Child discipline

https://www.academia.edu/40552793/In_Defense_of_Spanking

1. I agree with Hsiao that spanking is morally justifiable, and I salute his courage in defending an unfashionable but biblical practice. 

2. I'm not a child psychologist, but I doubt that the effectiveness of spanking is primarily due to physical pain. Indeed, that view can lead to excessive punishment. In my observation, the impact is more psychological than physical. 

3. I agree with him that punishment should be defined in terms of wrongdoing, guilt, retribution, and just desert. To classify deterrent, corrective, or remedial action as punitive sows confusion by using the same label for different kinds of actions that may operate from opposing assumptions. It's best to reserve the term "punishment" from retributive justice. 

4. One problem with the classification is that it begs the question of whether spanking is fundamentally punitive. If you define punishment in retributive terms, and you classify spanking as corporal punishment, then by definition, the nature, aim, and justification of spanking lies within that moral framework.

This is not to deny that spanking is sometimes punitive. But it prejudges the nature, aim, and justification of spanking to classify it as corporal punishment. I think we should drop that classification as the umbrella under which we analyze spanking since wrongdoing and culpability are not always the salient consideration. Rather, we should classify spanking under the broader, generic rubric of corporal discipline. This isn't a euphemism, but allows us to avoid a reductionistic understanding of its nature, aim, and justification. 

5. We might differentiate between two objectives for child discipline:

i) Moral conditioning

ii) Deterrence conditioning

Everything is not about morality; some things are about prudence. Teaching kids to be prudent. To avoid hazardous activities when they're too young to appreciate the danger. Where children are concerned, retributive punishment isn't the only justification. When you swat a little child who plays around the stove, that's not about just desert or exacting retribution but deterrence, and that's due to the cognitive immaturity of the child. Due to his condition of diminished responsibility, his hazardous action in that situation can't be blameworthy. It doesn't merit blame. He doesn't deserve punishment. 

Don't automatically shoehorn the warrant for spanking into a retributive paradigm. The warrant for the corporal discipline of children does not require guilt or wrongdoing on their part as a necessary precondition. Although children can do willfully malicious things, that's not the only motivation for their misconduct, and so it's an overgeneralization to assume the only defense of spanking is just desert for wrongdoing. In some cases, spanking conditions a child to avoid risky behavior when he's too young to appreciate the danger. It teaches him to associate the behavior with unpleasant, memorable consequences–spanking! Although he's too young to perceive and fear the danger of the action, he's not to young to fear discipline. That provides a disincentive until he's mature enough to appreciate the risk. He's too young to directly gauge the danger, but he's not too young to indirectly associate the forbidden action with discipline. 

Hell: against universalism

An excerpt from Hell: against universalism by Ioanna-Maria Patsalidou.

Discipline

I think Tim Hsiao makes some good general points in this article:

https://whatswrongcvsp.com/2018/11/16/the-moral-case-for-corporal-punishment/

However, I disagree with using retribution as the primary paradigm for child discipline. 

i) Why not deploy a remedial theory of punishment in the case of children and retribution for adult offenders?

ii) Part of the problem concerns the incidental connotations of corporal punishment. "Corporal punishment" is a conventional designation, but can be misleading if we treat that conventional label as the frame of reference. With regard to young kids, we should reframe the issue in terms of conditioning rather than punishment. Analogous to dog training.

ii) Sometimes children do things that are morally wrong even from a child's perspective. They can be cruel. They may steal. 

iii) That needs to be distinguished from foolish or dangerous things kids do, that are innocent of malice. Kids are impetuous. 

iv) I don't think physical pain is the major factor in the corporal punishment or discipline. What makes it effective has less to do with the degree of physical pain than humiliation. A psychological effect.

Skinning your knees by falling off a bicycle is more painful than a light spanking, but spanking has a psychological effect that mere pain doesn't. It's a reproof from a parent. More like an honor/shame dynamic. Putting a misbehaving child in its place. 

The shocked or hurt expression of a child who's swatted isn't primary due to the pain, which may be minor, but the humiliation–and the fact that it was done by someone they're so emotionally dependent on.

Another cliche example is a young child who shoplifts. The parent discovers the stolen item after they return home, takes the child back to the store, where the shamefaced child must present the stolen item to the storeowner and personally apologize. There's nothing physically painful about that experience, but what makes it a disincentive to future shoplifting is the acute embarrassment.

Even in the case of the public caning of juvenile delinquents, the primary deterrent isn't physical pain but public humiliation. The psychological rather than physical unpleasantness of the experience. 

Take the famous case of Michael Fay. The corrective effect of his caning has less to do with physical pain than public shaming.

v) Take the cliche of a cliche example of a young child who does something hazardous because kids his age are impulsive, oblivious to danger, and shortsighted regarding the consequences of their actions.

The purpose of swatting them isn't punitive in that context. Rather, it's to make it memorable and unpleasant in order to create a disincentive which will override the impulse to engage in that kind of risky behavior in the future. Associate the behavior with something unpleasant or fearful. 

vi) It can be useless to reason with a young child who wants to do something he shouldn't–because children can be willful. They don't care about the reason. They just want what they want. So a parent needs to make it unpleasant, to create a disincentive. 

This isn't a question of justice or fairness but prudence. Conditioning prudent behavior. 

BTW, I'm not suggesting parents shouldn't give children reasons. They should. But oftentimes children aren't listening, so a reason will be ineffective, although it's still important for parents to reason with their kids.

vii) I wouldn't say young kids are either amoral or moral agents. There are moral elements to a child's psychological makeup. Take their sense of fairness or betrayal ("You promised!"). However, kids lack the cognitive ability to entertain the kind of counterfactual reasoning that's a part of moral deliberation and decision-making. 

Dylann Roof is a victim of circumstance

Assuming that Dylann Roof is convicted, how should he be punished? I think he ought to be executed. But that's because I'm a knuckle-dragging Christian who gets his morality from a Bronze Age book. Compare that to the more enlightened perspective of atheism:

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Indeed, and “punishment” in the U.S. often involves retributive punishment based on the notion that the criminal simply made the wrong choice.  Retribution, in turn, rests on some notion that criminals have free will. We know that this philosophy is strong in the U.S. system, for when criminals are thought to have offended in circumstances when they couldn’t choose right from wrong (mental disability, for instance) or weren’t able to choose right from wrong (a brain tumor that makes one aggressive), they get lighter sentences, often involving more rehabilitation and hospitalization.

But to a determinist like me, no criminal has a choice about what to do, so all should be treated as victims of their circumstances. This would eliminate retributive punishment, and perhaps make our system more like Norway’s.

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/06/21/why-is-norways-prison-system-so-successful/

Ask people why they support the death penalty or prolonged incarceration for serious crimes, and the reasons they give will usually involve retribution. There may be passing mention of deterrence or rehabilitation, but the surrounding rhetoric gives the game away. People want to kill a criminal as payback for the horrible things he did. Or they want to give "satisfaction' to the victims of the crime or their relatives. An especially warped and disgusting application of the flawed concept of retribution is Christian crucifixion as "atonement' for "sin'.

Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.

Basil Fawlty, British television's hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn't start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. "Right! I warned you. You've had this coming to you!" He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don't we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?

Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. When a child robs an old lady, should we blame the child himself or his parents? Or his school? Negligent social workers? In a court of law, feeble-mindedness is an accepted defence, as is insanity. Diminished responsibility is argued by the defence lawyer, who may also try to absolve his client of blame by pointing to his unhappy childhood, abuse by his father, or even unpropitious genes (not, so far as I am aware, unpropitious planetary conjunctions, though it wouldn't surprise me).

But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?

Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.

http://edge.org/q2006/q06_9.html

Like a patient etherized upon a table

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we ‘ought to have known better’, is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image....

For if crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call ‘disease’ can be treated as a crime; and compulsorily cured. It will be vain to plead that states of mind which displease government need not always involve moral turpitude and do not therefore always deserve forfeiture of liberty. For our masters will not be using the concepts of Desert and Punishment but those of disease and cure. We know that one school of psychology already regards religion as a neurosis. When this particular neurosis becomes inconvenient to government, what is to hinder government from proceeding to ‘cure’ it? Such ‘cure’ will, of course, be compulsory; but under the Humanitarian theory it will not be called by the shocking name of Persecution. No one will blame us for being Christians, no one will hate us, no one will revile us. The new Nero will approach us with the silky manners of a doctor, and though all will be in fact as compulsory as the tunica molesta or Smithfield or Tyburn, all will go on within the unemotional therapeutic sphere where words like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ or ‘freedom’ and ‘slavery’ are never heard. And thus when the command is given, every prominent Christian in the land may vanish overnight into Institutions for the Treatment of the Ideologically Unsound, and it will rest with the expert gaolers to say when (if ever) they are to re-emerge. But it will not be persecution. Even if the treatment is painful, even if it is life-long, even if it is fatal, that will be only a regrettable accident; the intention was purely therapeutic. In ordinary medicine there were painful operations and fatal operations; so in this. But because they are ‘treatment’, not punishment, they can be criticized only by fellow-experts and on technical grounds, never by men as men and on grounds of justice.

This is why I think it essential to oppose the Humanitarian theory of punishment, root and branch, wherever we encounter it. It carries on its front a semblance of mercy which is wholly false. That is how it can deceive men of good will. The error began, with Shelley’s statement that the distinction between mercy and justice was invented in the courts of tyrants. It sounds noble, and was indeed the error of a noble mind. But the distinction is essential. The older view was that mercy ‘tempered’ justice, or (on the highest level of all) that mercy and justice had met and kissed. The essential act of mercy was to pardon; and pardon in its very essence involves the recognition of guilt and ill-desert in the recipient. If crime is only a disease which needs cure, not sin which deserves punishment, it cannot be pardoned. How can you pardon a man for having a gumboil or a club foot? But the Humanitarian theory wants simply to abolish Justice and substitute Mercy for it. This means that you start being ‘kind’ to people before you have considered their rights, and then force upon them supposed kindnesses which no on but you will recognize as kindnesses and which the recipient will feel as abominable cruelties. You have overshot the mark. Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful. That is the important paradox. As there are plants which will flourish only in mountain soil, so it appears that Mercy will flower only when it grows in the crannies of the rock of Justice; transplanted to the marshlands of mere Humanitarianism, it becomes a man-eating weed, all the more dangerous because it is still called by the same name as the mountain variety. But we ought long ago to have learned our lesson. We should be too old now to be deceived by those humane pretensions which have served to usher in every cruelty of the revolutionary period in which we live. These are the ‘precious balms’ which will ‘break our heads’.

There is a fine sentence in Bunyan: ‘It came burning hot into my mind, whatever he said, and however he flattered, when he got me home to his House, he would sell me for a Slave.’

Read the rest here.