Work in Progress

Crimes of Passion
It is a commonplace of the liberal mind that culpability for a wrong is strictly limited to the person who committed the crime. Circumstance is invariably extenuating, and we must exercise great caution when considering its role in the commission of a wrong, lest we compromise away the very notion of culpability and autonomy which undergirds the liberal worldview. So, when assessing the culpability of a crime, we are tempted to restrict our analysis to the proximate cause of the offense. The skinhead who batters the Chinese immigrant rightly bears the blame for the injuries motivated by his intolerance. The rapist who forces himself upon another is justly accountable for the intemperance of his lust. The fraternity brother who rebuffs an indecent pass from a gay man with blows is properly responsible for the disproportionate nature of his response.

As a moral philosophy, such an outlook is hard to reproach. In the private assignation of blame to individuals, such considerations are perfectly legitimate. The individual is wholly accountable for his or her own actions. But as a legal philosophy, such a doctrine is far harder to justify. Translated into political action, the theory of individual responsibility magnifies the consequences of human evil (an inescapable offshoot of human nature) causing a multiplication of harms which could be easily averted by adoption of a less willfully naïve approach.

In an ideal world of perfectly rational moral agents, we could reasonably expect that no person would ever violate universal ethical standards – assault, perjury, theft, murder… all would be reduced to theoretical abstractions. We might be able to conceive of performing such actions, perhaps as an illustration of the unrealized potential of free will, but the actual perpetration of such deeds would simply never occur. In a real world of irrational moral agents – of amoralists and immoralists – the elimination of such behaviors is the fantastic abstraction.

For all our convictions of what others “ought” or “ought not” to do, we find that there is a dismayingly regular pattern of moral failure. In any community of predominately white persons, there will be a given number likely to be so enraged at the presence of an obvious foreigner in their neighborhood that they will be moved to violence by the passion of their xenophobia. Within any population of male persons there will be a given number who will succumb to the temptations of sexual predation against members of the opposite sex. Among persons of normal sexual orientation, a portion will always exist who find the deviant proclivities of sexual minorities so abhorrent that assault will seem the most fitting expression of their revulsion. For all of our pompous sermonizing about the integrity of the soul and the imperatives of autonomy, we know these persons exist as hazards among us, and that they threaten our welfare in exactly the same manner as car collisions or natural disasters. Though human evil may be theoretically contingent, it is factually determinate. Since we can empirically assess the risks of evil, and design adaptive responses to mitigate them, we must consider ourselves remiss in setting our ideologies of accountability above the pragmatic task of preserving human life and well-being.

While retaliation is a somewhat effective principle, and it would be impossible to forever eliminate all cause for it, it will always be one of the least effective mechanisms of protection available. Though the threat of retaliation should deter the perpetration of crimes, we know that the flaws of reason which lead to criminal behavior seldom respond any better to the reason of deterrence. Far more importantly, however, by waiting for the crime to transpire, rather than forestalling it in advance, we allow an instance of crime to catalyze a chain sequence of victimizations. The consequences of a crime fall far more widely than upon the mere head of the direct victim. The criminal himself is also victimized by his actions, as a successful pre-emption of his criminal behavior would save him from the repercussions of society’s righteous retaliation. The vast majority of victims and victimizers are also the sentimental objects of their social networks – friends, families, lovers and acquaintances – almost all of whom are negatively impacted by the assault against the individual and the prosecution of his or her assailant. Society itself must bear the cost of investigating crimes, the procedural cost of assigning blame, and the high cost of maintaining vast numbers of citizens in a state of incarceration. Every crime successfully committed also places a psychic burden upon the citizenry at large, as each crime undermines their sense of safety within their own community. Once crime is allowed to transpire, victimhood takes root within society like a weed. And if we are to eliminate the societal consequences of individual misbehavior, we must deracinate criminality, pulling it up by the root from our social fabric wherever we find it germinating.