NOTEBOOK Punishment for Looters?
Murphy, Jeffrie G.
If society lets any considerable number of its members grow up mere children, incapable of being acted on by rational considerations of distant motives, society hasonly itself to blame for the...
...It is important to see, for example, that we cannot cite social disadvantage as an argument that looting is morally or legally right...
...Rather it is, granting that looting is wrong, whether or not its practice is, under certain social circumstances, to be excused...
...So I am suggesting that we consider social excuses, not out of charity or benevolence, but out of justice...
...For it is unjust (and not simply uncharitable) to demand of another man more than we could realize if comparably placed...
...Once again, then, we must ask ourselves: If we perceived legal authorities (especially police) as themselves violently coercive against all our aspirations, would we really be able to exercise that kind of restraint we can manifest when viewing the police as protectors...
...Such a sympathetic question is particularly appropriate when harsh cries of "respect law and order" and "end crime in the streets" are serving as the great national excuse for not doing anything about the real violence in our society...
...Now I have taken looting as an example because it seems to me that the case for tolerance is best made with respect to crimes against property...
...for these crimes are, Mayor Daley to the contrary, of a morally graver kind than crimes against property...
...These actions are not merely wrong but are inexcusable because it is reasonable to demand that these people, given their circumstances, exercise a greater restraint...
...As might be expected, some of these people take the opportunity (the first they have ever had) to cash in on the American Dream...
...And so it seems only fair to take a tolerant line...
...IN CLOSING, I should mention that what I am suggesting is not paternalistic and is not, therefore, an inroad on the dignity of the people in question...
...For as Mill reminds us, when we treat people as children or animals by controlling them violently and repressively, rather than treating them with sympathy and reason, we bear a part of the responsibility for what they do...
...Most of the great atrocities of history have resulted from this kind of violence rather than from the violence of individuals...
...As Newton Garver has observed ("What Violence Is," Nation, June 24, 1968, pp...
...Yet even here, though surely the violence is morally and legally wrong, there are at least some grounds for partially excusing its performance by the socially disadvantaged...
...I am not suggesting that, like animals or machines, they act by reflex or necessity without being able to help what they do...
...Society, at least as they (not too inaccurately) see it, is structured to thwart all the expectations which that society simultaneously holds out to them...
...Rather they are among the ranks of the permanently disadvantaged, the permanently left out...
...And so we tend to take a tone of righteous indignation when it is even suggested that social (as opposed to psychological) disadvantage be considered a legitimate excuse for wrongdoing...
...For these people are not as inclined as their more advantaged fellow citizens to view legal authority as a bulwark against violence...
...Obviously some rioters, particularly those who engage in crimes against persons, will have to be institutionally restrained...
...This will be largely for protection of others rather than as deterrence, since penal sanctions tend to deter only those with something to lose...
...And so no gun control bill, no matter how useful on other grounds, will even make a start toward rooting out the real violence and sickness of our society...
...Their perception of police and other legal authorities is rather different from that of the rest of us, for they see this authority (again not too inaccurately) as itself essentially violent...
...This connotes a factual difference, but not a morally relevant difference...
...VI3AT HAPPENS when general disorder breaks out in a ghetto...
...Many of us in the white and satisfied majority have not heeded our own pious cries for an end to violence and a return to law and order...
...And it seems to me that reasonable and fair men should consider this question and answer it with a no...
...Many well-intentioned liberals, for example, react in horror when representative members of a black community demand amnesty for crimes, like looting, which they judge to be substantial products of social disadvantage...
...It is some indication of how highly their interests are valued that they are drafted in great numbers to fight in a war which has, as a major side effect, the scrapping of those programs that might make a start toward lifting them from their misery...
...This is particularly true of the police who have, in virtue of their office, a duty to refrain from such acts...
...So rather than citing black rebellion as evidence of basic black immorality, we should remember how long it was in coming and how much more destructive of life it could have been...
...Suppose, for example, I had recently learned that my child had an incurable illness...
...they must even assist in their own oppression...
...If suddenly forced to change places with the ghetto black, we just might still exercise restraint...
...For if those of us who are white and wellborn were forced to change places with the urban blacks, I am inclined to think we would exercise less restraint...
...and it is unjust to demand of one man any greater restraint than it is reasonable to expect of any man in similar circumstances...
...So it seems to me unreasonable because unfair to punish, or at least punish with full severity, those ghetto dwellers who loot in times of civil disorder...
...For we are accustomed to getting most of our whims satisfied, and such habits die hard...
...Our mass media make the ownership of gaudy and frivolous possessions into not just a condition for human happiness, but a condition even for the worth of a person...
...But the issue that concerns me here is not the objective rightness or wrongness of looting...
...And this kind of violence, since it is accepted uncritically by most people, is the most dangerous of all...
...The only difference between us and the ghetto revolutionary is simply that the outlets for our violence are institutionally approved...
...For consider how the world must look to these people...
...Such an appeal to fairness provides, I think, a good reason for at least partially excusing (and therefore not punishing, or punishing with reduced severity) those who engage in looting during the recurrent disturbances in our black ghettos...
...and it would appear to be, because probably productive of more evil than beneficent consequences, morally wrong as well...
...The police may not in fact be as universally repressive and evil as ghetto dwellers believe...
...Attainment of these goods, however, is systematically impossible for our disadvantaged minorities...
...but there is perhaps some point in the argument...
...Many of them are neither given, nor do they have an opportunity to earn, income sufficient for such basic necessities as food, clothing, and shelter—much less for the frivolities that are a part of the American way of life...
...As they perceive our society, it surely presents little but a source of deep NOTEBOOK and destructive frustration...
...Note, for example, how sharply these people differ from those middle-class souls who, following a tornado or other disaster, begin to loot the scattered possessions of their neighbors...
...Similarly, any of us can act in ignorance, and some kinds of ignorance can excuse or mitigate responsibility for consequences...
...Note also how they differ from the police who, it is said, have on occasion joined in the looting...
...police...
...And this is quite a different issue...
...Unlike those self-made men who are always happy to remind us that they were able to make it into affluent society ("I fight pover ty...
...I suspect not...
...One must be careful about generalizing the argument to include crimes against persons (e.g...
...For the disadvantaged are acting here either under extreme provocation or in a kind of excusable ignorance...
...This is to demand of them a greater restraint than is reasonable to demand of any man in such circumstances...
...Many of us, however, have not been placed by our society in the position of being economically and culturally deprived or of risking such deprivation...
...If society lets any considerable number of its members grow up mere children, incapable of being acted on by rational considerations of distant motives, society hasonly itself to blame for the consequences.—John Stuart Mill FOR REASONS that sliould be obvious, a society tends to accept as excuses only those conditions which it is possible for its more advantaged members to satisfy...
...There is something ironic, after years of systematic treatment of blacks as children or animals, in wanting them to have that one dignity (responsibility) which it is painful for them to have...
...But if we did, this would no doubt be a residue of our respect for property and legal authority—a respect unreasonable to demand of the ghetto dweller since he can seldom have any of the former and quite plausibly regards the latter as an instrument of his oppression...
...But the important question, surely, is the following: Should they be held fully responsible (and thus be fully punished) for what they do...
...The value that one has in our society is made to depend upon the material goods that one can conspicuously display...
...This might incline us to marvel at the restraint of these people and to draw a more sympathetic conclusion about their moral character...
...Any of us, no matter how wellborn, can suffer mental disorder...
...For if sincere, none of us could confidently claim that we would exercise any better restraint if comparably placed...
...For looting is, since prohibited by statute, quite clearly legally wrong...
...Let us grant that what they are doing is legally and morally wrong...
...Rather I am suggesting that the pressures they face are more severe and the alternative channels for releasing those pressures more limited than is the case with most of the rest of us, and that tolerance demands that we take these pressures into account as mitigating circumstances...
...But we should view this restraint in part as a regrettable necessity and not as the righteous infliction of punishment...
...And in many circumstances, especially those involving crimes against property, society can well afford to seek mere recovery of property and abandon, through a tolerance motivated by fairness, most attempts at punishment...
...But then these people, given their experience, have little opportunity to come to know this...
...I work"), black people are for the most part not members of a temporary minority...
...We tend to excuse men in such circumstances because, though we know the act was wrong, we are not sure that we could have exercised any better restraint if comparably placed...
...Against such heretical suggestions, we might even be tempted to argue that being responsible is part of the meaning of human dignity, and to deprive members of the black community of the opportunity of being held responsible for what they do is to regard them as having no dignity—to treat them as animals or children rather than mature persons...
...It is not enough that they be oppressed...
...If this is an attack on dignity, it is an attack on the dignity of us all...
...And so it is common, once mental disorder of a certain sort has been established, to excuse or at least mitigate the moral or legal responsibility for actions performed under the influence of the disorder...
...819 22), violence is often institutionalized into so NOTEBOOK cially sanctioned forms...
...To hurt my secretary's feelings by extreme rudeness is morally wrong, but surely I am to be at least partially excused for this if I am laboring under great mental strain...
...Unless this plea for social excuses is carefully specified (as it often is not by those who make it), there will be good grounds for resisting it...
Vol. 16 • January 1969 • No. 1
