Editorial
By Thomas Albert Gilly
It has long been assumed the “call for the return of values” continually
echoes around criminology, criminal justice and the whole gamut of penal
politics and social control issues.
Although the trend is clearly recognized, the “call for the return of
values” remains a highly controversial issue. Attention to this public debate has
prompted a great number of contradictory interpretations. The expected or real
impact of values ipon criminology, criminal justice and penal politics also
lacks consensus.
The central question remains: Is the value talk in the criminological
and criminal justice enterprise more than a fad despite the semantically
sophisticated “moral rhetoric”of conservatism which itself is suspicious due to
the simplistic, archaic and religiously rooted black and white, good and bad
world division view? Is it more than the threat against reason and
Enlightenment?
The commitment to that debate is clearly demonstrated by our journal.
The
papers in this journal issue bring ethics to the fore of the criminological and
criminal justice debate.
In regards to the content of the debate, crime and social
prevention’s focal center is shifted from the external level to the internal
level. This shifting prompts the substitution of moral consciousness as a means
for prevention of traditional schemes that live on the development and
implementation of measures that are
issued and achieved by means of law, science and / or policy-making. The topic
that comes rapidly to the fore of the debate is that the best
prevention consists in installing a “moral policeman” in the human mind, this
superego or conscience.
In regards to the conduct of the discussion , the paper, lacking
premature conclusions, demonstrates a strong committment to engagement in an
open discussion about its core-proposals. This is particularly the case for
those core-proposals that hold for the essay‘s originality.
The first one is developed against the background of the
following idea:
Crime
prevention comes into existance through lack of social prevention. The problem raises
the question of what do we understand by social prevention? Obviously the
traditional and current understanding of social prevention does not fit
within the moral policeman that works in
the office of human consciousness on which points Vecerka..
Is the moral police something that appears in addition to
the legal, criminological or policey- making? Is it to be understood as a
complementary setting? Or should the
former be substituted FOR the lattter, and if so under which conditions?
How can the
instllation of this moral policeman be successfully
issued? And if so, to what extent does the moral policemen impact self-control?
Traditional means of crime and social preventions are,
according to the author, completely inappropriate in times of moral crisis.
Does this mean that the former becomes secondary or even irrelevant in times of
moral sanity and ethical security? Or is it instead that the traditional means
of crime and social prevention work only in moral healthy times and societies?
This said, Vacerka“s call for the return of values does
not comes as a surprise.
The second core-proposal
calls for the return of traditional values. Among the values that are
discussed in the essay, authority is
very important. But it is also a critical point
that the re-buiding of authority (in the traditional sense of the term) implies
that it might be possible to restore vertical structered authority relationships.
Is such a project not contradicted by the inherent rationale of of the global communicative society and its
effect upon the organization of social life? The fact is that our global
communication society tends to supplant vertically and hierarchically
structured authority by that which is
rooted in the communication rationale committed to building authority by means
of consensus.
These traditional values which Kazimir Vecerka has in mind are foremost and
genuinely those that belong to the Judeo-Christian tradition.
This is the third of the three core-proposals on which embodies
the originality of the essay. The contextualization of traditional values (here
the Judeo-Christian environment) prompts several fundamental questions that are
worthy of future discussion.
1)
Is the
Judeo-Christian tradition predisposed more than others towards the installation
of the moral policeman. Is it a better means of social control?
If so, why has that tradition – precisely
Christiantity, failed terribly in
preventing the holocaust? In this regard it is worth acknowledging that the
ethymologiocal origin of the term Judeo-Christianity
or Judeo-Christians“ witnesses that failure. Indeed, according to the Wikipedia
Encyclopedia, the term was first used in its
current meaning in 1938 and later during World War II as alternative to
Christianity and Christian tradition in light of the Nazi criminal enterprise
against Jews and Judaism[i]
Is
this question irrelevant? Is abuse or instrumentalization of Christian values to achieve goals that are
incompatible with Christiantity the reason for this terrific failure? If so, is
Christianity more than other (religious) value systems predisposed towards abuse
and misuse? Why? Or is it rather the inherent rationale of Christianity that
explains the failure?
Is the moral policeman who works in the mind of the
Christian and in accordance to Christiantity – is that Christian policeman per
se and without the help of a normative outworker of the mind capable of
providing an ethical system to society that is susceptible to produce norms
that impact social life in that they
prevent crime and deviance?
In the
debate about these complicated questions, several milestones should not be
moved aside.
(i)
Mercy is an issue which is common to the
the great monothoisms. But it could be that mercy is central to Christianity.
For reasons that are not discussed here,
it is possible to argue that mercy is more important to Christianity, but also
to Islam, than it is to Judaism. Suppose that it is.
Let me resume the problem that is involved in a
provocative manner:
Mercy
presupposes an act or behavior that does not conform to certain rules or even transgresses such rules, namely those which announce
an obligation to do or not to do this or that thing.To what degree is a
religion that lives basically on mercy capable of producing normative limits to
individual and collective social action? Does mercy positively impact that goal or is it an obstacle?
And closely connected to this first
problem comes the question:
(ii)
Is
the ChriStian policeman, who is genuinely and formost responsible in
consciousness and accountable to G’d and to G’d only sufficiently strong to
impact self-control and to prevent the Christian comunity (or the members of a
society which is rooted in the Christian tradition) from acting in this rather
than in that way? If so, is it strong enough to be relevant for moral
police-keeping of other religious
communities. Shall it be applied to such communities or shall it not?
What is involved here is the relevance of morals that are
located in the individual or collective consciousness to social problems and
their solution.
For the Christian philosopher and friend of Pope Paul VI Jean
Guitton such a relevance, after Hiroshima, has become frail: From now on, he
observes, metaphysics and morals can no longer be banished to and consigned by
private consciousness. They depend no longer on religion. They leave the secret
of consciousnes and oratory. They are rooted in experience, politics,
international problems and strategic conquests. An evidence takes the place of
faith: Death danger – the word impacts everything everywhere.
Suppose that Guitton is right. It follows that morals
have somewhat shifted from religion and the secret of private consciousness to
other less traditional settings and public life. It could be that the
late-modern global communication society goes hand in hand with the process
that supplants the traditional and generally specialized institutionnal
settings of socially relevant issues by outworking settings and frames. Morals
is not the only issue that is concerned. According to David Garland and Richard
Sparks, the same process applies to crime and criminal justice issues.
The comment, however, prompts some critical remarks:
During the last decades, religion and faith have become
increasingly relevant for all facets of social life and the public debate. For
reasons not discussed here, but pertain to the
global risk society related to the inherent risks in technological progress,
and the end of the clash of the modern ideological narrative, our late-modern
societies are actually living the renaissance of religion and faith. Religion’s
shift from the private secret sphere to the public debate does not hold for
religion’s „fin de siecle“. Rather it implicates that the public debate is no
longer what it has been, that the traditional levels of the engagement in the
public debate – the political, the normative and the rational level –
increasingly interact and involve ethics.
Within the global talk-show about global problems,
religion and philosophy have important things to say and what they say and discuss not only deals with
what citizens of the global society perceive as right or wrong, good and bad and
what people should believe to be right or wrong and good or bad. It is also
relevant to the nature – objective or subjective, absolute or relative – of
moral statements about major concerns and problems of our times, the
observation that such an ethical debate might help to set normative guides
while ethics or practical contexts are
set aside.
Questions such as: Do the citizens believe that marriage
betweEn homosexuals is wrong or right, shall they believe that it is right to
condemn to death people who have killed other people or it is rather that they
shall believe that it is wrong are central to the ethical part of the public
debate. Meta-ethical issues can not be eclipsed either: Is mass-murder or is
genocide objectively evil, or is it nothing but the phenomenological„truth
which is associated to subjectivity and relativity?
(iii)
Is interfaith the appropriate method to
install this collective moral police-maker.
If so, how is the
installation to be issued in lay and
secular society? Is there need to provide for legal settings that are aimed to
render obligatory courses of religion in public schools? To what degreE does such
a project require the re-conceptuializaton of laity? In regards to the
installation of such a moral policeman, what
does the contribution of reliogious communities consist of?
Churches and public government, how shall it work? Is the communitarian model
of society involved,? If so, to which extent?
2) Suppose that our late-modern societies
live in times of moral crisis.
Suppose,
furthermore, that people engage in a debatE about the historical roots of that
value crisis. Kazimir Vecerka advances the hypothesis that the
Judaeo-Christian European tradition, which gave substantial moral codification
to human relations in past centuries, has gradually (particularly following the
Second World War) dwindled away.
Obviously there is some truth in the observation
that the tradition has dwindled away after World War II. The value eclipse can
hardly be thought considering what happened to authority after World War II.
.The collective experience of totalitarian states
and the disastrous and catastrophic consequences of totalitarian politics and,
of course, the War itself prompted, in the aftermath of World War II and during
the whole post-war period, the gradual rejection of traditional moral authority.
Such a rejection has been issued in two opposite directions: As a support for
the political and economic system of the former Soviet Union with the
categorical rejection of Judeo-Christian morals authority by means of
historical materialism, on the one side, and, in the western world, as the
liberalization and democratization of morals with the de-legitimization of
precisely authority structures and settings previously relevant to the
respect-achievement of “ non liberal, anti-democratic and authoritarian
morals”.
In regards to future discussion, this issue
constitutes to the second milestone of Vecerkas’s essay.
3) Is there need
to re-think the decline of the Judeo-Christian morals?
Vecerka’s message is clear: The experience of
World War II has prompted the decline of Judeo-Christian morals. Does this mean
that the decline is the result of the war? If so, isn’t it possible to argue
that the value eclipse, instead of being the result of the war, has reached its
peak with the war? And if so, what is the historical origin of the value
decline?
Or is it that both hypotheses – decline of the occidental moral tradition
as a result of the catastrophe or the catastrophe as the culmination of the
decline – are irrelevant? Irrelevant in which regards?
In regards to the catastrophe of the war, Could it not be that war, per
definition, is the no man’s land of values? That war demonstrates exactly that
capitulation of morals as means of human beings natural domestication which is
central to Freud’s “Big disillusion”.
In regards to the unique crime in
the history of humanity – the genocide of the Jewish people, Could it not be
that the unique nature of the crime holds among others the impossibility to
think and to discuss humanity’s catastrophe against the background of
traditional values? After all, the monstrosity is the fact of human being. And
one might argue that the moral lesson of Auschwitz consists in teaching for all
times and everywhere that the human being who is capable of moral judgment is
capable of monstrous acts. This does not mean that that unique staging of
monstrosity is not to be considered as evil. From the viewpoint of normative
ethics, it is evil, objectively and in all eternity in meta-ethical regards.
This is obviously another important aspect of the unique nature of the crime.
The creation of the special legal category of crime against humanity is supportive.
Rather it means that the monstrous nature of the crime escapes from was perceived as evil and good and that the
question of the morally good or bad human being as well as moral motivation
does not impact the fact of human beings monstrosity.
It could be that the degree of monstrosity comes up to anti-Semitism’s
eternity, in which case the Holocaust is the unique event by which the
a-historical nature of the whole gamut of myths (e.g the “ritual murder”, the
“Jewish international complot”, the “Zion Declaration”;;) which feeds the
well-fad and ever hungry anti-Semitism has been historically and for all
eternity staged. Anti-Semitism is as old as human being and it is old as good
and evil and as old as the whole moral tradition. At the great amazement of
humanity, anti-Semitism is an issue that has been always paralleled by
otherwise well working moral codes. That’s the scandal, and it is revolting
enough to be discussed in the debate about the origins, the highlights and eclipses
of moral tradition and codification.
Is the gradual decline of the Judeo-Christian tradition to be considered
against the background of secularization? According to Kazimir Vacerka it is.
The fact is that the process of secularization, which is at the heart of
modernity, goes hand in hand with the dissolution of absolute, transcendental
values that belong to a supra-legal order in contingent morals and values.
Moral relativism can not be considered independently from the contingency of
values. Secularization implicates that value achievement is issued by and in
society, by virtue of norms. How is it possible to install a moral policeman
that is collectively relevant in a culture which is based upon the contingency
of values and prompts moral relativism? At first glance, moral relativism does
not favour the installation of a policeman that is aimed to prevent crime,
deviance and anti-social or unsocial behaviour. And yet the contingency of
morals has reached its highest peak with legal positivism which subscribes to
the dissolution of values into legal norms. In regards to the preventive
function of the penal law, contingent justice does not preclude crime
prevention.
Crime prevention by means of legal norms is an inherent part of the
traditional gamut of crime prevention schemes. It follows that Kazimir
Vercerka’s observation noting the completely inappropriate character of crime
and social prevention measures as it logically applies to the legal setting of
crime prevention.
And the question that is central to this issue is whether and to what
degree the prevention of crime, deviance anti and un social behaviour, by means
of moral codification, is compatible with modern political and legal culture.
This question,as all the other questions and problems, are central to the
debate that has been introduced by Vercerka’s essay.
With the creation of the new “ERCES FORUM” we demonstrate our commitment
to providing continuity and development to that debate.
.
Apropos “debate” – the public debate about major problems of our times
is itself a matter of debate. To explain this two major reasons are to be
considered: First, the public debate is per definition a debate in which all
actors of the social life participate. This assumes that laymen and experts are
involved in the discussion about major problems of our times. As far as the
public debate is aimed to identify social facts as major social problems and to
elaborate means to problem solution, it is never as rational as the scientific
debate and the production of knowledge by scientific and academic institutions.
Secondly it is a fact that issues such as law-making, political decision making
etc, which come traditionally under the competence of the law-maker and the
government, came rapidly and during the last decades increasingly to the fore
of the public debate. As a result, governments, political decision-makers as
well as the law-makers feel increasingly accountable to the public about what
they do, have done and are going to do.
The problem that is involved in either of both can be outlined as
following;
The late-modern global communication society has prompted the process
that gradually supplants both the scientific rationale and the inherent and
genuinely normative rationale of democracy by the communicative and cognitive
rationale.
Does the latter impact the former and if so, to what degree? Is it
desirable? Admissible or not admissible – is it compatible with democracy? And
could it be that the quality of that impact varies as a function of the
communicative rationale’s rationality?
In “Crime Talk and Discourse
Ethics” I discuss these questions against the background of the security
debate. Why? Because the security debate, in many regards constitutes the best
demonstration for “crime talk’s” paradigmatic use and significance. Secondly
the security debate constitutes “crim talk’s” best incarnation: People who talk
about crime do this in a rational or irrational, in a subjective or objective,
in a legal or extralegal – in an ideological and event moral manner. And all
these aspects live together in the security debate.
Suppose that the public security debate is capable of establishing and
defining norms that are relevant to security. The issue raises the problem of
the normative competence of a public outworker of the law. Suppose furthermore
that such a normative competence is capable of rational foundation. Consider
that “Discourse Ethics” constitutes the framework of that rational foundation.
In modern democracy, the normative and ethical limits of the rationally
rooted normative competence of the public security outworker are outlined with the question:
When are rationally rooted and democratic and pluralistic norm settings
relevant for security ethics, which are central to democracy? And from when on
they damage the security of democracy and the security of democracy’s
fundamentals?
The challenge consists of the engagement in the debate about the limits of
the rational foundation of issues that are central to democracy and the need to
shift the communicative rationale from reason to values. In this regard, the
question of normative limits is highly relevant for the human rightS debate.
The question of the criminologist’s responsibility has received less
consideration than other issues. One might argue indeed that this question is a
very academic question that is, to a large degree, disconnected from the every
day work of the criminologist.
This observation introduces “The
Criminologist’s Responsibility” by Dr Miroslav Scheinost.
If criminology is committed to protecting society against crime, this is
valuable so that the criminologist who meets such a commitment by means of
research provides a useful service. Obviously it is possible to consider that
utilitarian rationale against the background of morals. The useful job is then
likely to be interpreted as a good job and the positive commitment applies to
the criminologist on the right side of the “barricade”.
The problem here involves the following question: What happens to the
usefulness of the commitment to the right side of Society’s barricade when that
society is a bad society – let’s say a “criminal” society - that constructs the
“barricade?” The usefulness of the criminologist’s commitment (to protect the
society against crime) is not necessarily affected, and this is because the
commitment to protect against crime might be and in general is defined with
reference to the legal definition of crime and because bad and /or criminal
societies do not only have their own crimes and criminal law.
This said, the utilitarian rationale is never affected under the
condition that the reference is legal positivism And yet the question of the
criminologist’s responsibility is always relevant since the criminologist might
ask if he / she is willing to take responsibility for the participation in the
protection of a totalitarian society. He / she might ask if his / her job is
always useful; S/he might question the concept of usefulness in regards to the question:
who profits from his work and commitment and shall the totalitarian society reap
the profit? He/ she might even engage in the debate that echoes around the
question: Does useful criminological work not presuppose and require a
democratic society?
Obviously such questions engage the criminologist’s individual moral
consciousness. Insofar is the question of his responsibility IS a case for
individual morals. External values come in addition and deontological
considerations are no less relevant for the engagement of the criminologist’s
responsibility. The question of criminological usefulness only in democratic
society can hardly be resolved without confrontation of external values /
value-systems and work environment insofar as they are internalized at the
mental level. It is hard to imagine that the agent who asks this question does it
without reference to external, though internalized, values.
As for the deontological component of the responsibility of the
criminologist – with regards to this specific question, just note that it is
always possible to argue that criminology, in a non democratic society is
useless since freedom of opinion and the liberty to conduct scientific research
is not permitted in totalitarian states.
Let us now consider the implication of morals upon the responsibility of
the criminologist.”
To meet his / her commitment, the criminologist undertakes research. He,
more than other social scientists, grapple with very private and sensible data which
may, predict criminal or deviant behaviour, namely in the field of
multi-recidivism and youth delinquency. Given the social mission of the
criminologist, these data are likely to be used in crime prevention programs possibly
considerd politically opportunistic. The question of the responsibility of the
criminologist, here again, is extremely tricky. When shall the criminologist
relinquish the commitment to evaluate data that might impact life courses and
that he/she has the professional obligation to evaluate?
This deontological dimension of the question of the criminologist’s
responsibility is associated with another: Given the social and political
relevance of the commitment, the dilemma consists of the requirement for an
explanatory, empirical –positivist crime discourse that is constantly
confronted with or even contradicted by the axiological rationale that is
intrinsic of the commitment’s social and political relevance. Can criminology
be considered as a science that is neutral with regards to values?
This question has been central to the 1970’ social sciences’ value
controversy”.
What is involved here is the epistemological side of the question of the
criminologist’s responsibility.
This said, the question of the responsibility of the criminologist
constitutes a very tricky case for ethics. Miroslav Scheinost, in his article,
discusses the whole gamut of ethical problems that are involved in that
question in an extremely clear, condensed and eloquent manner. In this regard,
this short and substantial contribution to the ethical debate about criminology
constitutes a master-piece.
The United States of America constitute the biggest and most powerful
democracy in the world. It is the homeland of the first declaration of human
rights, but it is also the country which has one of the highest crime rates and
the biggest prison population in the democratic world. And in the US, American
citizens seem to be predisposed more than others towards the use of weapons and
guns as an appropriate means to resolve conflicts. In the United States of
America, the gun market is more or less free access. It has long since been
assumed that free selling and killing culture is the fact of the very strong
lobby that covers that market and that industry. In fact it is a cultural
phenomenon that has a lot to do with the constitution of the United States of
America and with the conquest of the West and the history of the United States
of America.
Obviously, the massacre at the Virginia High Tech can be and has been
interpreted against that specific background.
This is not the purpose of Dr Peter Tarlow. In the “Virginia Tech Massacre”, the author draws an analogy between
campus and tourism security. In order to enforce campus security he spotlights
the relevance of tourism security’s concerns for law enforcement and campus
security departments.
[i] Though he first-known uses of the terms
"Judæo-Christian" and "Judaeo-Christianity", according to
the Oxford Dictionary, are 1899 and 1910 respectively, but both were discussing
the emergence of Christianity from Judaism.