Posted by bob on October 08, 19103 at 14:31:44:
In Reply to: Retaliatory force and Rational Egoism--some questions... posted by SBCore on June 18, 19103 at 14:38:52:
The societal goal of criminal justice SHOULD BE primarily to prevent crime from occurring in the first place. But often the term "criminal justice" implies that the process is merely cathartic for the victims ... the jury is still out as to whether getting even really does any good.
To the ends of preventing crime, the amount of retaliation is a judgement call. If a child steals 5 dollars, you scold him and teach him why stealing is wrong.
If you have kids, I'd refrain from using objectivist principles. They'd probably end up shooting you when they become a r.
Rand's thoughts on this are hardly original -- Judaism has held for thousands of years the principle of an "eye for an eye" ... Who can disagree with not "initiating the use of force"?
The tricky part, really, is figuring out who exactly is the initiator. Criminally, as in the case of murder and robbery, etc, usually the lines are clear cut, but Rand more often applied this principle to political entities, i.e., the United States was justified in going to war with Japan because of pearl harbor. Applying it like this is a whole new ballgame.
I recall Rand saying some time ago (was it her playboy interview?) that the united would have been within its rights to attack Cuba, even though it hadn't initiated an attack, which seems to contradict her principle. She explained this away that we weren't obligated to attack, but because cuba was oppressing its own people, the US was within its rights.
(Luckily, we didn't attack cuba -- doing so would have been tantamount to attacking the USSR, and our leaders knew it.)
If you were to use the "initiation of force" standard for retaliation, we were certainly justified in going to afghanistan but not to iraq; The line of reasoning that led us to Iraq would give individuals permission to attack their next door neighbor simply because they bought a gun. And attacking another nation because their governments are oppressive to it's own citizens is actually contradicts objectivist ethics -- the idea that we should risk our own necks when a threat to us (or our allies, for that matter) is not imminent smacks of rand's definition of altruism.
The principle as it is applied to criminal law is fairly clear cut; it is up to forensic science to determine criminality, and it is up to social scientists to study the role of criminal justice as a deterrent to crime. But it's important that application of the principle is far less clear-cut in the political realm, which is where rand applied it most.
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