Now this seems like a reasonable thing to call paradoxical. We hold basic intuitions, or values, or ethical frameworks that say that on the one hand deterrence is important, and on the other hand fairness is important, but when they collide, it isn’t fair giving someone already disadvantaged more punishment, we’re left with a moral conundrum.

I agree with you Jean, there are plural values, and sometimes they pull in opposite directions. So how to reconcile which value to go with? They typical answer is let reason decide, but I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I wonder if reason can really decide between two values. Reason doesn’t decide (for me anyways) which art piece is more beautiful. How could it decide for me which value is more important?

I’m totally enjoying this series of posts Jean. I might have to pick up Smilansky’s book.

Jean,
This “paradox” reminds me of eugenics, a subject which of late I’ve become interested in.
I find that I vote more liberally than I feel. I think most liberals would say the same for themselves. So, I feel morally the underprivileged should always be cut some slack, certainly as a first time offender. As far as their requiring heavier sentences to deter repeated problems, isn’t that finding them guilty of future crimes, ones they might never commit?

There is only a paradox here if one assumes that the social structure is fixed for ever. One might well say that the solution is not to give harsher punishments to the “underprivileged”, but to distribute privileges more fairly.

Wayne, Thanks for your vote of confidence! The book is fun and readable and good for giving students and friends things to worry about.

As far as their requiring heavier sentences to deter repeated problems, isn’t that finding them guilty of future crimes, ones they might never commit?

But all punishment isn’t based on guilt. If you give a person a long sentence so they won’t do it again, you aren’t actually assuming they’ll do it again. In fact, you’re trying to prevent them from doing it again. It seems unfair, if punishment is entirely a matter of desert, but fair if punishment is party a question of deterring future crime.

A book I read recently meshes perfectly with this paradox of punishment–Random Families, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. It is about a neighborhood full of terribly underprivileged people who are constantly in and out of prison. The book follows them for 10 years. Knowing what you do about their mistreatment as children, you feel like they are less to blame for their later crimes. They seem to deserve lenience. But they are shocking recidivists. As soon as they get out, they do the same terrible things again. So for purposes of prevention, they need especially long sentences.

Saul Smilansky: (from post to ethics etc.)

What makes things paradoxical is a peculiar FACT: that, generally speaking, the same harsh environmental factors that make some of the underprivileged deserving of mitigated sentences also harden them, and hence require that they be threatened with more severe punishment. As a result, we reach the absurd result that, broadly, the more one needs to be punished the less one deserves to be.

That seems like a genuine paradox i.e. arguments which go from unexceptionable premises to dodgy conclusions. Is it surdogenic though?

Having read through his series of posts I’m still not convinced that ‘beneficial retirement’ and ‘fortunate misfortune’ are paradoxes though he continues to refer to them as such. O.K. let’s call them quirks. A quirk is that part of a moulding where there is change of plane from the circular to the perpendicular. It’s that little ledge on the top of an ovolo moulding and its function is to add definition and act as a register where rail meets stile in a frame. How do his ‘quirks’ define or set off the moral plane? What do they register?

How do his ‘quirks’ define or set off the moral plane? What do they register?

I’m hoping if I keep reading I will find out. I invited him to drop by here for discussion, so hopefully he will address this very central question. Stay tuned!

I’m a bit confused. Why is it more just for punishments to be proportionally less when temptation is higher? It’s more tempting to steal the retirement fund from a little old lady than it is to steal a piece of candy from a baby. Most of us will argue that stealing the retirement fund deserves a higher punishment. If our intuitions are that the underprivileged deserve less punishment for crimes, surely it is due to the fact that they are already experiencing a great deal more injustice already, not because crime is more tempting for them.

And who says crime is more tempting for the underprivileged anyway? I would argue that the only reason that official crime rates are not higher among the most privileged classes where the reward for immorality is clearly enormous is the fact that since the elite are themselves making and enforcing the rules, making it much easier for them to behave immorally without getting charged with crimes.

M. Harris: The elites commit different types of crimes and of course have good lawyers. For example, my internet service never delivers the speed that they promise, but can I sue the telephone company or bring them to court for misleading advertising? Theoretically, I can sue them, but the telephone company has a battery of top lawyers who win all cases. I probably cannot even afford to pay one good lawyer. So the telephone company robs, say, 20 dollars a month from me (and from all other users of internet). That is a robbery, as much as one committed by a kid with a knife in the street.

Hi, thought I’d jump in with a few comments. Thanks, Jean, for taking up my book and to everyone writing and indeed reading. Each paradox is very different so if you don’t like one I hope that you will like the next one or the one after it. And even if you don’t agree with me hopefully you will think that it is worthwhile to think about the stuff. I hope that the discussion will encourage some of you to look at the book itself, where things can be explained in more detail (not to mention the drawings - really - and jokes).

Sometimes the word paradox is used for things that are just unexpected, unusual or ironic, but I think that it is important not to be too liberal in the way we use the term. Some of my paradoxes follow the standard definition for a-moral paradoxes, the one Jean quoted (it’s from Mark Sainsbury). A conclusion is clearly unacceptable although it seems to adequatly follow from premises we find no fault in. The idea then is to go back and try to find the mistake, either in the premises or the argumetation. (This can come in the form of an antinomy, where we have two sets of arguments whose conclusions contradict each other, but that’s really the same thing.) To the standard notion I’ve added another one, the idea of an “existential paradox”, where the conclusion is indeed absurd, but it is true nevertheless. So there is nothing wrong with the premises or argumentation, although they lead to absurdity. Here the paradox is not an indication that we are at fault (i.e. of our epistemic limitations), as with most familiar paradoxes, but that moral reality is “at fault”. (Let us also be fairly rigorous as to what we think is “absurd”.) The reason for adding this notion is that some corners of our moral life just do seem absurd, yet the paradox is not a mistake (it is a discovery).

I’ll say a few words about the previous paradoxes, Fortunate Misfortune and Beneficial Retirement. FM asks whether something was unfortunate, regrettable, on the all-considered view. So I don’t think it’s a problem of ambiguity. The problem is that in certain cases we feel both that it was a misfortune, and that it wasn’t. The main examples I consider in the chapter are of very harsh childhood conditions (e.g. a girl born with breathing and walking difficulties), that built the victim’s character, and as a result made her life better (e.g. she took up swimming, became world champion, and almost certainly had a much happier life than she would otherwise have had). We need to take some care in establishing each case, for we don’t want it to be a mere blessing in disguise (for then we won’t have a real misfortune), but on the other hand we don’t want the person to say that he or she would be happy to give up the later success if only s/he could have had a happy childhood, for then we don’t have the good fortune. Most cases where people suffer misfortune of course don’t end up being fortunate. But in the special cases which are genuine FM, we are torn: it seems clear that years of hardship ARE a misfortune, and remember that the person was thrown in without choice, forced to swim or drown. Moreover, one would never wish such a misfortune on one’s child, even if later success was promised. So it seems an obvious misfortune. On the other hand, what kind of a misfortune is it, which makes the person’s life better (in a way that s/he admits was worth it)? Isn’t it rather good fortune?

It’s best to think of Beneficial Retirement in terms of personal integrity. If you are, say, a surgeon and know that were you to leave the person who replaces you will save more lives, how can you stay on and maintain your integrity? On the other hand, the idea that I should leave my job (after years of hard study, and after dreaming to be doctor all my life, and with all that this means to me and my family) just because someone out there happens to be better, seems crazy. We don’t normally expect people to make such huge sacrifices (giving up 20% of your post-tax income is less demanding, but we never demand that). As I see it, the demand to retire wins out, but this means that morality has here become absurd (we can see why it’s both true and absurd). And notice that because it’s an argument about your own integrity, it doesn’t even matter what other people do - if no one among the scores of surgeons who are even worse than you don’t leave, arguably you still should do so, as long as you have reason to believe that someone better than you will replace you.

On top of the personal paradox, we can see that, when certain conditions are met, this would apply to everyone in the bottom 50% of (say) medical doctors, so we also have absurdity on a grand scale. Indeed, as I argue in the book, given some very plausible further assumptions, the MAJORITY of such people should, each, consider leaving.

This is getting to be too long so just a few sentences about the pardoxes of chapter 3, about justice and the severity of punishment. The basic idea here is indeed simple: often the underpriviliged have either “payed in advance” through the hardship of their earlier lives, or not sliding into crime is more difficult for them (they are poorer, have bad role models, etc), so there are mitigating circumstances. In other words, they deserve less severe punishment. On the other hand, those same harsh conditions have typically hardened them, so they require the threat of more severe punishment (so that enough of them will be deterred). Hence, broadly, the less you deserve to be punished the more you need to be, which is absurd. This is, it seems to me, an “esistential paradox”, i.e. the absurdity is inherent in social and moral reality, and it’s not that we simply don’t understand things. Now, the mere existence of tension between desert and deterrence isn’t a paradox, and isn’t even news. But in the situations I specified, things are much starker - again, the less you deserve punishment the more punishment you need to get. I give the analogy of a world where the more you love someone the less s/he would love you. Luckily we don’t live in such an absurd and tragic world concerning love, but, arguably, such is our world concerning punishment.

Finally, some of you might find this recent interview on the book interesting (I discuss four of the paradoxes, including Fortunate Misfortune and Beneficial Retirement). The link is here;

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/14400

Saul- First, thanks for taking the time to come out and chat with us. :)
Your beneficial retirement paradox still doesn’t ring true for me. I can easily keep my personal integrity, and know that people are better than me at my profession, so long as I am meeting a minimum standard. We do this with ethical behavior, why should it be any different with professional behavior? I don’t think I should commit suicide because I don’t live up to all my supererogatory duties… afterall I should donate more of my money to charity (Singer suggests everything beyond personal necessity) than I do. But I think that I’m okay since I don’t violate my basic moral obligations. Do I concede that other people are better than me morally, sure. Similarly, I concede that other people are doing the job better than me, or could do the job better than me. But I can do the job competently. It strikes me a supererogatory for me to quit my job, thus no moral paradox. Is my intuition just broken on this paradox?

Saul, Thanks so much for joining the conversation. I will just tell you my family was forced to talk about the difference between threatening blackmail and threatening a strike or a boycott at the dinner table last night (from chap. 4). If making it into dinner conversation is the mark of an engaging book, then yours has succeeded.

What I’m wondering is what the word “absurd” means. Also I’m wondering what you take to be the import of finding morality absurd. I think that’s going to be addressed in the last two chapters, so I’ll just keep going and find out what you say for myself. (I’m enjoying the suspense…) But the meaning of “absurd”–maybe you could clarify?

Hi Saul,
Honored to have you spend time with us.
I disagree with your conclusion in the retirement paradox at least for the example given.
You’re actually being unfair in the way the problem is stated. From it one immediately thinks of some normal distribution connected with doctor competency, and (for the sake of simplicity say we have 100 doctors) the 10th worst is considerably different, in terms of life or death decisions, than the 30 or the 60th. I doubt it. I think a competency curve would be extremely steep to begin with and then taper down slowly well after the 50. I think that’s built into the education and training docs get.
Most doctoring is not of a life or death nature, but for the sake of argument let’s consider the surgeon. If he/she (all the way through) feels he’s not the greatest, surely there are hack jobs even in surgery that he could perform admirably.
No, I wouldn’t give up my job unless I felt I couldn’t avoid doing harm.

Saul Smilansky,

I like a lot of your examples and they are indeed food for thought. Your example of justice reminds me of the paradox of credit where banks scramble to give loans to those who don’t need it while those who need it most are those who are least likely to get it. Similarly, those who are least able to pay are those who pay the highest interest rates making it even more difficult for them to pay. As you say, what makes this paradoxical is that it is actually both logically necessary yet absurd at the same time.

I think that you are right to frame the Beneficial Retirement case in terms of personal integrity, but I agree with Wayne that it’s hard for me to imagine realistically. If the hospital employs you because it believes that your skill is better than it actually is, then there is a problem. However, the fact that retiring will mean that a better surgeon will come in seems to be problematic. Before this would make sense in practice, you would have to not only be worse than the particular surgeon who would replace you, you would actually have to be worse than the least skilled surgeon that was being hired in the country at that time since the surgeon that might take your job would presumably be getting a job somewhere else. Ultimately, the only barrier you present to employment are those doctors whose skill is not high enough to find a job anywhere.

Amos,

You worded your comment to me as if we were in disagreement. Are we? If so, how?

M.Harris: I agree with what you say about the elites writing the rules and hence, breaking them less.
I merely added an example from daily life, that of the phone company.

Glad to join in. “Absurd”: well, in the Introduction to the book I put it this way: “What makes for absurdity? To say that a state of affairs is absurd, in the sense that concerns us, is to say something about the fundamentally alien relationship between this state of affairs and human reason, human nature, or our basic expectations about the moral order” (p.5). I am not sure that I have much more to say, and would tend to leave it to each reader to decide whether s/he feels that things are absurd. I think that it just is absurd to require people in the relevant situations to retire, by which I guess I mean that it would be unnatural to do so, and that the demand is out of all proportion to what we normally expect of people. With FM, it seems to me manifestly absurd to say that Abigail (from my example about the girl born with the physical difficulties), let alone Primo Levi, were not unfortunate. And so on. But if someone doesn’t share the sense of paradoxicality, then s/he just won’t agree that there is a paradox. The only thing I can do is to try to explain myself better.

On Beneficial Retirement: I am a strong believer in supererogation, and that there are significant limits on our moral obligations. But this is easier to defend when it comes to blocking utilitarian demands for sacrificing for the sake of others, then when it concerns one’s own integrity. Now, if someone is a doctor just for the money or because he enjoys himself doctoring, then my argument has little to hang on. But if the doctor thinks that medicine is very important, and got into the business in large part because of that, then he is in trouble, because integrity then pushes him to give up his position. And keeping one’s own integrity is not some external demand for doing good for others, but something that’s about your own self-respect and value.

On the economic/empirical challenges: if you agree that WHEN the conditions are ripe, the guy should retire, that’s already conceding the paradox. How common it is would be contingent. And certainly (as I discuss in the book) sometimes one can do things to deal with the argument short of retirement - moving sideways to some less demanding but unpleasant role, or perhaps moving to a different location where there might be a shortage of doctors. But the very need to think about this is something that hasn’t been widely noticed (at least philosophicallY). And sometimes the best thing to do WILL be to just leave. This is often so even when one’s replacement would have eventually got a job somewhere else (he might give up before that, or end up in a place where he can do less good, or his contribution might just begin later, and so on). James Lenman wrote a reply to my paper on these empirical questions (he doesn’t challenge the paradox but says that in reality one often can remain), so those who want to can look it up. His paper and my short reply appeared last year in Ratio. I don’t have a link to his paper, but my own (which begins by explaining his arguments) is here:

http://philo.haifa.ac.il/faculty_pages/smilansky/reply_to_lenman.pdf

I think that it just is absurd to require people in the relevant situations to retire, by which I guess I mean that it would be unnatural to do so, and that the demand is out of all proportion to what we normally expect of people.

I think I’m still not clear on the import of the word “absurd.” Normally, we urge people to fulfill their obligations and we try to fulfill our own. But if the obligations are absurd, then what? Put it this way: would you want people reading your book to retire, if they saw themselves as lower-50% professionals, or rather are “absurd obligations” not quite like other ones, and not to be taken too seriously?

On the issue of beneficial retirement and whether it actually is obligatory….In the book you say the obligation to retire exists only when retiring would cause no “exceptional hardship.” I seems as if this will exclude a large number of cases, because self-respect is wrapped up in having a career (for a lot of people). Yes it damages my self -respect, as a mediocre doctor, to contemplate the not very good job I’m doing for my patients. So that gives me a “personal” reason to retire. But chances are it would damage my self respect even more to draw on my savings and watch TV for the rest of my life. Careers seem to have a very central role in identity and well-being for people who choose to have them. If I ought to retire anyway, it would seem to be for the sake of “the greater good”…and then it does start seeming supererogatory, as Wayne says.

Saul Smilansky:
The interesting question is whether these paradoxes or quirks arise out of or evince in a particularly pointed form, the inherent absurdity of looking for clean, clear, crisp moral paradigms from which conflict and contradiction have been eliminated or are they the artefact of an analytic philosophy in which all facts and values lie scattered on a single plane to be discovered by the earnest prospector? To be sure some will be of higher caret than others but there is no sense of a natural hierarchy. Can we imagine the existence of different planes? For instance if supererogation is a higher demand than the maintenance of a comfortable life style then it is clear what the moral thing to do is. Hierarchy brings clarity to the muddle of competing goods.

As throughout this thread, these are very good comments. I don’t have a simple yes-no reply, the paradox raises the issue and each person will need to think for him/herself about retirement, if it’s relevant. Integrity is not a very clear topic, and hasn’t been much discussed philosophically, but surely it’s not good for a person not to be able to look at his daily work without thinking that he lacks integrity by doing it. If leaving would bring him to the brink of suicide (or make his family starve) then those are of course very strong counter-considerations. But most cases will not be like that, and in such easier cases I think that we can say that one should probably retire, and that the demand to do so is absurd. The absurdity (or ensuing paradoxicality) may be a quality of moral situations that nevertheless could not be correctly resolved in a non-absurd way. But again, things are likely to be complicated.

I don’t have grand theory of moral paradoxes. This is not because I am “anti-theory”, but because to my suprise each moral paradox is so different that we have to think things from the bottom up. It’s difficult to say general things about them, particularly as to how they should be resolved or otherwise dealt with. But perhaps we should wait with the general reflections till the other paradoxes have been discussed.

But perhaps we should wait with the general reflections till the other paradoxes have been discussed.

Good idea. They really are all very different, eliciting various reactions. The next one (blackmail) elicits feverish “figuring out”…I’m going to post about it soon. Thanks again for your comments.