Cyborg justice

19/3/2014

Ross Andersen from Aeon interviewed Anders Sandberg, Hannah Maslen, and me about a paper we're writing on how punishment practices might change as technology advances. You can read the interview here. It's attracting a fair bit of attention, having been picked up by various other news outlets. A lot of people have contacted me via Twitter. Since 140 characters is pretty inadequate for a philosophical discussion, please feel free to leave a comment below if you have anything to say about the interview.

I'll do my best to respond to comments, and you can be as blunt as you like, but I won't publish abuse.

Please note that I have very limited internet access until around 24th March, so comments may not appear until after that.

8 Comments

Eric

19/3/2014 08:00:15 am

I haven't been nice to you on twitter, I'm gonna assume your feelings about this are due to the fact you're a mother and that you wouldn't eventually make someone suffer this much. Because I need to believe that, I cannot find beauty in this world knowing that someone, a mother, a Doctor in Philosophy, would do that to another human being. Because what reassures me the most about life is the idea that, whatever amount of pain someone can experience in this world, death eventually ends it for good. To this day, whatever barbaric torture human beings were subjected to, death eventually put an end to their agony. If you reach an awfully high level of pain your heart is "programed" to stop, that's the miracle of biology, that's what put an end to the agony of Dr Mengele's victims. Can you imagine a world where death couldn't do that? By uploading your brain on a computer, someone could multiply tenfold your capacity to feel pain, speed things up so that one minute IRL is one decade inside the computer and torture you like that for decades (millions of years). I believe even Hitler doesn't deserve that. That doesn't mean I wouldn't piss on his grave if he had one. Whatever barbaric society we live in, death has this capacity to end your agony for good, let's keep it that way. Picturing a world where this would no longer be possible gives me nightmares. Sorry for my English. All the best.

Adam C. Emerson

20/3/2014 11:25:27 am

I didn't really care for your posting or your interview, but not because the punishments you suggest are so cruel. I believe they are cruel, but that isn't the heart of the objection I have. I understand that your ideas follow logically from the idea that people who do good things ought to be happy and people who do bad things ought to be unhappy, but I don't understand why you embrace the retributive model in the first place.

I admit that there's a certain innate, intuitive appeal on an immediate level to the idea of wanting to see someone who does soemthing particularly heinous feel some portion of the burden of their deeds, and I can understand people who haven't really given the matter thought wanting murderers to have more unpleasant lives. But it seems that precisely the kind of thought you have carried out is the sort that would break the appeal. Why do you accept the 'retributive' model, with punishment as something to be pursued for its own sake, (rather than as a deterrent), as seems to be the case from your post and your interview, at all, whether in normal or in heinous crimes?

Adam Whybray

20/3/2014 02:40:01 pm

Firstly, I think it's important not to conflate the two separate ideas that you posit:

1.) Artificially lengthening the lives of the incarcerated in "real time" so they literally live for and serve, say, one thousand years in prison.

2.) Using biotech/ invasive surgery or drugging to make the incarcerated experience millennia of imprisonment while, in actual fact, they serve merely days in "real time".

The first I think is morally reprehensible in a society in which people live for, say, 80-odd years. Only in the cases of the most monstrous political tyrants could such sentencing be possibly justified. In the absence of a biblical Hell, the dead are released from suffering. Those who are suffering directly on account of a heinous crime (say, the murder of a loved one; rape; torture) will "only" suffer for a certain number of decades before they are released from suffering. So, the sentencing is disproportionate because the amount of suffering you induce in the perpetrator will far outweigh the amount of suffering they have caused in strictly quantifiable terms. Secondly, the victims affected by the crime will be dead long before the sentence's completion. So, if victims are no longer gaining closure or healing or even simply pleasure through retribution from the punishment, what is left? Merely the punishment itself and the pleasure/ satisfaction of the public. Clearly, in the case of a millennia-long sentence, there is little chance for rehabilitation (at least, not unless we are thinking of a society in which humans have already adjusted to living for millennia) since the severe restrictions put upon a human's freedom in prison is such that spells of even decades tends to cripple a person for life... they may be too broken to re-offend, but neither will they be able to contribute meaningfully to society. So, all we are left with, is the pleasure/ satisfaction these millennia (and sentences would, I feel, be ever-extended as a symbolic act to reflect outrage and disgust, so we are possibly talking of thousands, even millions of years) of punishment would bring to the public. Personally, I'm sceptical of the way in which forgiveness has shifted from being a personal emotion to a public one. What does it 'mean' for me to say that I do, or don't, forgive Adam Lanza? I am horrified and saddened by Lanza's crimes, but as a perpetrator he did not directly cause harm to me. It would seem presumptive, even grotesque, for me to label myself as a victim of his crimes. As such, what stock do I take in his punishment, save for some hope of rehabilitation, or the protection of the public? I don't believe the idea you propose is whatsoever concerned with rehabilitation (indeed, the rehabilitative mode of justice is curtly dismissed with the single point that consequentialists are also concerned with punishment) and clearly it aims for something more than simply public protection because else why extend the prisoners' natural lives? As such, I conclude, that the principle aim of this sentencing for be for justice itself – specifically retribution.

I think you make a very dangerous a priori assumption that the reactive desire for retribution and punishment and the pleasure derived thereof are useful or good (please correct me if you don't believe this, but the sentence: 'I had wondered whether the best way to achieve justice in cases like that was to prolong death as long as possible. Some crimes are so bad they require a really long period of punishment, and a lot of people seem to get out of that punishment by dying. And so I thought, why not make prison sentences for particularly odious criminals worse by extending their lives?' indicates this pretty clearly, I believe).

Why do you deserve, simply by virtue of being a law-abiding citizen, to take pleasure in the suffering of another human being who has not directly caused you or a loved one harm?

Perhaps I am more sceptical of the average law-abiding citizen than yourself, but I do not believe that for most people, descriptions of how a rapist was tortured to death in prison, or how a murderer took longer than he should have done to be fried on the electric chair, are simply 'pure' expressions of justice in which satisfaction is cleanly taken from wrongs righted and balance restored.

For instance, in all the news articles I read about Patrick Drum, the majority of commentators wrote that Drum should be hailed as a hero, be given money, be released from prison, etc. etc. Drum was a vigilante who sought to murder as many people on the sex offenders register before he got caught. He managed to kill Jerry Ray, a child molester previously imprisoned for raping a 4-year-old, and Gary Lee Blanton, arrested for the statutory rape of a high-school freshman when he was an 18-year-old senior.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/unrepentant-washington-vigilante-killed-registered-sex-offenders-life-prison-article-1.1162753

There will be a portion of people (some

Blake

21/3/2014 07:38:40 am

Why do we care about free will or aspects of autonomy? We tend to care about them because they are seen as important for determining moral responsibility, in other words, who ought to be punished and how they ought to be punished. Why do we tend to care about determining moral responsibility? Because how we determine who ought to be punished and how, has a significant impact on crime rates and the overall well being of society. It's important not to forget, that, the primary purpose of a system of punishment in a society is to benefit the society.

Retributivism, the idea that we should make people suffer, solely for the purpose of making them suffer, because they 'deserve' it, is generally based on the assumption of the existence of the libertarian conception of free will. Not only is there no good evidence this kind of free will exists, but more importantly, as Galen Strawson has argued, the very conception of this kind of free will is itself logically incoherent. No one 'deserves' to suffer in the way people who assume this kind of free will exists typically imagine. The only point of making people suffer is to create deterrence or correct behavior, but (A) tons of research shows that punishment above a fairly minimal level ceases to significantly increase deterrence value, which renders the kind of excessive suffering you propose completely unnecessary with regard to deterrence value, and
(B) making someone suffer in itself is rarely ever effective at correcting behavior or rehabilitating people.

So, what value is there in making someone suffer excessively purely for the sake of having them suffer? The answer is that there is none. The only point in making anyone suffer would be if it significantly benefited society to do so as part of our system of punishment. How would making people suffer for 1000 years benefit society? It wouldn't, at all. It wouldn't significantly increase deterrence value and it wouldn't help correct negative behavior. There would be no point to it other than to satisfy sadism which is a trait that should not be encouraged.

The future of punishment should not be to find ways to make people suffer more but to find better ways to rehabilitate people, or if they can't be rehabilitated, to find ways to inexpensively isolate them while having them suffer as little as possible. To invert your example, we could potentially give them a drug, if they wanted, which would cause them them to experience being in a fantasy land where they can be happy while not being able to harm others, or we could put them in virtual reality.

Most students of neuroethics or neurolaw have encounted the case study of the man with the tumour that caused him to become attracted to children and loose impulse control. We know that most people, when presented with this example, have the intuition that there would be no point in punishing the man, since it was the tumour causing his negative behavior and the tumour can simply be removed. In the future, we may be able to identify and correct the mechanisms that cause many negative behaviors and remove them, just like tumours. At that point in time, society will have a better general understanding of how our behaviors are caused by the physical mechanisms that compose us and that it makes much more sense to simply correct the problems in those mechanisms than to make someone suffer for having those problems exist. That is the future of 'punishment'.

Greg Slepak

23/3/2014 04:56:07 am

Congratulations, in attempting to punish criminals, you've succeeded to lowering yourself to their level.

In reading your interview on aeon.co it is clear to me that what drives you is not a fair sense of justice, but sadism.

I advice you to try your ideas on yourself before torturing others with them. Otherwise you might find yourself a bed partner in Hitler.

Greg Slepak

23/3/2014 05:11:32 am

My comment was based on first being introduced to your work from VICE:

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/could-altering-punishment-with-psychoactive-drugs-fix-overcrowded-prisons

There they emphasize your discussion of a 1,000 year prison sentence, however, the aeon.co article links that to a 1,000 year lifespan (something not mentioned in the VICE article).

Could you clear up your position on this issue please? Are you recommending 1000 year "felt-like" sentences for today's prisoners? Are you limiting it to prisoners who live for 1000 years? How do you square that with your acknowledgement that different personas inhabit the same body?

Greg Slepak

23/3/2014 05:12:01 am

Greg Slepak

23/3/2014 05:12:06 am

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