Punishing Transgender Robot Criminals

          The Following is an adaptation of my response to a prompt in my "Science, Ethics and Culture" class at Arizona State University, taught by Maria Erspamer in the Fall of 2015. It outlines what I think is the proper grounding for ethics and government.

Prompt:

          Do you feel that transgender inmates have the right to have access to hormone therapy, and why or why not?

Response:

          This question is relatively easy to answer if we start with the premise that the proper grounding of ethical decision making is the prevention of suffering by sentient creatures. This premise leads naturally to what I call “The Protection Theory of Punishment.”


          To protect sentient life, the Protection Theory says we should remove the capacities, freedoms or abilities that enabled a perpetrator of suffering to harm someone, until such a time as that perp demonstrates that she is no longer a danger to others. Thus, a check-kiter would be prohibited from having a checking account until rehabilitated, and a dog which bites someone would need to be held - completely - in captivity until its owner demonstrates that the dog has been trained sufficiently not to be a danger any longer.


          Note that for purposes of imposing punishment, this theory completely bypasses the issue of the mental state, mental capacity, or mental health of the perpetrator, which Silpa Maruri said has been used to justify - for the wrong reasons - prisoners’ access to hormone therapy (807). Under the Protection Theory, all we care about is that a person demonstrably committed a crime, and what freedoms or capacities enabled her to commit this crime. (Admittedly, how we later determine that criminals are no longer a danger does necessitate consideration of their mental state, and is a very tricky and important issue, which parole boards are already grappling with to no one’s satisfaction; but this is tangential to the hormone therapy issue, as will become clear below).


          Now this is the key:  According to the Protection Theory, the only justification for incarcerating someone is to remove the danger they represent to others. Thus, the practical mechanics of incarceration are aimed at danger removal (for example through rehabilitation), not at vengeance, deterrence, or cancelling out the human rights of criminals just to exact “an eye for an eye.” This applies to ALL punishment - everything from restraining a child in danger of hurting himself, to removing weapons from autonomous killer robots. We are removing abilities and freedoms, not acting out angrily ourselves.


          So, under a Protection Theory of punishment we really only need to consider three things when establishing whether inmates should have access to hormone therapy:

1. Does access to hormone therapy enable the inmate to harm others? I say no. Therefore, the Protection Theory does not dictate that we remove this freedom from the inmate. So yes, she should have access to hormone therapy. However,

1. Who is to pay for this therapy? If the taxpayer is forced to pay, that victimizes - imposes suffering - on an innocent person. This violates the Protection Theory. Therefore the inmate or her insurance - which she pays for - should bear the costs. In fact, the inmate should bear ALL the costs of her confinement, unless demonstrably disabled and unable to work. Otherwise, if the inmate doesn’t work but is able, she would not be fed nor clothed nor given any other materials except a cell with no bed (although to be fair, initially the prison should extend enough credit to the prisoners to make it to their first paycheck). Any other action on the part of the prison would impose suffering on taxpayers, who are not responsible for the inmate’s misdeeds, rather than on the inmate, who is. However,

1. As the penal system currently functions, inmates are not paid a living wage for their work. In some states inmates are literally paid pennies an hour, while corrupt corporations and politicians profit greatly. The ability of an inmate to earn a wage comparable to what she could earn in the private sector is not an ability that enabled her to harm others through her criminal acts. Therefore, the Protection Theory says this ability should not be taken away from the inmate.  What kinds of work would be available to the inmate without violating the rights of taxpayers, business owners, prison guards or other stakeholders would need to be decided case by case.  We would also need to decide how wide a range of products or services inmates could purchase without imposing too much of a burden on prisons or on society (again, guided by the principle of protection of the innocent from suffering).  But the important thing is that inmates have both the right and the responsibility to earn a decent living and pay their way through life.  This is also congruent with rehabilitating them.  So the only reasons to deny hormone therapy to inmates would be either that they couldn't pay for it themselves, or that the logistics of providing the therapy endangered guards, doctors, or someone else.  In fact, this treatment endangers no one.

          I have no doubt that if the Protection Theory of punishment were implemented, the implication of it that inmates have ALL the same rights as anyone else, except those that enable them to harm others, or that interfere with their rehabilitation - would lead a great many people to believe we were coddling inmates. However, any other policy would unnecessarily impose further suffering. And it is the elimination of suffering that justifies a proper ethical theory in the first place.

          Protection from suffering is also the only ethical justification for any other government action.  Opinions may differ about the practical applications of a broad Protection Theory of ethics.  But the undesirability of suffering is not, strictly speaking, a theory ... it is a fact which can be experienced directly by anyone who suffers.

Works Cited:

Maruri, Silpa. "Hormone Therapy for Inmates: A Metonym for Transgender Rights."           Cornell journal of law and public policy 20.3 (2011): 807. Web.

The Examined Rock

I want to make sure my judgments are my own.  I've been influenced by other people to my detriment too many times to not be cautious about this.

Still, the more I interact with other people and the world, the more I learn what I really believe ... and don't believe.  I liken this to my being a rough stone, which is put in a rock tumbler with other stones.  The rough edges stick out the way I put my ideas out in the world.  Some of the sharp corners are smoothed away by rubbing up against intractable facts and other people's beliefs that hadn't occurred to me on my own.

     But social interaction is a "magic" rock tumbler; some of the interaction fortuitously pounds rocks together in such a way that flat facets are created - meeting points of self and world, where the world is reflected out without distortion.  A number of facets, in turn, lead out inexorably to angles - the personally-perceived implications of those commonly-accepted flat understandings.  All this happens because when people are put into the tumbler, unlike rocks we move in our own directions.  Thus much of the movement isn't haphazard smashing and rolling around; it is directed by people's free will.  This is what permits both the polishing down of beliefs and the sharpening of angles making beliefs even more pronounced.

     The role of the tumbling machine, a regular churning, is analogous to the role of the physical environment.  The walls of the tumbler are the confinement of unyielding reality, representing the way we all bump up against natural laws in our attempts to control our trajectories.

The result is a polished gem: My true ideas, the beauty of them revealed by the process of tumbling.

This process works best for me when I alternate between tumbling and private polishing.  The soft, sensitive private polishing washes the dust from my tumbling thoughts - getting rid of the little bits of other people's gems that have clung to me.  Going from my contemplative states into the tumbler and back gives me the requisite alone time to clean myself, but continually grinds away my misconceptions about other people and the world.

It’s frustrating when my prejudices stick out into the tumbler, scratching up other people, the jagged edges grinding themselves up into dust that sticks to us all, obscuring our true humanity.  But staying in the tumbler, combined with honest introspection, removes these imperfections.

This is a seemingly never-ending process ... The gem getting smaller and smaller, until just the essential kernel, the really important basic truths - my fundamental convictions - are revealed.

Yet we’ve all heard the stories of grooms losing the precious rings they needed for their weddings.  The smaller the gem, the easier it is to lose it out in the world - in the tumbler.  The dust from the grinding just covers you up, the tumbler swallows you up, the grinding really never does stop, and ultimately the self is ground away.  But without the tumbler, how would this gem have been cut?  It would have remained a wild rock.

The important thing is to undertake really looking at the gem.  Some people never do.  You’ve got to wipe the dust off to do that; you need time to meditate.  It’s said the common mass of people see in rough diamonds only a rock.  The master diamond cutters bring out the hidden individual beauty of each unique stone.  Some say God can see into the deepest recesses of our souls.  Be that as it may, the ultimate diamond cutting and polishing responsibilities are ours.

The examined life truly is worth living.  But it can only be fully appreciated by a true craftsman equipped with a high-quality loupe.  

Unreal: Evil Cats

     Evil is all around us.  Murder, rape, genocide, theft, child abuse, extortion, fraud ... What is the cause of all this?
     Many answers have been offered.  The simplest and easiest answer to digest, the answer that allows us to explain the really inconceivable depravity, is that some people are "just plain evil."  Bad to the bone.  Incorrigible.  I suspect all of us have had this thought before.  It seems so obvious.
     Sure, we all make mistakes, we all sin occasionally, but a select few are demon spawn, incapable of mending their ways.
     Turns out, that's logically impossible.
     It's impossible by the very nature of evil.
     An evil act involves a choice.  No one forced Ted Bundy to callously murder people; he did it because he wanted to - because he freely chose to.  Sure, he may have had a deprived childhood, he may have had bad genes.  But all those possibilities do is exonerate him of responsibility.  No, we must assume he is evil incarnate.  That's part of his identity.  For that to be true, he must have freely chosen his crimes.
     But wait ... He's innately evil, bad to the bone ... yet he had a choice.
     That means he's intrinsically bad, even though if he were intrinsically bad he couldn't help himself, yet he could help himself.  He's evil, yet not evil.
     Those of us who think for ourselves call that a contradiction in terms.
     So you can't "be" evil and have free will.  You can only choose bad behavior.  Ted Bundy chose bad behavior.  Describing him as evil frees him of responsibility for his actions.
     Let's consider another case:  A cat not only catches a mouse, she also toys with it.  She inflicts pain on the terrified little creature.  Is the cat evil?
     Many people claim "lower" animals don't have free will.  Does this assumption free us from contradictions enough to call the cat evil?
     Well, if the cat doesn't have free will, then she must have been programmed by nature to torture mice.  If so, then is nature evil?
     Maybe so.
     But wait ... Aren't we assuming that there is such a thing as "evil?"  That is, aren't we assuming that there exists some objective standard of good and evil - that evil is not just subjective?  Aren't we assuming that torture really is bad?
     If so, then where do we get this standard of good and evil - is it the "natural" standard?  But if nature itself is evil, and we got the standard from nature, from reality ...
     Again, we are led by inexorable logic into a maze of contradictions, as soon as we assume that some creatures are "evil."  It doesn't matter whether the creatures have free will or not.
     The only way out of this maze is to accept responsibility for our choices and actions.  Choices and actions can be evil, but people can't.
     No wonder Christians say God loves all of us in spite of our sins.
     But wait ... If we can't be evil, doesn't that mean we can't be inherently good, either?
     Well, it certainly means that we can't earn goodness by our actions.  We can only choose good actions.
     No wonder Mom and Dad always told me to "Do the right thing."
     And for the record, cats do have free will.  They aren't forced to purr and act cute; they really mean it when they snuggle up against you lovingly.
     I'm not so sure about dogs.  They may have ulterior motives:-).
   
   

Unreal:  Students Justifying Beliefs

    “Argument” to me is essentially just reasoning, because when I write out an argument I'm writing out my own thinking on an issue.  I participated in a debate in the sixth grade where the instructor required us to argue the opposite of our convictions.  I no longer admire people who do that.

I see the pedagogical utility of the exercise: among other things, you learn to see the logic of other perspectives. But as an adult nothing annoys me more than people who take positions they don't actually find credible themselves.

 

    Sometimes people think they believe something, while their behavior indicates otherwise.  This happens to all of us.  But when I find myself arguing opposite to the perspective I was arguing ten minutes before, I take that as a sign I've become concerned with winning, or with showing off my racionating skills, with something other than Truth.

 

I often raise objections to my own convictions. Isn't this the healthiest attitude?  Rarely am I on more dangerous ground than when I've made up my mind.  Playing the devil’s advocate for purposes of sharpening your thinking and attaining Truth, however, is not the same as building castles in the air.

 

    So now my reasoning (including feelings) is my writing.  I want the main difference between my reasoning and my writing to be that my writing is more explicit, organized and rigorous, because I've put more time into it. 

In practice it's hard to separate working my explicit beliefs out on a keyboard from my rhetorical presentation.  It's just that working out the genuine beliefs takes precedence for me over rhetorical considerations.

* * * *

Our assumptions cause weak arguments and many disagreements. Intellectual honesty, however, demands we acknowledge that we can’t get off the ground without making assumptions.

Too many people don't get this. They treat assumptions - even conclusions - as facts.  The real question is, which assumptions does the evidence best support? Which assumptions about the evidence does other evidence best support?

The question is not: How do I remain consistent?

The question is not: How does this sound?

The question is not: How do I defend this position?

     I schematize ideal reasoning as a movement from perceived evidence ---> via perceived implications  ----> to a conclusion/judgment.  The rest of the thousands of other considerations that an in depth look at rigorous reasoning will reveal only buttress, question, qualify, or otherwise elaborate points along this progression.   Any inquiry genuinely aimed at uncovering knowledge has the overall shape of a movement from evidence to judgments about the implications of that evidence. You look, listen, sense, then you decide on the significance of what you've perceived.

    Yet students of writing, rhetoric and argument are taught to craft a strong thesis first and foremost.  The claim comes first.  Their job, they're told, is to justify that judgment with evidence. 

  Schools have been teaching this way for decades. (For centuries? For the millennia since Aristotle?). Now everyone on earth goes around making bald assertions and then defending them.  Just look at the Internet or the Congress.  I do the same thing. I'm doing it now.

 Is it any wonder the world is so screwed up?

    I'm not saying this is all bad.  Following an up-front assertion with evidence exemplifies one rhetorical approach to conveying your personal Truth.  Monotony bores, so constantly laying out the evidence, followed by its implications, followed by a judgment, would make for boring writing.

 

Writers may present the findings of their reasoning in a variety of ways.  And they may reason as they see fit. In fact the possibilities are endless.

But why are they reasoning? To convince, as I'm doing now? Or to inquire and learn, as students should spend most of their time doing?

Writing doesn't just help us to persuade. Writing helps us to learn, by articulating our thinking and getting it out there as an object. Once it's an object, we can look at our thinking from some distance. We can manipulate it to our liking.

By writing, we can find out what we think.

* * * *

     Unfortunately, by the nature of our brains evidence usually must first pass the gatekeeper of our existing beliefs before we even notice it, let alone accept it.  That shouldn't stop us from trying to keep an open gate, so we can follow where the facts lead us. Argument, fundamentally, is not about justifying judgments. It's about reaching judgments.  An argument is a line of reasoning.

In the real world our reasoning jumps around.  Our trains of thought visit and revisit all sorts of stops on the tracks of argument.  But on our vacation journey to the sunny paradise of justified conclusions, we should start from the evidence station. And we should return to that station often.

 

Unreal:  Prison Healthcare

          The courts have ruled that the 8th amendment guarantees those incarcerated for committing crimes access to adequate health care. In fact, many prisoners lack this access. This means that prisoners who should be paying their way in prison are prevented by illness from working. Prisoners with untreated mental illnesses and addictions endanger the communities they return to, their families, and corrections officers.

          Chronic illnesses worsen when left untreated. But the cost of healthcare both in and out of prison threatens taxpayers. To fix prison healthcare we need to explore the effects of current policies on all involved.

The Prison Healthcare Context

Rehabilitation or Recidivism

          According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics over 95% of those incarcerated in the U.S. will eventually be released into their communities. In fact annual releases now outnumber admissions.  Thus it is in our interests to rehabilitate those who commit crimes.

          According to Columbia University 85% of prisoners have substance abuse issues. For many, their addictions led to their crimes in the first place. Untreated, these addicts don’t wait until they’re released from prison to return to drugs and crime; illegal substances are usually available inside. Thus many addicts continue abusing substances and committing crimes both inside and outside of prison walls as if they’d never been arrested. Prisons are becoming unmanageable for corrections officers, while society outside prison walls remains unsafe.

          About half of those incarcerated show symptoms of serious mental illness (National Institute of Mental Health). Most mentally ill prisoners don’t receive adequate psychiatric treatment . What’s more, the prison environment can worsen psychiatric symptoms. Untreated mental illness, like addiction, increases the likelihood of recidivism.

          When left untreated, both mental illnesses and addictions create a cycle of dysfunction in which children of prisoners grow up with addictions and mental illnesses, then turn to crime themselves.

          In short, society is punishing lawbreaking in a way that creates more lawbreaking.  Why should prisoners, corrections officers, families and society all suffer from the effects of treatable illnesses?

Dollars and Sense

          Aside from drugs and mental illnesses, over one third of U.S. prisoners suffer from some chronic disease or infection (Society of Correctional Physicians). Because chronic illnesses worsen without treatment, and are often only treated once prisoners get released, these illnesses end up costing society more than they would have were they treated in prison.

          Meanwhile, health care is consuming an increasing share of corrections budgets. Reasons for this include:

          • The aging prison population
          • Communicable diseases in the close confines of prisons
          • The prevalence of substance abuse and mental illness among prisoners
          • Challenges inherent in delivering healthcare to prisons, such as distance from
             hospitals

          Enrolling prisoners in health care plans, and ensuring more oversight and accountability could help lower costs. Releasing those too sick to pose a danger to society could also ease the financial burden. Telemedicine could lower costs. Allowing more volunteers, such as those from Narcotics Anonymous, into prisons to offer counseling would provide more care at a low cost.

          What else can be done to provide effective, low cost health care to prisoners? Don’t prisoners have this right? What can the stories of stakeholders teach us? How can we collaborate to solve this problem?

Unreal: “Reality” Shows

          It would seem to take a world of cojones to characterize as “Reality” a show in which pretentious people, paid for their performance, put in contrived situations, create drama for the camera. Actually it takes a world of self delusion and con games. Such is the reality of “reality shows.”

          Recreation, entertainment and play time by definition need not be limited to the real, the useful, the serious. So I see nothing wrong with watching such shows. But don't let the marketers kid you; actors by definition are professional phonies. These aren't documentaries, these are scripted dramas.

          Drama involves artificial conflict. This is true whether your spouse creates a public scene at your favorite restaurant over and extra fifty cents on the tip, or someone on Duck Dynasty, taking a jab at common decency, claims to base intolerance on “religious” beliefs.

          The word “religion” comes from the Latin, signifying “Unite again.” Unite with what? Unite with the Divine, with your neighbors, with all of existence. If anyone can point to any traditional world religion whose basic tenets don't include a call for spiritual connection – for love and compassion - please let me know.

          I've pointed out in previous posts that scientifically and spiritually we aren't really separate beings in the first place – in reality. All religion asks of us is to recognize reality and act accordingly.

          Actors like everyone else have every right – every legal right – to express their opinions. Entertainment companies have every right – every legal right - to broadcast these opinions. The public has every legal and moral right to ignore or follow, criticize or praise them. No one involved loses their status as Divine beings no matter their decisions.

          It's just that some of us aren't acting like the Divine beings we really are.

          Being nonjudgmental about dissenters from our personal truth doesn't come naturally to any of us. Loving our neighbors - or at least acting with common decency - takes hard work. We all need breaks. Winding down by escaping into idealized, funny, dramatic, adventurous, scripted – that is imaginary - worlds needs no justification.

          Calling such fantasy “reality,” on the other hand, doesn't justify substituting pretension for integrity. Calling these actors “down home, religious, and grounded” because they speak their “truth” and a lot of other phonies agree with them doesn't justify intolerance. It all justifies an apology.

          Entertainment, yes. Reality, no.