[Buddha-l] Re: Buddhist social deconstruction

[Dan Lusthaus]

Erik wrote:
> I don't think one example proves a lot and I hate conversasiotns where
only examples and counter examples are exchanged. An important question one
has to answere is: what's the objective of punishment?Is it:

Of course not. Why should reality or anything empirical intrude on one's
fantasies?

>     * revenge
>     * honouring the public feeling of justice, or
>     * prevention?

If you go back and reread what I wrote, the answer is that some people are
too dangerous to be allowed to prey on others. "Revenge" is merely a label
one gives to someone else's sense of justice when one doesn't approve or
agree. To deny a society the right to establish justice would be perverse
and injust.

> The Old Testament prescribes revenge,

Actually, that is the Christian myth (= deliberate misreading) of the Hebrew
scriptures. It's a devious and yet transparent way for Christians to disown
two incredibly brutal millennia while reassuring themselves that they are
morally superior to their victims and each other. Which is why the Rabbinic
tradition outlawed capital punishment -- based on its reading of the
scriptures -- two thousand years ago (they set the bar so high, that in
practical terms, virtually no human situation would fulfill the
requirements). Rabbinic ethics center on balancing chesed (loving-kindness,
mercy) with din (stern justice), the former considered the higher value;
either extreme, when untempered by the other, leads to bad consequences.
Middle Way.

>most judges nowadays appeal to a
> feeling of justice expressed in the law and jurisprudence.

Judges, if they are doing their job, implement the law (which is usually
written by others). If they don't, they are not judges but vigilantes.

>One
> thing is certain however: the prison today is a crime university. (Read
> Michel Foucalt's 'Discipline and punishment'). Most inmates are prone to
> go back where to came from, even better prepared.

That generalism doesn't even rise to the status of an example or
counterexample. There are lots of problems with Foucault's version of
institutional history (driven, as it is, by an agenda grounded in a deep
nostalgia for the lost wholeness of the Church). In the American judicial
system, the stress and resources were devoted to rehabilitation over
"punishment" for several decades (1950s-70s), but the results were
unsatisfactory and depressing. Recidivism didn't decline, actual
rehabilitation was a rare event, and the crime rate soared. While some
argued that more effective rehabilitative methods should be sought, others
(who have dominated policy since) rejected that argument and insisted that
prisons shouldn't "coddle" criminals. Whatever one thinks of the
heartlessness of that theory, crime rates have dropped. Whether Europe has
been following a similar or different trajectory, I don't know.

Some people really are icchantikas.

Dan Lusthaus