Overreaction, Bullshitting, Death Penalty
Links and recommendations
You can now watch the panel discussion I joined at ARC (Alliance for Responsible Citizenship) in London earlier this summer. My remarks start at 7:48:
From the archives:
The Evolutionary Advantage of Overreaction
The Psychology of Morality:
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Three interesting findings:
1. 76% of Americans support the death penalty for murder involving sex crimes or torture. 71% support it for rape of child. (source). Reminds me of Wilfred Reilly’s point that there are many ways to be a “prison abolitionist.” One is to support public execution. Many progressives misunderstand that prison is the moderate option; the actual gut instinct preference for many people is firing squads for criminals.
2. A traditional view is that rape is perpetrated by men who are unable to get sex in other ways and therefore resort to force as a way of ending their frustration. That stereotype has been debunked, and indeed rapists generally have more sex than the average man. (source: Concise Introduction to Social Psychology by Roy Baumeister).
3. The most violent category of human being is the toddler, and the only reason we don’t worry more about the epidemic of toddler violence is that toddlers are small and cute, and can’t do much damage with their tiny fists. (source: A Billion Years of Sex Differences by Steve Stewart-Williams).
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Not only is “prison the moderate option” - but historically one of the reasons the death penalty was so pervasive was because few countries had the state capacity to maintain large prison populations. Generally speaking, all “life sentence” crimes today were historically punished with death as the obvious just penalty. Of course historically, there were many intermediary options between “death” and “no punishment”. For example, flogging or other corporal punishment was widely applied as a penalty for crimes whose seriousness did not merit death.
Other societies, going back to the time of Hammurabi, or the Anglo-Saxon weregild system, demanded fines paid to the victim, which varied based on the seriousness of the crime and the social status of the victim (many crimes were simply unbuyable, whether in Hammurabi’s time or in Anglo-Saxon England, you weren’t buying your way out of regicide, for instance). Or judicial enslavement, if you couldn’t afford the fine, but hadn’t earned a death sentence. Exile to an unpleasant location was also a popular option, used in both Ancient Rome and Imperial China.
Many of these death penalty alternatives are blanket banned under modern practice. Which leaves the death penalty, and not the death penalty (which pretty much means: fines or prison). Prison exist principally because we need an alternative to “prompt flogging” or “immediate death sentence.” That is why the first long sentence prisons were created in the late 1700s.
I read the 'violent toddlers' snippet with interest - recalling a book by Deborah Spungen. If you weren't alive in 1978: Nancy Spungen was a groupie hanger-on who wasmurdered by her boyfriend, rocker Sid Vicious from one of punk's originals the Sex Pistols. Her mom Deborah wrote a pisthumous book about her difficult third child, born into an ordinary somewhat well off JewishAmerican family. One line from thebook stuck out because I had a child often described as difficult, whom we later discovered was intellectually gifted. "She was the toddler who hurt people," Deborah wrote. Woulda shoulda coulda known this was in the spectrum of normalcy.