You know, I couldn’t possibly care less whether or not Democrats question Alito in a way that makes his wife cry. That’s no sin of theirs. But remarks like the following …

somewaterytart: I don’t think it was fake. I do think she’s a bit emotionally unstable.

somewaterytart: It was immature and she’s probably one of those narcissistic, theatrical types.

Nadai: The public right to know what sort of Justice her ass of a husband would be is more important than her widdle feewings. Stupid bitch.

… are overt cases of contempt for “emotional” women and, in order to ridicule and express contmpt for Martha Ann Bomgardner, freely make use of well-worn tropes of misogynist contempt, sometimes uncritically and sometimes intentionally (“emotionally unstable,” “narcissistic,” “theatrical,” lisped speech about hurt feelings, etc.). One of them concludes with an overtly misogynist insult. The other lists classic symptoms of the pseudo-diagnosis of “hysteria.”

They’re also simply mean and serve no discernible purpose at all beyond making fun of someone for being visibly upset.

If you want to complain about a bunch of newsmedia hoo-ha over nothing, you could complain about that, instead of piling on to ridicule Martha-Ann Bomgardner herself. Why not just leave the woman alone?

Rowe:

Alan Dershowitz has admitted off the record this to be the case. Judge Harold Rothwax wrote a good book on the matter a few years back: …

O.K. Perhaps I’m not confident as you are that the anecdotal experience of a couple high-profile defense attorneys is widely representative of the criminal justice system as a whole, or even the criminal justice system as relates to hanging crimes. Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t, but I’m not sure why you seem as sure of it as you do.

Rowe:

Aside from legitimate claims of deterrence, rehabilitation, and restraint, individuals morally deserve to be punished for the criminal wrongs that they do. Retribution is a legitimate rationale by itself for punishment.

The second sentence in this paragraph doesn’t necessarily follow from the first. Whether or not a criminal deserves to suffer or even to die for her crimes, it may still fail to be the case that we have a legitimate reason to give her what she deserves. (To take a rather different example: I think that Rosa Parks deserved a million dollars rather than decades of poverty for her role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. But since I never had a legitimate title to a million dollars, I couldn’t legitimately give it to her.)

Rowe:

I think I could probably do a thought experiment to lead you to the same conclusion. Say someone murder someone close to you, somehow we had a crystal ball that demonstrated that the person snapped and if they could be led out, wouldn’t do it again. Or maybe they had a Clockwork Orange kind of “treatment.” And no one would find out that the person would go free; the legal norm, with punishment, against the crime would still remain; so there would be no negative effect on deterrence. Say the person murdered your parents.

Should this person go unpunished for the crime?

Yes.

That is, if “unpunished” means that nothing is done to them over and above what’s necessary for defense of self and others (which you’ve stipulated to be nothing in this case) and to force her (if necessary) to make such restitution as is possible for the murder (which you don’t mention in your hypothetical, but which I happen to think is very important). The reason is that I don’t think that violence is morally justified except in defense of self or others. Even if the victim of the violence does deserve to suffer.

Here’s a hypothetical example concerning punishment that I’d be similarly interested to know your thoughts on. Suppose that the situation you just described obtains — there’s someone who murdered your parents, and (somehow or another) you know that he won’t kill again or pose a threat toanyone else, and you know (somehow or another) that no-one will know if he is let go without further punishment. But you think that he ought, nevertheless, to be punished, as retribution.

Now, there are lots of ways that you can punish someone. For example, you can make fun of him in nasty ways; you can beat him up; you can incarcerate him against his will; you can hurt him in any number of ways; you can deprive him of any number of things he values; or you can kill him. Suppose that the court hands down the following punishment: the murderer of your parents is to be incarcerated in an otherwise humane and safe prison, but they’ll hack off his arms and legs, and every so often (say, twice a month) they’ll torture him in some way (say branding with hot irons, or raking his back with the cat’s paw and then washing it with brine), for the sole purpose of making him suffer.

Do you think that this could be a suitable punishment for the murder?

I think his discussion of “aristotelian categoricals” may shed light on other problems in ethical theory, specifically the possibily of virtue ethics.

Well, for what it’s worth this is one of the explicit purposes of the philosophical work that I’m drawing on. Philippa Foot has the best investigation I know of in her book Natural Goodness, and puts the logical status of Aristotelian categoricals front and center in her account of why a broadly Aristotelian virtue theory can succeed in solving a number of standing problems concerning ethics and rationality; Thompson’s essay explicitly aims at, among other things, clearing some of the logical ground for an explanation of what he finds to be right in Foot’s work, and in some similar remarks on ethics by Elizabeth Anscombe.

It’s good stuff; if more people in applied ethics would apply it, then we might see some more interesting and serious work on questions like those surrounding ethical vegetarianism.

Steven: libertarianism violates a principle rule of politics that has been observed as far back as Western civilization has cared to observe it: all parties (individuals, groups, nations) will pursue ends that are ruinous by their own standards if they are not checked in some meaningful way.

This and several other complaints that you lodge against libertarianism above may be answered by pointing out that libertarianism is a theory of justice, not a constitutional theory.

There are lots of different ways that a libertarian society might organize itself politically, and different kinds of libertarians (centralists as against decentralists, constitutionalists vs. moralists, minarchists as against anarchists, anarcho-capitalists as against mutualists and syndicalists and other left libertarians, etc.) have different ideas about what, ideally, that should look like. Decentralists, for example, would suggest that the best way to build and sustain a free society is by decentralizing political power to states, counties, municipalities, etc., thus increasing the number of political units that can check and balance each other and decreasing their unilateral power. Centralists tend to think that keeping political power roughly as it is, or increasing central power, can be alright if it serves the cause of liberty (which they think it sometimes can). Minarchists think that some kind of sovereign state is necessary or desirable for a free society; anarchists think that it’s inconsistent with principled libertarianism. “Panarchists” tend to think that any constitutional arrangement is O.K. as long as people are able to freely leave it and participate in others, and so tend to take the attitude of letting a thousand flowers bloom. There are libertarians who favor anarchy, libertarians who favor direct democracy, libertarians who favor representative legislatures, and even a few libertarians who favor monarchy.

There is at least as much diversity in libertarian constitutional theories as there is in non-libertarian constitutional theories, and probably more, since there are at least two major types of constitutional theory (anarchist and panarchist) that don’t exist outside of libertarianism. Some of them emphasize an extensive system of checks and balances; others don’t, or don’t express much concern about the question in the first place.

Libertarianism, however, is identical with none of these constitutional theories; it is merely the claim that the only just form of violence is self-defense. The question of how to create, sustain, and defend a just society, given libertarian principles of justice, is an interesting question of constitutional theory, but there is no single libertarian answer to it.

Hope this helps.

andrew: At least with the government, if it’s democratic I have a chance of stopping it from punching me in the stomach.

How do you intend to go about stopping it?

It is part two with which I disagree—that the Bush Candidate’s legal interpretations accurately represent the Constitution.

The text of the Constitution wasn’t written in fire or set in stone; it can always be changed. Supposing it were changed, so that the Bush candidates’ legal interpretations did accurately represent the Constitution; would it then be O.K. for them to militate against “world peace, … the health and safety of citizens, and … equal social, legal, and economic rights to all”?

Jill:

Ah, I love this talk of prevailing social values and community standards. Kind of how community standards dictated that blacks had rights about equal to those of livestock; or how community standards clearly didn’t want black children going to white schools; or how community standards decided that Jews were sub-human and could be killed by the millions; or how community standards dictate that if a woman is raped, she’s an adulterer who deserves to be punished as such.

David Thompson:

When the prevailing community standards held such, the law reflected those beliefs. When the community standards changed, the law changed in accordance. In a voluntary society, the laws are the mechanism to promulgate and regulate social mores; otherwise they are merely arbitrary diktats without the legitimacy conferred by social assent and respect.

You need to think harder about this. “In a voluntary society,” everyone affected by the law has a voice in making it. Jews under the Nuremberg Laws and during the Holocaust, Blacks under slavery and Jim Crow, and women in contemporary Pakistan didn’t have any meaningful voice in making the laws inflicted upon them — this was an essential part of the political structure that the Nazi regime, white supremacy in the United States, and male supremacy in Pakistan created — so describing the imposition of them as anything less than “arbitrary diktats” is tendentious to say the very least.

“The legitimacy conferred by social assent and respect,” if “social assent and respect” means nothing more than the assent and respect of the numerical majority of people, or a numerical minority that happens to have enough guns to dominate the discussion by force of arms, is precisely zero.

Three clarificatory questions. First:

I have no problem with government coming down hard with its iron fist against those who commit violent crimes against person or property.

Question: What do you think justifies the “iron fist” of government in the specific form of the death penalty for whatever crimes you think merit it? Vengeance for the innocent? Punishment of the guilty? Defense against some kind of threat from the condemned? Deterrance of third parties? Something else? One or more of the above?

Second,

By the time someone stands for trial, odds indicate that they are not just likely to be factually guilty, but almost certainly factually guilty of the crime in which they charged.

Question: How do you know this?

Third,

If, for instance, we were to ensure that those convicted of capital crimes are executed within say 2-years of conviction, then that would pretty much guarantee some wrongful executions, after say the first 1000 or so people were executed. I’m not sure if that would be worth it.

Question: If you’re “not sure” an 0.1% chance of murdering an innocent person “would be worth it,” at what point would the odds be low enough that you’d consider it acceptable losses for whatever benefits you think judicial killing secures?

My understanding is that there are some aboveground markets in which organized crime outfits have historically been successful — for example, in vending machines, and in the financing and distribution of pornography.

Pornography is a special case, given that during the period of substantial Mafia involvement, it was constantly under legal threat, and social pressures contributed to a lot of economic features that made the market similar to black markets even when it wasn’t formally one. As for vending machines, I’m not sure where exactly the organized crime element came from — although I’ve heard plausible suggestions that coercive control over restaurants and bars (through various forms of racketeering) played a role, and also that getting into businesses oriented around large amounts of cash in small denominations aided in money laundering.

I think it grabs the attention of the fence-sitting archist, especially the statist male heterosexuals.

Like there aren’t enough drooling statist male heterosexuals in This Movement of Ours already.

I’m waiting for the upcoming beefcake calendar from those sexy Catallarchs, personally.