Punishment, criticism and authority

It is always unjust to punish without the right kind of authority over those that one punishes.

Sometimes that authority may be given to us by them (as in the case of a University’s authority over adult students, or maybe even in the case of mutual authority in friendship) and sometimes it may come from some other relationship (as in the case of the state’s authority over us). But in any case, such authority is sparse. The number of entities and persons that have this sort of authority over us is several orders of magnitude smaller than the number of people in society.

This means that typically when we learn that someone is behaving badly, we do not have the authority to punish them. I wonder what this does or does not entail.

Clearly, it does not mean that we are not permitted to criticize them. Criticism as such is not punishment, but the offering of evaluative information. We do not need any authority to state a truth to a random person (though there may be constraints of manners, confidentiality, etc.), including an evaluative truth. But what if that truth is foreseen to hurt? If it is merely foreseen but not intended to hurt, this is still not punishment (it’s more like a Double Effect case). But what if it is also intended to hurt?

Well, not every imposition of pain is a punishment. Nor does every imposition of pain require authority. Suppose I see that you are asleep a hundred meters from me, and I see a deadly snake, for whose bite there is no cure, approaching you. I pull out an air rifle and shoot you in the leg, intending to cause you pain that wakes you up and allows you to escape the snake. Likewise, it could be permissible to offer intentionally hurtful criticism in order to change someone’s behavior without any need for authority (though it may not be often advisable).

But there is a difference between imposing a hurt and doing so punitively. In the air rifle case, the imposition of pain is not punitive. But in the case of criticism, it is psychologically very easy to veer from imposing the criticism for the sake of reformation to a retributive intention. And to impose pain retributively—even in part, and even by truthful words—without proper authority is a violation of justice.

There are two interesting corollaries of the above considerations.

First, we get an apparently new argument against purely reformatory views of punishment. For it seems that the imposition of pain through accurate criticism in order to reform someone’s behavior would count as punishment on a purely reformatory view, and hence would have to require proper authority (unless we deny the thesis I started with, that punishment without authority is unjust).

Second, we get an interesting asymmetry between punishment and reward that I never noticed before. There is nothing unjust about rewarding someone whom we have no authority over when they have done a good thing (though in particular cases it could violate manners, be paternalistic, etc.) In particular, there need be nothing wrong with what one might call retributive praise even in the absence of authority: praise intended to give a pleasure to the person praised as a reward for their good deeds. But for punishment, things are different. This is no surprise, because in general harsh treatment is harder to justify than pleasant treatment.

Castigation

Mere criticism is a statement that something—an action, a thought, an object, etc.—falls short of an applicable standard. But sometimes instead of merely criticizing a person, we do something more, which I’ll call “castigation”. When we castigate people to their face, we are not merely asserting that they have fallen short of a standard, but we blame them for it in a way that is intended to sting. Mere criticism may sting, but stinging isn’t part of its intent. Mill’s “disapprobation” is an example of castigation:

If we see that ... enforcement by law would be inexpedient, we lament the impossibility, we consider the impunity given to injustice as an evil, and strive to make amends for it by bringing a strong expression of our own and the public disapprobation to bear upon the offender.

But now notice something:

1. Castigation is a form of punishment.

2. It is unjust and inappropriate punish someone who is not morally culpable.

3. So, it is unjust and inappropriate to castigate someone who is not morally culpable.

In an extended sense of the word, we also castigate people behind their backs—we can call this third-person castigation. In doing so, we express the appropriateness of castigating them to their face even when that castigation is impractical or inadvisable. Such castigation is also a form of punishment, directed at reputation rather than the feelings of the individual. Thus, such castigation is also unjust and inappropriate in the case of someone lacking morally culpability.

I exclude here certain speech acts done in training animals or small children which have an overt similarity to castigation. Because the subject of the acts is not deemed to be a morally responsible person, the speech acts have a different significance from when they are directed at a responsible person, and I do not count them as castigation.

Thus, whether castigation is narrow (directed at the castigated person) or extended, it is unjust and inappropriate where there is no moral culpability. Mere criticism, on the other hand, does not require any moral culpability. Telling the difference between the castigation and mere criticism is sometimes difficult, but there is nonetheless a difference, often conveyed through the emotional load in the vocabulary.

In our society (and I suspect in most others), there is often little care to observe the rule that castigation is unjust absent moral culpability, especially in the case of third-person castigation. There is, for instance, little compunction about castigating people with abhorrent (e.g., racist) or merely silly (e.g., flat earth) views without investigation whether they are morally culpable for forming their beliefs. Politicians with policies that people disagree with are pilloried without investigation whether they are merely misguided. The phrase “dishonest or ignorant” which should be quite useful for criticism that avoids the risk of unjust castigation gets loaded to the point where it effectively castigates a person for possibly being ignorant. This is not to deny, of course, that one can be morally blameworthy for abhorrent, silly or ignorant views. But rarely do we know an individual to be morally culpable for their views, and without knowledge, castigation puts us at risk of doing injustice.

I hope I am not castigating anyone, but merely criticizing. :-)

Here is another interesting corollary.

4. Sometimes it permissible to castigate friends for their imprudence.

5. Hence, sometimes people are morally culpable for imprudence.

In the above, I took it that punishment is appropriate only in cases of moral wrongdoing. Mill actually thinks something stronger is the case: punishment is appropriate only in cases of injustice. If Mill is right, and yet if we can rightly castigate friends for imprudence, it follows that imprudence can be unjust, and the old view that one cannot do injustice to oneself is false.