Criminological Theory

Assessing Philosophical Assumptions

Anthony Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317523086
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Law

Criminologists can benefit from questioning the underlying assumptions upon which they rest their work. Philosophy has the ability to clarify our thoughts, inform us of why we think about things the way we do, solve contradictions in our thinking we never knew existed, and even dissolve some dichotomies we thought were cast in stone. One of those dichotomies is free will vs. determinism. Criminology must reckon with both free will and agency, as posited by some theories, and determinism, as posited by others—including the ever more influential fields of genetics and biosocial criminology. Criminological Theory: Assessing Philosophical Assumptions examines philosophical concepts such as these in the context of important criminological theories or issues that are foundational but not generally considered in the literature on this topic. The uniqueness of this treatment of criminological theory is that rather than reporting what this person or that has said about a particular theory, Walsh exposes the philosophical assumptions underlying the theory. Students and scholars learn to clarify their own biases and better analyze the implications of a broad range of theories of crime and justice.

1
The Usefulness of Philosophy in Criminology

Why Criminology Needs Philosophy

Philosophy is the mother of all science—indeed, of all formal knowledge. Because the subject matter she claims for herself is the whole of knowledge, she fusses around at the periphery of all the sciences, as well as that of the arts and humanities. Philosophers retain a child-like wonder about all things (after all, philosophy means “love of wisdom”), and they were pondering much the same kinds of questions that modern sciences ask long before they were parceled out to different disciplines. They contemplated these questions relying only on their rational faculties and on an occasional observation unaided by any of the marvelous accoutrements with which modern science is blessed. Although philosophy’s domain is shrinking as the sciences advance, it still has a valuable role to play in knowledge synthesis and holding before us the continuity of thought bequeathed to us by the great minds of the past. Philosophy thus continues to monitor her offspring in childhood and adolescence, making sure that in their haste to grow up they do not lose contact with the foundational principles of knowledge seeking all her children share. Whether the practitioners of the various sciences know it or not, there cannot be a philosophy-free science.

Presumably, most criminologists have no great wish to go beyond the data they produce to struggle to understand and define fundamental principles of the “whole” within which their work is organized and situated. It is easy to agree with Williams and Arrigo’s (2006:15) complaint that “criminology proper has mostly failed to contemplate let alone critically examine its conceptual underpinnings, that is, the philosophical cornerstones that support its purpose and potential.” We do, however, have unlabeled suppositions of which we are only dimly aware that serve as our “silent partners” as we go about our business. It is these silent partners I wish to bring out of the closet and give voice.

Criminologists’ works are judged by the explanatory power of their findings and the clarity of their presentations applied to specific problems. The philosopher’s work is judged by his or her persuasive use of logic and language in articulating the whole within which these specific problems reside. Criminologists may rest content, for example, by showing that such and such an approach to punishing offenders “works” better than some alternative approach in terms of the goals they have in mind, or with arguing whether this or that practice is consistent with justice as they view it. The philosopher’s motives are much more grandiose and abstract, and they direct our attention to the “first principles” of knowledge. The philosopher asks why we punish, what is the basis for it, how we justify it, what would society be without it, what is its relationship to justice, where justice comes from, and what it means to act justly, as well as numerous other fascinating and perplexing questions of interest to criminologists and criminal justicians.

Philosophy and Physics

Thinking of ourselves as empirical scientists concerned with collecting and analyzing data rather than armchair speculators, we might be tempted to think philosophy a waste of time with nothing to offer us. If we do, we are terribly mistaken. Our discipline is still in the toddler stage relative to our more mature siblings in the natural sciences (all of which have journals devoted to the philosophy of their subjects), and we can still learn a lot hanging on to our mother’s apron strings. Many of the finest minds in physics, the grand epitome of science, such as Ernst Mach, Niels Bohr, and Erwin Schrodinger, were steeped in philosophy. As for Albert Einstein, arguably the greatest scientist of them all, Howard (2005:34) writes: “Einstein’s philosophical habit of mind, cultivated by undergraduate training and lifelong dialogue, had a profound effect on the way he did physics.” Einstein’s philosophical interests went beyond the philosophy of physics; one often detects references to the works of Kant, Hume, Spinoza, and Schopenhauer in his writings (Howard, 2005). Einstein believed that all scientists should cultivate a philosophical frame of mind or rest content to be dustbowl outhouse counters unable to see the forest for the trees: “So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest.” He further added that philosophical insight is “the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth,” and that philosophy is most needed when the intellectual foundations of a discipline have become problematic (in Howard, 2005:34).

Not far behind Einstein in the hierarchy of great minds is Niels Bohr, of whom Galison (2008:122) writes: “Historians of physics have made much of the way Niels Bohr used the ideas, directly and indirectly, of Søren Kierkegaard as he formulated his principle of complementarity.” Werner Heisenberg, a pioneer in quantum physics, lectured extensively on Immanuel Kant’s ontology and epistemology, especially in terms of interpreting quantum phenomena (Camilleri, 2005), and Kurt Godel, arguably the greatest mathematical logician of the twentieth century, was deeply devoted to philosophy, especially the works of Leibniz, Kant, and Husserl (Parsons, 2010). If philosophy was valued as an adjunctive study for the likes of Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Godel, and is recommended when the foundations of a discipline are shaky, surely it is not wise for criminologists to ignore their mother.

British philosopher of mathematics and Nobel Laureate Bertrand Russell (1988:18) wrote of the value of philosophy thus: “The knowledge it aims at is the kind of knowledge which gives unity and system to the body of the sciences, and the kind which results from a critical examination of our convictions, prejudices, and beliefs.” Philosophy concerns itself with examining the assumptions, methods, and ethics that apply to particular sciences and to the “grand problems” central to all sciences, such as the nature of truth and reality. It is an analytic enterprise based on deductive logic rather than a synthetic enterprise based on inductive empiricism as is science. As is the case with any other domain of inquiry, the philosophy of criminology seeks to lay bare the practices and assumptions underlying the inquiries the discipline makes, and it offers critiques with the ultimate aim of enhancing the discipline’s ability to improve its understanding of the phenomena it claims as its domain. Philosophy asks criminologists to contemplate on the abstractions and concepts they work with, which are usually, consciously or otherwise, taken for granted.

Philosophers have not found the problems of crime and criminality to be worth spending very much of their intellectual energy on. However, they have expended much on pondering issues connected with the concerns of criminologists, particularly on the ontological and epistemological assumptions on which our discipline rests. These issues include human nature, justice, free will, moral responsibility, rationality, emotion, punishment, the nature of reality and knowledge, determinism, essentialism, realism, reductionism, and nominalism. It is for this reason that “criminology is fundamentally wedded to philosophy in countless ways, and the crossroads for criminology and philosophy are ripe for exposition and assimilation by scholars in both camps” (Williams & Arrigo, 2006:2). The same point about exposition and assimilation was made to physicists by both Einstein and Heisenberg in earlier times (Camilleri, 2005), so Williams and Arrigo are in excellent scientific company.

Although it is often said that there is nothing new under the sun, it is obviously not true in many areas of science where knowledge is increasing exponentially about what we did not even know we did not know. It is probably true, however, that there is very little that is new in the fundamental understanding of human nature that cannot be found in the works of long-dead philosophers. Humans have contemplated what it is to be human and how they are to behave toward one another from time immemorial. Even those things revealed to us by the remarkable advances in the genomic and neurological sciences have tended to corroborate what one line or another of philosophical thinking has long asserted. I will thus introduce topics of interest to criminology (and criminal justice) in this book with reference to some philosophical tradition to emphasize the continuity of thought from the philosophical past to the scientific present.

Many topics in criminology engage seemingly dichotomous either/or positions. One of the aims of this book is to try to bridge some of these dichotomies. Aristotle’s principle of the golden mean, by which he meant that virtue lies at the midpoint between the polar vices of excess and deficiency, is something always to be kept in mind when assessing seemingly irreconcilable philosophical positions. There is no universal mean applicable to all positions, of course, only to reasonable positions for which there are often compelling arguments on either side. The most extreme positions defy any sort of compromise, so it is wise to leave them alone. With this in mind, we begin with a metaphysical question for which science offers no real support for strong versions on either side but for which there are compelling argument on both sides: the perennial issue of free will versus determinism.

Free Will and Determinism

Both the free will and determinism positions are embraced or disdained by different groups of scholars across the social sciences. This philosophical issue does not necessarily disturb natural scientists qua scientists, but because the theories and practices of social science disciplines tend to be predicated (wittingly or not) on one side of the debate or the other, it is an important issue for us to explore. Social scientists as a group seem to think in terms of extreme positions on free will and determinism, as exemplified by behaviorists such as B. F. Skinner, who insisted that we do not have free will but keep pretending that we do, and existentialists such as J. P. Sartre, who insisted that we do have free will but keep pretending that we do not. The positions on the issue supported by these two men were extreme versions that brook no compromise. Thus, we often feel that we are confronted with a Manichean choice on this issue: Either our behavior is completely determined or (in Sartre’s words) we are “condemned to be free.” Here we search for Aristotle’s golden mean.

The classical eighteenth-century founding fathers of criminology and criminal justice, such as Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham, were certainly a lot closer to Sartre than to Skinner. For classical thinkers, a God-given free will enabled humans to purposely and deliberately calculate a course of action that they were free to follow absent external restraints. Given the classical assumption that we are free to choose how we will behave and that we know the difference between right and wrong, if we choose to engage in illegal activities, society has a perfectly legitimate right to punish us. The act of holding criminals responsible for their actions both deters an unknown number of potential wrongdoers and affirms the humanity of offenders by treating them as free agents rather than mindless automatons blown hither and thither by capricious circumstances and events external to them. The assumption of a rational free-willed individual that emerged during the Enlightenment is the assumption that underlies all modern legal systems.

The nineteenth-century founding fathers of our disciplines, such as Cesare Lombroso and Raffaele Garofalo, were children of positivism, a philosophy pioneered by Auguste Comte that maintains that authentic knowledge comes only from sense experience that is subject to “positive” verification. This was the great age of science, and science was (and is) deterministic. Even though there was a great enthusiasm for science in general during the nineteenth century, there were enemies of determinism as it is commonly understood by scientists. The modern counterparts of these folks may call themselves by names such as postmodernists, humanists, existentialists, radical feminists, and social constructionists. This coterie of intellectuals values creativity and spontaneity, and tends to view science with all its rules and methods as a numbing rationality lacking in emotional quality. Saint-Amand (1997:96) describes the anti-science writings of these scholars as “a refutation, as well the negation, of the heritage of the Enlightenment.” Modern anti-science individuals are heirs to the fears of science that such champions of Romanticism as Wordsworth and Shelly railed against in the early nineteenth century. The Romantics believed that the idea of determinism detracts from human freedom and dignity, and they tended to equate the determinism of Newton’s age with universal determinism, a view usually associated with eighteenth-century French mathematician and astronomer Pierre Laplace, who wrote:

An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. The perfection that the human mind has been able to give to astronomy affords but a feeble outline of such an intelligence.

(in Bishop, 2006:2)

These two sentences look a lot like fatalism, or perhaps Calvinistic predestination, because only an almighty God could possess such an intellect. But Laplace was well aware of this and posed this hypothetical as true in principle but impossible in practice. He posed this impossible scenario precisely to propose how science should proceed in the absence of perfect knowledge about all possible influences on a phenomenon of interest. He wanted to contrast the concepts of certainty and probability to introduce his statistical physics (Bishop, 2006). Yet some enemies of determinism claim that Laplace’s purposely constructed absolutely deterministic straw man is the kind of determinism that scientists actually embrace (Saint-Amand, 1997).

When scientists speak of determinism, they usually mean causal determinism, which simply means that every event stands in some causal relationship to other antecedent events. Determinism is a position relating to how the world is said to operate and is a position held by all scientists; what would it be for a scientist not to be a determinist? Scientific determinism does not state that X will lead to Y absolutely and unerringly; rather, it says that given the presence of X, there is a certain probability that Y will occur, which was exactly Laplace’s conception of statistical determinism. Surely we are all determinists in this sense. There are certainly unique events and random happenings, thus we cannot always speak of statistical regularities, although even unique events and random happenings have causes. The world is not all chaos and randomness; it has a great degree of predictability about it, and the more science discovers about it, the more predictable it becomes.

On the other hand, when it comes to investigating any kind of human behavior, our most inclusive models do not come near to explaining even one-half of the variance. This is true even in many of the recent models that include genetic as well as a slew of personality and demographic predictor variables. We can continue to blame this on misspecified models and/or inadequate measuring instruments, but I am more inclined to opt for locating the “missing” variance in human agency and pure chance. Although I am more allied with Sartre than Skinner on this question, Sartre’s radical freedom does not cut it. Rather, Karl Marx got it right when he asserted that humans make their own history, but they make it from a cloth they did not weave themselves. Left realist Steven Box (1987:29) puts this in more modern context in asserting that people choose to act criminally, and “their choice makes them responsible, but the conditions make the choice comprehensible.”

Atoms and the Origin of the Controversy

According to Pamela Huby (1967), the Greek philosopher Epicurus was the originator of the free will/determinism controversy. Epicurus took the free will position based on Democritus’ atomic theory within which the “swerve” of an atom can occur without cause. Roman philosopher Lucretius developed his theory of free will based on the same idea, and he wrote, “The atoms do not move in straight or uniform lines; there is in their motion an incalculable declination or deviation, an elemental spontaneity that runs through all things and culminates in man’s free will” (in Durant, 1944:150–151). The modern version of this argument is based on Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty (unpredictability), which is said to destroy determinism and affirm the unfettered freedom of the will (Schuster, 2009). But would you want the kind of freedom in which no one can probabilistically predict your behavior? The random, unstructured firing of neurons is one of the defining features of schizophrenia, and being in that unfortunate condition is not my idea of freedom. Max Weber wrote of the kind of freedom championed by Lucretius as the “privilege of the insane” (in Eliaeson, 2002:35). If free will means action without a cause, all actions would be unpredictable and chaos would reign.

Writing of the uncertainty principle and the way it has been misused to affirm a sort of “new age” free will, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman says that the prediction of an emission of a photon from an atom is probabilistic but still deterministic, and that “this has given rise to all kinds of nonsense and questions of freedom of will, and the idea that the world is uncertain” (in Corredoira, 2009:450). The indeterminacy of quantum phenomena is not in the system itself but exists “only when the measurement is carried out” (Corredoira, 2009:450). There are no “uncaused causes” miraculously free of nature, and we do not live in an “Alice in Wonderland” world.

Determinism is the operating assumption of criminological theories usually defined as positivist, such as social learning theory or strain theory. Free will—or human agency—is the operating assumption of such theories as rational choice theory and age-graded life course theory. These latter theories are not radically free-willed in the sense that they disavow behavioral causation. Their free will is more akin to the compatibilist free will of philosophy, a position that insists that free will and determinism can peacefully coexist. What is meant by agency or free will is that people are free to do what they want unless constrained by external circumstances. In affirming this position, compatibilists are in complete agreement with Schopenhauer’s position that “you are free to do what you want, but you are not free to want what you want” (in Clark, 2007:96). In other words, we are free to wish for that which is compatible with our nature, a nature that is the product of a configuration of our genes and developmental history. We are not free, however, to choose wishes or wants that run contrary to our nature—that is, wants that would disgust, harm, or terrorize us. A weak, introverted, and fearful man, for instance, may wish for a nice, quiet, and safe career in accounting or computer science but never for a career in the police or the marines. Even if the choice is between ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Online Resources
• 1. The Usefulness of Philosophy in Criminology
• 2. Social Constructionism Versus Science in Criminology
• 3. Relativism, Rationalism, Empiricism, and Paradigm Shifts
• 4. Essentialism and Reductionism
• 5. What Is Real and How Do We Know?
• 6. Materialism and Idealism
• 7. Conflict and Cooperation: Alienation and Equality
• 8. Rationality and Emotion
• 9. Right and Wrong Conscience
• 10. The Science Wars and Ideology in Criminology
• 11. Ideology and Causation
• 12. The Philosophy and Science of Human Nature
• 13. Feminist Criminology and Contending Metaphysics
• 14. Origins of the Intuition of Justice
• 15. Punishment
• References
• Index