Reflection on Rights and Punishment

   In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant describes the connection of law and punishment in the following simple relation: if you violate a law, it is a violation of the security of some right or rights for everyone else, and so your own same right should be made insecure. After this, the Doctrine of Right proceeds to discuss a legal system that seems familiar, involving a central authority that meets out punishment.

   Given the manner in which the rights of the criminal are made insecure, it does not seem necessary that any punishment over and above this naturally follows.  Why could the judgment not merely end at the removal of the rights of the individual until such a time when they can be returned?  Of course, if you have committed a murder, and now are made insecure concerning your own life, the result could be worse (in brutality) than a punishment met out by the state: vengeance can be very bloody indeed.  However, there is also the possibility of forgiveness of the deeds which is impossible by means of punishment, and which also seems more needful and just than any punishment.  

   This accords better with the state, since the state ought to be concerned with the maximum freedom of all of its members, and so a violation of rights and subsequent exclusion from the state in certain ways (with the possibility of readmission), allows the state to strive to include a maximum of individuals with differences, but can exclude those who must make the state insecure.

   The human being, taken practically (morally), is the agent of his actions. There is no mechanism we can place underneath the actions of an agent without also destroying the form of practical thought that we think him under.  Any absolving of crimes that are met out through some kind of mechanism which measures out a particular amount to be repaid will never be commensurable with crimes committed by an agent: such correction must be reserved for mere equipment.  This is why it makes sense to untangle the theoretical and practical in this case, and require that forgiveness be the only means of absolution for crimes.  Forgiveness does not accept the crimes committed, but it accepts the person in spite of them.

   The degree to which we take as quite natural and fitting the punishment of individuals as a means of making amends for crimes, or the correction of these individuals as if they are broken equipment, is also a degree to which we take people as mere objects.  If justice is to concern persons in their full humanity, then the treatment of humans as mechanical also stands for the impossibility of real justice.

Descartes and the Lowering of God

(While this 'story' surrounds some few thinkers, I recognize that there are many lost to me, and to history, which I leave out.)

   Descartes' Cogito is often read as denying the reality of objects.  This is how I think Descartes understood it as well, but, as I have written on in the past, I think that Cartesian doubt is actually a doubt of the subject, and his ability to act in relation to objects: Cartesian doubt preserves objects unchanged (theoretically), while separating us from them (practically).

   The result of Descartes' interpretation of the cogito as the list of cognitive acts (perceiving, willing, denying, &c), leaves him with a jumble of things which he rightly recognizes as containing nothing that relates them to the same being (as existing) over time.  The unity of these 'representations' is not contained in all of these acts of the mind (taken in an empirically psychological manner).  However, the continuity of his existence he takes as granted, and so can say, analytically, that there is some infinite idea/being that he depends upon for (the unity of) his existence.  This being is God.

   In relation to Descartes, Kant recognizes the pure concepts which are required when we experience representations, and which - under the unity of apperception - explain the unity of experience.  The unity of apperception plays the same role in Kant as God plays for Descartes (in the third meditation).  However, Descartes choice had a peculiar result in the history of philosophy (as we have received it) which we can, perhaps, learn from.

   As a result of God taking the position of the unity of apperception, and becoming responsible for the unity of experience, we found a way of thinking God which was immediately connected in our theoretical experience of the world (analytically).  However, Descartes begins a tradition that results in the lowering of God.

   Malebranche's Occasionalism represents a view where God works a miracle at every moment to position things correctly.  Spinoza's Monist-Deism does more or less the same in terms of making everything in nature an act of God.

   Leibniz is the first thinker (known to me) in the rationalist tradition that has been handed down, and emphasized, to truly recognized the problem here.  Leibniz demanded that God should not be considered to have caused any miracle save for the bringing into existence of the World.  This single miracle is, to Leibniz, worthy of His greatness.  If we consider, also, that the bringing into existence of everything is understood by Leibniz in terms of the triumph of Good (since this is the best of all possible worlds) it is clearer that this reflects a kind of practical attitude at the foundation of his system.  This decision of Leibniz' seemed to be incredibly important for the development of Kant's thought in relation to this same area.

   I do not write this post to plant a knife in Descartes back, nor to complain about Malebranche's or Spinoza's shortcomings.  I think that all of these thinkers were in possession of the answer to the problem I have raised here - the answer just laid dormant in their systems until a genuine concern with goodness could once again take its place at the helm of the structure of the system (and not merely the interest in first attending to it).  In order to learn from Descartes, Malebranche and Spinoza, we can uncover these practical propositions in their work (as well as bring them out more clearly in Leibniz), and so recover a great deal of clarifying thought for our own benefit (and training).

Different Types of Contradiction - Theoretical and Practical

   We are all familiar with contradiction, but contradiction is applied in many nuanced ways.  It can be very beneficial to go through different senses of contradiction, and I will briefly lay out some of these here, and then in another place develop some of them more closely.

   The sort of contradiction that seems most familiar is that the same object cannot be in two opposite states at once, e.g., something cannot be entirely black and entirely white.  However, we allow an object to have mutually exclusive properties/states over time.  This is understood well enough, and is typically the model of the other ways we speak of contradiction, which is confusing since it transports everything into the context of objects with properties too quickly.

   A more obscure sense of contradiction involves rules that connect a cause and effect (ground and consequence).  We take every effect to have only one cause (even if this cause is a complex - and it usually is), and when we connect a cause and an effect it forms a rule, and so we can say that is contradictory to have two rules for the same cause and effect pair.  To illustrate this sort of contradiction, consider the following: when one object displaces another, we call the connection of these moments impact (or various other terms that describe the same thing), and we say that impact is the cause of one object displacing another.  Impact names a rule that connects the two states (cause and effect).  It would be contradictory to say that besides impact, the rule that connects the cause and effect is a force that acts at a distance, and so the impact of the objects is accidental.  The reason this would be contradictory is that we cannot maintain that the rule of displacement requires impact, and also that the rule of displacement does not require impact; perhaps something can be moved by impact, and at a distance, but they exclude each other as rules connecting the same ground and consequence.

   Another form of contradiction which is obscure is a contradiction between contexts.  A context holds together a number of rules and purposes of things for some activity.  The context of wood working holds certain uses to the tools of the wood working, and the goal one has makes the context of wood working necessary to develop.  It is possible to have a context from which one can evaluate different possible contexts (ways of organizing ourselves and our things in an activity), but we cannot have more than one context at a time.  Even when we are accomplishing two tasks through one action, we have a context for this, as well.

   A context can be contradicted if it does not produce the results that are desired.  We may think that a certain organization of activities and materials will produce the results we aim for, but when it fails we must consider if there was some error or defect in our skill or the material, or if the context was poorly designed to begin with.  If we decide the the context itself is at fault, then it would be insane to repeat the same procedure expecting a different result.  I want to refer to this as a technically practical contradiction.

   Even though we can narrow our interests to certain contexts and achieve the goals we set in them, we can hardly ever remain in any one context at all times; the demands of life pull us into different contexts.  While we do not expect to find a single context that is specifically suited to all tasks, we strive for all of our tasks, and their respective contexts, to harmonize with each other, and so we eliminate contexts not only when they do not work, but also when they conflict with each other and make a harmonized life impossible.  This brings me to another sort of contradiction, which I will call simply a practical contradiction.  When a context functions (attains its aims), but falls into conflict with other contexts (and so throws our life into disarray), we have a practical contradiction.  An example of such a practical contradiction would be a lying promise.

   There is a peculiarity of practical contradictions (both technical, and pure) which makes them very distinct the first two sorts of contradictions (which I will call theoretical).  The first two sorts of contradictions have subjective necessity (we simply do not operate without them, and so they form a part of all of our practical contexts as well).  The theoretical contradictions also have objective necessity, since all objects must obey them, as well.  Now, for practical contradictions, there is no subjective necessity.  We can violate technically practical rules and continue to do the same ineffective thing over and over again — if we could not, then it would have also been impossible to try it the first time.  We can also act against our own interests in having a chaotic life which tries to hold together many different opposing contexts (opposing goals, ultimately), but this is problematic for attaining our higher ends, even if it always seems easier at any time.  These practical contradiction, which are by no means newly devised by me, will benefit from further development elsewhere.