Jim F. esposes a sort of hard determinism, the view that we really are not responsible for our actions because if you accept determinism, responsibility makes no sense. He would justify punishment on the grounds that it can in fact affect behavior in ways that we might like, but according to Jim that has nothing to do with what anyone "deserves."
Btw he attributes this view to Marx, which I think is doubly wrong. Marx would never have anything to do with this sort of metaphysics; ina ny case, as Jeff Reiman has shown in patient detail in his wonderful paper Marx and Retributivism (I think that is the title), Marx is a retributivist who believes in responsibility. Of course he thinks that responsibility operates differently in different sorts of societies.
I am well aware of the antimonies of "free will," and I don't have plausible answers to hard determinist arguments. I react to them as Rousseau did. In writing about freedom, he commented that he was saying nothing about the metaphysics of freedom, which gave him a headache. I don't use the term "free will" myself. And, like Rousseau, I don't attempt the metaphysics of the problem.
I reject hard determinism, however, because I don't believe that we can think of ourselves as people who are capable of action, as opposed to mere behavior, under a hard determinist description. I don't think that makes sense as a way of understanding action. Man makes his own history, although not just as he pleases, as someone said. But we cannot be understood to make our our history if we are just causal links. If we are, history just happens, like the weather. It would not then be something we do. It is true that we might get rid of the vocabulary of action and come to conceive of ourselves differently, as merely determined beings, but I submit that we do not so think of ourselves and wouldn't know how to think ourselves like that.
I also find that I am some sort of retributivist, who thinks that people should get what they deserve, and am not merely a consequentialist. Of course we take consequences into account because we are not crazy. (So I am susceptible to arguments that sometimes we should not punish the guilty as they deserrve if that would have bad effects, e.g., if jailing Pinochet would make it easier to go after Castro, as Jim argues. (I don't say it would.)
But I am persuaded, and I think in his heart of hearts Jim believes this too, that it would be unspeakably wrong to punish the innocent merely because doing that happened to have good consequences. (Or to punish them worse than they deserve, e.g., it miight deter theft to cut off hands, but, in the immortal words of John Dean, that would be wrong.) And it may be right to punish the guilty even if doing so has no such consequences. Pinochet deserves to be imprisoned for the rest of his miserable life, even if, as I think it likely, that will not deter future tyrants for ten seconds.
Btw in the same connection I find that I am not an abolitionist on the death penalty. As we have it, sure, it's evil. As long as it is a way of oppressing the poor and the Black, and it may be that in capitalist society it cannot be otherwise, it should be banned. But for most of the Nuremburg defendants or Henry Kissinger? Give me a rope. After a fair trial, of course. Again. I think executing the these lowlifes has no deterrent effect whatsoever, and if it does, that's not why it would be OK to execute criminals against humanity.
Jim notes, and perhaps all of us but Wojtek agree, that our present criminal justice system does a rather bad job of handing out appropriate punishments to those really deserving of it: you can get 10 years for possession of three vials of crack cocaine, when you should be sentenced to spend time in a drug rehabilitation center, but if you poison the environment and cause cancer in hundreds of helpless workers and citizens, you may have to pay a fine, which you can make up by jacking up the price of your products. It goes without saying that I don't defend those policies.
Perhaps I should expressly dissociate myself from Wojtek's more exteme statements. I did make fun of those who get sentimental about poor misunderstood criminals. But I think that the rights of criminal defendants, severely under attack by the courts and the legislatures, are very important and no distraction from "more important business." Their rights are _ours._ And it is part and parcel of retributivism that is is desperately wrong to punish the innocent, so the crumby representation and limited judicial review criminal defendants get is immoral on retributivist grounds.
I also think that people who are being justly punished by imprisonment ought to be treated decently and not subjected to warehousing in pestilent overcrowded dumps where thet can be brutalized and sexually assaulted, or kept 23 hours a day in solitary. Being locked up is enough punishment.
Finally, I disagree with Wojtek that the criminal justice system plays no part in oppressing the workers. True, it is less used against radical labor then formerly, but only because there is less radical labor. However, as Yoshie has said,a lthough I disagree with other conclusions she draws from this, Law 'n Order rhetoric and policies are an important ideological prop for right wing policies. You have to be blind and deaf (sorry Marta) not understand that "crime" is a code word for "race" in a lot of this rhetoric. The fact that a lot of workers are reactionary bloodthirsty racists doesn't mean that the policies they advocate do not contribute to their subordination.
Jim thinks that I have come to accept rather uncritically many of the premises of bourgeois jurisprudence. Well, if I accept many of these premises, I hope I do not do so uncritically. If I have failed to think through things that I ought to have thought about, I would welcome having it called to my attention.
--jka