Philosophy, Crime, and Criminology
304
Philosophy, Crime, and Criminology
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Overview
Charting a provocative and original direction, editors Bruce A. Arrigo and Christopher R. Williams couple theoretically oriented chapters with those centered on application and case study. In doing so, they develop an insightful, sensible, and accessible approach for a philosophical criminology in step with the political and economic challenges of the twenty-first century. Revealing the ways in which philosophical conceits inform prevailing conceptions of crime, Philosophy, Crime, and Criminology is required reading for any serious student or scholar concerned with crime and its impact on society and in our lives.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252090417 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2010 |
| Series: | Critical Perspectives in Criminology |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 691 KB |
About the Author
Bruce A. Arrigo is a professor of crime, law, and society and the former chair of the department of criminal justice at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the author of Social Justice/Criminal Justice and many other books. Christopher R. Williams is an associate professor of criminology at the University of West Georgia. He is the coauthor of Law, Psychology, and Justice: Chaos Theory and the New (Dis)Order with Bruce A. Arrigo.
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Philosophy, Crime, and Criminology
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2006 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-252-07289-8
Introduction
Historically, philosophers have written very little about the subject of crime. Similarly, criminologists have written very little about the subject of philosophy. In both cases, the linkages between philosophy and crime have been left implicit-either in the more general metaphysical, ethical, and legal writings of philosophers, or the theoretical speculations of criminologists. However, to be sure, law and justice have been particularly significant concerns throughout the history of philosophy (e.g., Solomon & Murphy, 1990; Friedrich, 1963). From Plato, through Aquinas and Augustine, to Kant, Bentham, and Beccaria, many of the most important philosophical minds have confronted the complexities of social obligation, social offense, social control, and societal responses to crime directly and deeply. Yet hardly any of these same philosophers saw fit to address, in any systematic or comprehensive fashion, the behavior that makes necessary and possible recurrent debates on issues such as the meaning of justice, the proper reach of the criminal law, and the ethical underpinnings of criminal punishment.Indeed, crime, it seems, has never been regarded as a suitably philosophical issue. Admittedly, at various historical junctures, the subject ofcriminal behavior has been taken up by legal philosophy, medical philosophy, theology, and, as a subset of immoral conduct, by ethics. This notwithstanding, crime per se has been and remains conspicuously absent from the sorts of general ontological, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetical analyses that might suggest new perspectives and alternative directions for its general comprehension and, by consequence, for its specific applications in law and justice studies.
At the same time, the discipline of philosophy and its corresponding intellectual subdivisions (i.e., ontology, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics) have never been properly regarded as criminological concerns-save, perhaps, the ethical dilemmas and quandaries that emerge as issues of professional or practical interest within legal, law enforcement, and correctional circles. Regrettably, as criminology has evolved into an increasingly interdisciplinary and independent field with its own scholars and practitioners, the role of philosophical speculation, argument, analysis, and critique in matters of criminological import has withered into veritable nonexistence. Even in pedagogical formulations, criminology and philosophy are mostly regarded as distinct, and perhaps unrelated, subjects. For example, in colleges and universities around the world they typically represent separate departments, housed in different colleges, and often occupying space in entirely distinct physical quarters. Criminologists rarely interact with philosophers and vice versa. Criminology departments do not often-if ever-offer courses whose clear objective is to entertain and expose the connections between what criminology does and what philosophy is. Moreover, in many criminology programs, students may earn their degree without ever having taken a course in philosophy. At best, they are introduced to philosophical issues only by way of an occasional footnote or two in books and courses on theoretical criminology. Even then, such footnotes infrequently appear (see, however, Einstadter & Henry, 1995).
Yet criminology is fundamentally wedded to philosophy in countless ways, and the crossroads of criminology and philosophy are ripe for exposition and assimilation by scholars in both camps. This very sentiment was the basis for creating the present volume. As such, many of the implicit historical associations between crime and philosophy, as well as relevant philosophical concepts and arguments, represent topical foci for the chapters that follow. We hasten to add, however, that the philosophy-criminology union entertained in this book is not intended to be exhaustive. Rather than offering a comprehensive portrait of a philosophical criminology, we have instead chosen to concentrate on selected points of intersection with the promise that access to further critical junctures will most assuredly follow in subsequent works. Thus, rather than attempting to "fill" a gap in the literature, our primary interest is indexical; that is, we hope to "point out" such a gap, evocatively contributing to a more thorough and enlightened consideration of this underexamined relationship.
In the interest of an introduction, the remainder of this chapter pursues several goals. First, we address the historical development of the concept and study of crime as it has progressed from antiquity, through the Middle Ages, into modernity and, more recently, postmodernity. Admittedly, our historical treatment is modest, omitting several shifts in the evolution of the philosophy of crime. However, our intention is to provide merely a sense of the ways in which philosophy has addressed the issue of crime and, further, how such conceptions have been subjected to broader intellectual speculation and social transformation. Second, we offer some suggestions as to how a philosophical criminology or the introduction of philosophy into criminological analysis might occur. In other words, we address the specific value that philosophy ostensibly holds for the study of crime. In doing do, we briefly address each of the four core areas of philosophy (i.e., metaphysics or ontology, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics), attending to their potential relevance for studies of crime. Given that the chapters in this volume flesh out many of these intersections and potentialities, our primary aim is to expose the reader to the contours of these philosophical subdivisions, providing in each instance an overview of and reference to several constitutive concerns. We conclude the introductory chapter with a synopsis of the book's organization and the substantive chapters representing this volume.
Crime in Philosophy
Many students and scholars alike often fail to recognize just how recent the temporal separation actually is between philosophy and criminology, the social sciences, and science more generally. We forget or, perhaps, never consider that only several centuries ago, the boundaries between what are now considered to be the physical and social sciences and philosophy were not so clearly demarcated (for a discussion of these boundaries, see, e.g., Benton & Craib, 2001). For nearly two thousand years, social science and philosophy were one and the same. The psychologists, sociologists, and criminologists of antiquity and the Middle Ages were philosophers associated with psychology, sociology, and criminology only by way of the sorts of questions they entertained. It was only during subsequent historical periods that these sorts of questions became affiliated with specialized academic disciplines (Rosenberg, 1988).
In fact the relationship between philosophy and crime is one that dates to antiquity. The essential questions of criminology-what crime is, why certain people engage in criminal behavior, how systems of justice should respond to lawbreakers-are questions that, until relatively recently, were examined almost exclusively by philosophers (though not, as previously noted, in any systematic fashion). In fact, the very notions of crime, law, and justice that we continue to wrestle with today-and upon which the discipline and practice of criminology are based-are firmly rooted in a philosophical tradition that extends as far back as Plato, through Kant, Bentham, Beccaria, and Marx, and into the theoretical variants of more recent scholars who have adopted, adapted, and incorporated philosophical critique into their criminological commentaries (e.g., Arrigo, 1999; DiCristina, 1995; Henry & Milovanovic, 1996; Newman, Lynch, & Galaty, 1993).
Though most books on criminology or criminological theory begin their historical descriptions with the insights of Cesare de Beccaria (1764/1963), crime, law, and justice were at least implicit topics of concern throughout the two-thousand-plus years of Western philosophy that preceded him. Rarely, however, have criminologists extended serious attention to such contributions (cf. Beirne, 1993; Foucault, 1977). In part, this lack of consideration may reflect the relative absence of anything resembling a complete and intellectually noteworthy philosophy of crime prior to the 1700s. While theories of law and justice were central concerns throughout antiquity, the concept of crime per se emerged only as a topic of inquiry ancillary to them. Nevertheless, philosophical considerations of crime can be traced at least to Plato, thereafter becoming a subject of theological concern throughout the Middle Ages, subsequently entering the cause-effect discourse of modernity through the legal ponderings of Beccaria and Bentham and the scientific discourse of the early biological positivists, and, finally, succumbing to the antifoundational and deracinating agenda of postmodernity.
We should keep in mind that, while crime may be a "social fact," the particular realities of crime are relative to time and place. Consequently, whatever implicit or explicit speculations might be derived from the likes of Plato or Kant, crime in ancient Greece or 18th-century Germany was dramatically different from what we find today in the Western world. Typifying the latter are issues of crime's hyperreality and the mass-mediated character of its existence (e.g., Arrigo, 1996). Such ontological considerations would have been unimaginable just a few short decades ago. Similarly, other contemporary realities such as the incidence of crime and of other social problems (e.g., drugs, racial conflict), technological advances in weaponry and other tools of the criminal trade, and the automobile as a means of transportation are criminological considerations unique to the 20th and 21st centuries. While many of the philosophical issues relevant to criminology are transhistorical and transcultural (e.g., free will vs. determinism; the nature of causality), others are not. Thus our philosophical criminology must be one that both draws from the perennial debates in philosophy while remaining cognizant of time and place.
Crime as Vice: Crime in the Origins of Philosophy
Law and justice were prominent concerns of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, often figuring into broader moral and political debates (e.g., Friedrich, 1963). Theories of crime, while not often postulated as such, can be inferred from the general ethical and legal philosophies of many thinkers from antiquity. To be sure, crime was an integral component of theories pertaining to law and justice. For example, one could not have postulated a view of punishment without crime serving as a basis for such a theory (e.g., de Beccaria, 1764/1963; Foucault, 1977). Consequently, we can look to theories of law and punishment for some indication of how crime and criminal behavior were conceptualized.
At various points throughout the philosophy of Plato, we find some of the earliest efforts to explain crime. Not surprisingly, Plato weaves-mostly by implication-his theory of crime into his more general moral psychology. Following Mackenzie (1981), we can surmise three different analyses of criminality for Plato: (1) crime as ignorance; (2) crime as psychological disorder; and (3) crime as disease. In each case, criminality is understood to be a characterological deficit. Characterological deficits, in turn, were subsumed under the broader category of vice rather than virtue. For Plato-and the ancient Greeks more commonly-the moral person is virtuous. By contrast, the immoral person-including the criminal-is vicious. For purposes of this section of the book's introduction, Plato's understanding of crime as ignorance and crime as psychological disorder requires some further elucidation.
In the first analysis, vice is a state of the soul whereby the soul is defined as ignorant. More precisely, virtue is knowledge, while vice is ignorance. Plato understood all evil in this manner: "all wicked men are, in all respects, unwillingly wicked" (1988, p. 369). The individual who knows what is right, good, and just will necessarily pursue what is right, good, and just. This, then, is the essence of Plato's moral philosophy and, inferentially, his theory of crime: all people aim at that which they believe to be good. People, however, can be mistaken about what is actually good and, consequently, can remain in a state of ignorance and vice. As such, ignorance is both necessary for crime and it is sufficient for crime (Mackenzie, 1981).
In other places, Plato seems to link crime (i.e., vice) to the appetitive "part" of the soul. In the Republic, he sets forth his tripartite psychology wherein the soul consists of a relationship between rational, spirited, and appetitive aspects (for an introduction, see Pappas, 1995). The vicious soul is characterized by psychological disorder or conflict. Not only is knowledge essential to virtue, but order and control are essential as well. For the virtuous person, the rational part of the soul has mastery and control over the desirous or appetitive component. In vicious souls, reason loses this mastery and either inflated desires or perverted spirit compel vile action (Mackenzie, 1981, p. 171). In book 9 of the Republic, Plato offers a more specific analysis of the criminal disposition, pointing to three causes of vice: anger, pleasure, and ignorance. Anger and pleasure both compel a person toward wrongdoing, whereas ignorance reflects a lack of knowledge and a consequent lack of rational power over the emotions (Mackenzie, 1981, p. 174).
Given that virtue ethics characterized the thinking of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, we can rightfully assume that crime was regarded as a form of vice or immoral behavior. However, the conceptualization of "crime as vice" was a historically informed and thereby historically specific phenomenon. Interestingly, nowhere is the historical nature of theories pertaining to crime and criminality more apparent than in the dramatic reformulations and ideological changes wrought by theology that followed the Greco-Roman era. This period is known as the Middle Ages.
Crime as Sin: The Middle Ages
The defining feature of the Middle Ages in general is the profound influence of theology on human conceptualizations of the world (e.g., Solomon & Higgins, 1996; Hyman & Walsh, 1983). Philosophical inquiry was largely replaced by theological speculation. Theoretical insights pertaining to law, crime, and justice were no different. The Middle Ages witnessed the demise of the Greek-inspired "crime as vice" philosophy and the emergence of the theologically inspired "crime as sin" framework. This was the dominant perspective on crime throughout the Middle Ages; that is, from the end of antiquity until the 17th and 18th centuries (Pfohl, 1994). In many practical respects, the notions of "vice" and "sin" are similar. The vices of antiquity and the sins of the Middle Ages described many of the same tendencies and behaviors. The locus of the transition from vice to sin was metaphysical. That is to say, while vice was understood by the likes of Plato to be human ignorance and the absence of virtue, the same behaviors became recast in the Middle Ages as transgressions against God and, consequently, sins issuing from human weakness (rather than ignorance) and lack of faith (rather than reason). In other respects, conceptualizations of crime in the Middle Ages display considerable parallels to subsequent criminologies; namely, the classical notion of freedom of choice and the positivist notion of deterministic causality (Pfohl, 1994; Einstadter & Henry, 1995; Vold, Bernard, & Snipes, 2001).
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