy patients to participate in and benefit from the market, is to create a global market without trade restrictions, an organ-GATT if you want. This will bring in the masses of poor people from Africa and Asia, pushing up supply of organs and hence bringing down prices. This will supposedly benefit both the less than wealthy patients and the very poor donors. The latter will benefit even with prices for organs falling because of increased supply, because they start at extremely low levels of income. Even the sale of a cheap kidney can mean years of income for them.

The problem with this global market is that organ extraction will take place in sub-optimal medical conditions, creating risks for donors (if you can still call them that), also in the case of renewable tissue donation. Paradoxically, the poor are driven to risk their lives in the process of saving their lives. Even in the best healthcare systems in the world, organ extraction is often very risky. In the U.S., the extraction of a section of the liver, for example, carries a risk to the donor’s life of almost 1 percent (source). That’s not negligible. I doubt anyone would cross a street if that were the odds of getting hit by a car.

I’m convinced that an opt-out regulation for cadaveric donors (meaning that everyone’s a donor after death unless an explicit opt-out), combined with non-financial encouragement of voluntary pre-death donation, is the best way to solve the organ shortage problem. A free organ market will obviously also solve the organ shortage problem, but will create new problems instead.

The distinction between renewable tissue such as bone marrow, and non-renewable organs such as kidneys, eyes, etc. is a relevant one. If the donation of renewable tissue can take place in medically safe conditions, I can’t see a problem with being allowed to trade, on the condition that poor patients have the same opportunity and power to buy as rich ones (and that’s a pretty big “if”). The needs of the sick or disabled who risk dying or suffering because of a lack of available organ, clearly outweigh any remaining concerns.

One of those remaining concerns is the problem of the commodification of the body. Organ trade is obviously commodification, and commodification is dehumanization. I don’t want to imply that organ trade liberalization necessarily results in “organ farms”, dystopian places where people are “cultivated” solely for the harvesting of their organs – although the Chinese criminal justice and capital punishment system for instance comes awfully close. (I sometimes wonder if deterrent and punishment is the real goal of executions in China). But people can commodify and dehumanize themselves. And although we should normally respect people’s self-regarding choices, what looks like a choice may not always be a true choices.

The logic of economics tends to overtake all other domains of life, even those where it doesn’t belong and can do serious harm. Why is it so evident to so many that body parts are something that it supposed to be tradable? Even the most outspoken proponents of organ trade draw the line somewhere: they won’t allow people to sell parts of their brains, I guess, or their children and wives, or the parts of aborted fetuses (perhaps fetuses specially conceived and “harvested” for their parts), not even if this would fill a great social need. And yet they accept as natural that non-vital body parts should be tradable and seem to forget that irreplaceable body parts form our body and that we can hardly exist without our body. If we allow total freedom of organ trade, we will have to accept the case in which a poor father decides to sell off every single one of his organs for the survival of his family. After all, he is the master of his own body, he has a right to self-determination, and the government has no right to limit what masters of their own bodies should be allowed to do with it. If you don’t accept the legitimacy of this extreme case, you accept limitations on the freedom to trade organs. Since most opponents of organ trade also accept certain types of trade – e.g. renewable organs such as bone marrow and skin – the disagreement isn’t a principled one but one about degree.

Underlying the argument in favor of organ trade is the fiction of a market populated by free, equal and self-determining individuals who make free and rational economic decisions and agreements on what to sell and buy, free from government interference. The reality is of course that organ trade isn’t an expression of self-determination or autonomy but rather of the absence of it. And that organ trade, just like a lot of other trade, is radically asymmetrical: some are forced to sell in order to survive, especially if the price and hence the reward is very high, as it will be relatively speaking for the poor. And others will sell without rationally examining the benefits for or risks to their interests (absence of informed consent). It’s beyond my powers of comprehension that all this can be denied:

It’s true that I don’t find any of the arguments about the coercive effects of money on peoples’ decisions particularly compelling.  Megan McArdle (source)

Any potential paid organ donor is always free to decline the transaction, and is left no worse off than before. What next, will you tell me that I “coerced” Apple into sending me a Macbook? (source)

This seems to me to be more correct, or at least less outrageous:

Talk of individual rights and autonomy is hollow if those with no options must “choose” to sell their organs to purchase life’s basic necessities. … Choice requires information, options and some degree of freedom. (source)

Of course, some would say: if someone is forced by poverty to sell her organs, would you stop her and make her worse off by imposing legal restrictions on her autonomy and “reducing her resources”? That’s again the myth that markets always make things better. What if she does get some money, has a better life in the short run, but gets sick because of the operation (or do we also assume the myth of perfect healthcare for the world’s poor?) or because of the lack of an organ? Who would make her worse off? The one allowing her to sell, or the one stopping her? And anyway, there are better ways to protect the poor than to allow them to harvest their organs.

So, if we’re afraid that free organ trade might be exploitative for the poor, why not allow free trade but exclude the poor from selling? Because the poor will be, in general, the only ones tempted to sell. A wealthy person has no incentive to sell organs. Hence a free trade system restricted in this way will not solve the shortage problem, the main concern of proponents of free trade.

I’ve stated before that government interference can promote rather than restrict freedom. In the case of organ trade and donation, two specific types of interference can help:

• Restricting the freedom to trade non-renewable organs, as well as renewable organs in circumstances in which extraction poses a health risk to donors, will protect the freedom of the poor. Not their freedom to sell organs obviously – which isn’t freedom for them anyway but compulsion – but the freedom to live a healthy live.
• Imposing default cadaveric donation with an opt-out clause will protect the freedom to live a healthy live of patients in need of replacement organs. Of course, if it’s the case that for some organs cadaveric donation isn’t possible medically, I’m willing to accept an exception.

How about allowing people to sell their organs after death? This would evidently remove the health risks for donors. It could be considered a kind of life insurance for the deceased’s family. That would indeed remove all the concerns from the donor side. (The counter-argument that such a system would encourage families to kill their members for the “insurance money” seems a bit weak, and just as weak as the similar counter-argument against generalized organ trade liberalization, namely that people would murder in order to sell organs; I guess they already do).

But assume that we would allow free post-mortem trade: what would happen with the organs? They would be sold of course, but to whom? The most wealthy first, and hence we still have our problem on the beneficiary side: wealth yields better health. Of course, that’s already the case in healthcare in general: rich people also have better dental care etc. But do we want to add to the existing injustice by allowing wealth to determine who gets an organ?

If we allow limited organ trade of deceased’s organs, we’ll have to do something on the beneficiary side in order to neutralize the effects of wealth. A lottery system could be an option. Or subsidies for the poor, or price caps etc.

The Ethics of Human Rights (24): Richard Rorty on Human Rights and Sympathy

Richard Rorty has an interesting take on human rights. If we want universal acceptance of and respect for human rights, we shouldn’t try to argue about it. We shouldn’t attempt to work out rational justifications of human rights, or arguments that will convince people that human rights are a good thing. Instead, according to Rorty, we would achieve better results if we try to influence people’s feelings instead of their minds. And the best way to do that is by telling sentimental stories like “Uncle Tom’s cabin” or “Roots” etc., or by making political art. Such stories and art make the reader sympathize with persons whose rights are violated because they invite the audience or the reader to imagine what it is like to be in the victim’s position. The victim, who may be of another class, race or nationality and who seems so very different that he or she initially isn’t even considered to be of the same species and therefore cannot possibly claim to enjoy the same rights, is transformed by the story into a living human being. The sympathy engendered by the story gives the victim a human face. This person also grieves for the loss of children, also has an opinion and a moral sense. He’s or she not a barbarian. As a consequence, the victim can be given human rights.

This approach to human rights doesn’t justifying human rights in an abstract and philosophical way – something which according to Rorty isn’t possible anyway (Rorty’s a post-modern anti-foundationalist highly sceptical of the power of reason or rationality). Instead it motivates specific individuals to respect the rights of other specific individuals. So motivation instead of justification. And the focus isn’t so much on human rights themselves, but on humanity. When human rights are violated, it’s often not because people object to human rights, but because they consider the targets of rights violations as somehow outside the realm of humanity. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was very eloquent about human rights, but was a slave holder at the same time. Undoubtedly because he had convinced himself that negroes were more akin to animals than humans.

The big advantage of the sentimental approach is that is can convince people to accept others into the realm of humanity. Sympathy means after all the recognition that someone else’s suffering is akin to your own. Rorty harked back to David Hume for this insight:

Hume held that corrected (sometimes rule-corrected) sympathy, not law-discerning reason, is the fundamental moral capacity. Richard Rorty (source)

This approach, or “sentimental education” as Rorty called it, can indeed be very useful. However, I think we should and can use both strategies, the emotional and the rational one. The emotional approach isn’t without a downside. Human rights violations do not always occur because of a lack of sympathy or because of dehumanization. They are often the result of power structures, cultural practices, legal rules, institutions, international relations etc. Just engendering sympathy won’t do much good there. Moreover, sentimental education implies a willingness to listen – not a notable characteristic of many of the worst human rights violators, i.e. Taliban c.s. – and a certain standard of living that allows people to relax long enough to be able to listen. These are problems which Rorty recognized (source) and which indicate that his approach cannot be exclusive.

Capital Punishment (18): The Stupidity of Deterrent Statistics, Ctd.

Some more data on the supposed deterrent effect of capital punishment:

In 2003, there were [in the U.S.] 16,503 homicides (including nonnegligent manslaughter), but only 144 inmates were sentenced to death. Moreover, of the 3374 inmates on death row at the beginning of the year, only 65 were executed. Thus, not only did very few homicides lead to a death sentence, but the prospect of execution did not greatly affect the life expectancy of death row inmates. Indeed, Katz, Levitt, and Shustorovich have made this point quite directly, arguing that “the execution rate on death row is only twice the death rate from accidents and violence among all American men” and that the death rate on death row is plausibly lower than the death rate of violent criminals not on death row. As such they conclude that “it is hard to believe that in modern America the fear of execution would be a driving force in a rational criminal’s calculus.” John J. Donohue III and Justin Wolfers (source)

Proponents of capital punishment may answer this in two ways:

1. It proves their point: if all these data are correct, we need more capital punishment, and then the deterrent effect will kick in. Capital punishment as it is used now may indeed not deter significantly, but that’s no reason to abolish it; it’s a reason to step up the production of corpses.

But this reasoning leads to a reductio ad absurdum: if deterring crime is so important, and if we should do more to deter crime, then why don’t we change the execution methods: burn criminals alive at the stake. That should deter. But this, of course, brings home the point that we simply can’t do what we want to people in order to achieve some beneficial aggregate social good. If proponents of the death penalty shy away from this ultimate implication of the deterrent argument – and I think most of them will – then there’s no reason why opponents cannot have good reasons to reject killing criminals in other, less cruel ways. If propopents concede the point that there are certain things we can’t do to people, regardless of who they are or what they’ve done, then opponents can make the case that these “certain things” do not only include burning people alive but also killing them in a way which is less cruel but which nevertheless implies instrumentalizing people for the benefit of others with whom they have no relationship and who may not have been born yet. This instrumentalization is perhaps not physically cruel, but it is dehumanizing. People are no longer viewed as humans but as tools for the maximization of social wellbeing.

2. The calculating criminal is a myth. Murderers don’t look at death row statistics or other statistics mentioned in the quote above in order to decide whether or not to actually kill someone. They are deterred, not by numbers, but by the general vivid image of the horror of capital punishment. That may be true in the case of some types of murderers (e.g. the uneducated ones, or those motivated by passion), but not in the case of other types (some people may indeed look at the data and calculate that the risk of being killed for their crimes is so low that it’s ok to go ahead*).

But even if it is true and people don’t calculate, the “burning at the stake” implication still holds. If it’s the vivid nature of the punishment that counts as a deterrent, not the statistical likelihood of actually receiving this punishment (which is very low as a matter of fact), then let’s make it as “vivid” as possible and bring back the Middle Ages.

* I’m thinking of professional criminals for example.

Limiting Free Speech (5): Pornography

First of all, whatever we think of pornography, we should admit that it is a kind of speech, just as cross-burning, flag-burning, hate speech etc., and hence it is at least possible that it falls under the protection of the right to free speech. The U.S. Supreme Court has at different occasions decided that pornography should be protected under the First Amendment:

There are two types of pornography that receive no First Amendment protection ’97 obscenity and child pornography. The First Amendment generally protects pornography that does not fall into one of these two categories. (source)

Other jurisdictions have also protected pornography.

Violence IN pornography

The quote above already indicates that an overall protection of pornography widely defined is not acceptable and that certain limits on the freedom of speech of pornographers are possible. According to the rules set forth in the introductory post of this series a right can be limited if it violates other rights or the rights or others. This is obviously the case of any child pornography or pornography in which violence or force is used against the participants, such as certain kinds of extreme sadomasochistic porn.

Another reason why there can be force and violence in pornography is human trafficking. Many girls are forced to participate in porn movies because they are victims of human trafficking. They are modern slaves in the sex industry.

Violence BECAUSE OF pornography

There is still some discussion in the scientific community as to whether pornography, and especially hardcore and violent pornography, promotes sexual violence in society. This is not easy to establish because the interactions of mass media and human behavior are complex. If pornography promotes sexual violence, we have another justification for limiting its distribution.

The weight of evidence is accumulating that intensive exposure to soft-core pornography desensitises men’s attitude to rape, increases sexual callousness and shifts their preferences towards hard-core pornography. Similarly, the evidence is now strong that exposure to violent pornography increases men’s acceptance of rape myths and of violence against women. It also increases men’s tendencies to be aggressive towards women and is correlated with the reported incidence of rape. Many sex offenders claim they used pornography to stimulate themselves before committing their crimes. (source)

In Australia, the federal government has tended to relax its controls on pornography since 1970. Different states have, however, implemented these changes to varying extents and, as a result, have unwittingly conducted an interesting experiment on the effect of pornography. Queensland, the most conservative state, has maintained the strictest controls on pornography and has a comparatively low rate of rape reports. By contrast, South Australia, the most liberal state in relation to pornography, has seen escalating reports of rape since the early 1970s:

Businesses spend billions of dollars on advertising, in the belief that media can and do have an effect on human behaviour. We support and encourage the arts, in the belief that novels, films and such have the capacity to uplift and enhance human society; in other words, that the arts have a capacity to influence people. Yet we are expected to believe that the increasing tide of pornography does not affect attitudes to women. (source)

The image of women in pornography

One reason why porn can cause violence in society is the image of women that is created through pornography. In some porn, rape is explicitly legitimized, but in all kinds of porn women are depicted as constantly and immediately available for sex. We can assume that long term consumption of porn from an early age onwards, creates the opinion that it is not necessary for men to establish whether a female partner consents to having sex since porn tells them that such consent is automatic. In real life, of course, this is not the case and hence there will be rape.

Porn also objectifies women. It turns women into objects of sexual desire and sexual use. Objectification of women is of course not limited to pornography. Advertising also regularly uses women as means or tools or objects. The objectification of women means dehumanization. And there are more things you can do to a non-human than to a human. Objectification therefore can promote violence against women. To the extent that is does, we have another justification for restrictions on pornography.

Moreover, pornography shapes and reinforces a male-dominant view of sexuality and of gender relations. It’s not far-fetched to claim that pornography contributes to gender discrimination, machismo, sexism, paternalism etc.

All this is the case not only for violent porn but for porn in general and could therefore justify restrictions on non-violent porn.

Different kinds of restrictions

There are different kinds of pornography, different circumstances in which it is distributed, and different people respond differently to pornography. So restrictions on pornography may differ according to circumstances. People with a history of sexual violence are more obvious targets of a ban on the use of hardcore and violent porn than other people. Young people, for the reasons given above, may have more restrictions, including non-violent porn. Pornography in a library is not the same thing as pornography on the streets…

Soft porn or “artistic porn” should be treated differently. An all-out ban on all kinds of pornography would be just as unwise as an all-out protection. Many classic works of art would have to be forbidden if no pornography were allowed. We have to admit that porn can be art and art can be pornographic.

Cultural Rights (11): Genocide

 

Genocide is the deliberate, systematic and violent destruction of a group (an ethnic, racial, religious, national or political group). This destruction can take many forms:

• the outright murder of (the majority of) the members of the group
• inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about destruction
• measures intended to prevent births
• systematic rape as a means of terror and a means to “dilute” the identity of the group
• forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
• destroying the (cultural) identity of the group (forceful assimilation; imposition of a language, religion etc.)

“Systematic” is important here. Short-term outburst or pogrom type actions will probably not amount to genocide.

The “intent to destroy” is also crucial when labeling actions or campaigns as genocidal. The destruction, however, doesn’t have to be physical (i.e. large-scale murder). As is obvious from the list above, cultural destruction or destruction of the groups’ separate identity is also genocide.

Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide states that genocide is

“any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group…”

The “in part” bit has led to some confusion. When is the part of the group that is being destroyed big enough to warrant the label of genocide? There is still some discussion about absolute numbers of victims, percentages of the total population of the group, degree of killing in the territory controlled by the killers etc.

Of all the generally recognized genocides that have taken place throughout human history, the most infamous ones occured in the 20th century (the Holocaust, Rwanda, Armenia, Cambodia, Stalin’s forced famines, Mao’s Great Leap Forward etc.).

Before a genocide is actually carried out, the perpetrators usually take a number of “preparatory” steps:

• dehumanization of a group (vermin, insects or diseases…)
• promotion of narratives of “us and them“
• hate propaganda, polarization
• criminalization of a group (group has to be eliminated “in order that we may live”; them or us)
• identification of victims (“yellow star”)
• concentration of victims (ghettos)
• mobilization of large numbers of perpetrators
• state support and logistical organization (arms, transport, training of militias etc.)

The causes of genocide are often hard to pin down. They include:

• long-lasting tensions
• imbalances in political power
• imbalances in wealth or economic power
• scarcity
• religious incompatibilities
• indoctrination and propaganda
• civil war
• ideals of cultural purity and autonomy
• ethnological constructs (e.g. the creation of “hutuness” in Rwanda) which get a life of their own
• colonial heritage
• outside indifference
• etc.