The Clockwork Orange emphasizes the fundamental importance of moral choice. This was show en through the ultra-violence of Alex. After the movies release, copycat crimes were so rife in Britain, that Kubrick himself withdrew it from U.K. markets for over two decades. Kubrick fell victim for the usual moralistic condemnations for the way the film seemed to colorize Alex's rapacious taste for ultra-violence. This backlash was based on an incomplete understanding of the director's intentions.
I find A Clockwork Orange to be one of Stanley Kubrick's most life-affirming works. The final scene, where a chastened Prime Minister has an impressive sound system wheeled into Alex's hospital room, the chorale finale of the "Ode to Joy" booming in the background while Alex fantasizes about raping a young woman as a Victorian-era upper crust applauds in approval, is one of the most ambivalently exhilarating sequences in the history of cinema. Alex ends the film with with: "I was cured, all right!"
Alex was cured from was the effect of the Ludovico technique. His attempt to "snuff it" by jumping out a window had caused him sufficient trauma to the head. However, this trauma did not liberate him from the nightmarish conditioning process as most people who have seen the movie have interpreted. Alex was conditioned to to feel nausea whenever he was confronted by sex and violence. However, Alex, conditioned himself to tolerate the nausea using graphic sexually violent images to deter the nausea. He could then resume his old sadistic thoughts and condition himself to no longer become nauseated at the prospect of sex or violence, Alex was free to resume his old ways. In my view, Kubrick celebrates Alex's recovered freedom of choice here. No matter how monstrous Alex was, it was clear that the State attempted to rob Alex of his free will. After his suicide attempt, the state saw they had done wrong, that they revoked his free will by conditioning him to not have a choice.
Kubrick focused on this theme. In an interview with Stanly Kubrick in 1980 about the film, the question "how do you see your own film?" was asked. Kubrick replied that "The central idea of the film has to do with the question of free will". Do we lose our humanity if we are deprived of the choice between good and evil? Do we become, as the title suggests, A Clockwork Orange?" Kubrick answers "yes" to this question.
To reduce Alex to a collection of innate drives and claim that he did not have free will before the Ludovico treatment because his psychological makeup governed his behavior seems to miss the real point of the film. Alex, before the treatment was a free agent capable of moral choice and after the treatment, he was robed of making moral choices. In the novel, the chaplain asks Alex, as he considers whether to submit himself to the conditioning process, if it might not be better to choose evil willingly than to do good unwillingly. The answer to that question is that indeed it might.
At the end Kubrick has us identify with Alex not just as the embodiment of our repressed desires, but as an immensely dynamic force of life, albeit one put to evil ends. Kubrick stacks the deck early on by making Alex's victims as unsympathetic as possible (in chronological order, a sodden street bum, a gang about to rape someone, a rich bleeding heart liberal and his snooty wife, his own derelict droogs, and the bony old ptitsa with 100 cats), so we feel little for them when they are abused. In the end, we rejoice that Alex has recovered his will, though we expect him to return to his old, depraved ways, and this time as a protected member of the establishment.
It is comparatively easy to affirm human existence by depicting the triumph of good over evil. It is much more difficult to convincingly celebrate being in the world in the face of some of its greatest challenges. Tragedy, to my mind, is the most profound of theatrical genres precisely because of its ability to be life affirming despite the injustice of the fates of its protagonists. A Clockwork Orange celebrates human freedom, while showing some of its distasteful consequences. In A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick confronts us with the immoral monstrosity that is little Alex. For the Ode to Joy at the end tells us how to read the meaning of the sequence; it would be much worse for society to rob such an individual of the capacity to do evil than it is to be forced to continue to deal with the consequences of his choosing to do so.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
The Future of Man and Technology
I've been working on a paper for the last year and I'm hoping to succeed in publishing it this February. I can not post the entire paper, but here is the Abstract.
Abstract: Within the next forty years, humans will have the ability to create superhuman intelligence. After this accomplishment, the human era will end and be replaced by posthuman existence. The ethical issues concerning the future creation of superintelligent machines must be explored in order to rectify the possibility of any harmful ramifications these machines might have on humans once implemented. I will discuss some of the ethical issues in creating these superintelligent machines as well ways we could implement them in a manner in which their motivations and intellectual capacities accelerate human development without any negative or harmful consequences for human beings.
Abstract: Within the next forty years, humans will have the ability to create superhuman intelligence. After this accomplishment, the human era will end and be replaced by posthuman existence. The ethical issues concerning the future creation of superintelligent machines must be explored in order to rectify the possibility of any harmful ramifications these machines might have on humans once implemented. I will discuss some of the ethical issues in creating these superintelligent machines as well ways we could implement them in a manner in which their motivations and intellectual capacities accelerate human development without any negative or harmful consequences for human beings.
Retributive Justice
Can a system of punishment that takes the categorical imperative seriously really permit the death penalty?
Kant offers a pure statement of the retributive theory of punishment. The idea is that it is wrong to punish people for utilitarian reasons and therefore any sort of legal punishment must always be a response to guilt. If the only motive in punishing someone is to deter others, set an example or protect others or society in general, then the person who is punished is punished is punished wrongly. Thus punishment must always be in response to guilt. However, Kant goes deeper into this in so far as the guilty must be punished for justice and equality to be served. Equality is the principle that must be used in selecting a punishment. Kant uses a metaphor. He refers to the principle of equality as the one by which the pointer of the scale of justice is made to incline no more to one side than to the other.
One idea of Kant's theory on punishment is the familiar "an eye for an eye". Thus, the evil that a wrongdoer inflicts is the measure of how severely so/he should be punished. Kant's requirement is that the pain inflicted on the criminal should be equivalent to the pain inflicted on the victim. That is one part of the jus talionis -- the right of retaliation. Kant's second idea on punishment is found in the statement:
If you steal from another, you steal from yourself.
This statement infers that by stealing, criminals make property insecure in general. They act on a motive that, if it were universalized, would make their own property insecure and similarly, people who slander others make their own good names insecure in the sense that they operate from a maxim that, if it were made universal, would make it acceptable for anyone to slander anyone, themselves included.
The connection between this and the right of retaliation seems to be this: it shows that the wrong of stealing, for example, is the sort that the thief would suffer himself if his maxim were generalized. So the appropriate punishment for a robber should be that he is derived of his property. These two ideas link in a moral union between crime and punishment. What is less clear is how it leads to the conclusion that we must extract a punishment proportional to the crime. So again, if we don't punish the wrongdoer, something is out of balance; justice has not been served. When we come to the particular case of capital punishment, we see that Kant thinks it is both permissible and obligatory in the case of murder. The only thing that is proportional to the crime of killing another person is the execution of the murderer. Kant asserts that if a society were abut to dissolve itself, but it had murderers awaiting execution, "the last murder lying in prison ought to be executed" before the society dissolves itself. According to Kant, the two primary reason for this : "That everyone may realize the desert of his deeds". Kant goes further: "for otherwise they might all be regarded as participators in the murder as a public violation of justice."
But just exactly how far can the principle of retaliation go? If a murderer tortures his victim painfully before killing him, and if we take the jus talionis seriously, we would conclude that the murderer should be tortured before being executed. Torture is inhuman. Those who torture others are showing us their inhumanity. But if by doing as they do, even if its in retaliation, we sink to their immoral. We become morally polluted by the very evil that we respond to. Kant does touch slightly on this matter when we writes about the condemned person:
His death... must be kept free from all maltreatment that would make the humanity suffering in his person loathsome or abominable.
Kant is unclear here. The idea seems that even a person guilty of murder is to be treated with a certain sort of dignity, because even the murderer is still a person -- still an end in himself and therefore punishments that don't respect the humanity of the criminal are outside the pale of morality. They are not justice, they are pure, unadulterated revenge . Thus, it would be a mistake to confuse what Kant means by "retribution" with revenge. Revenge is a natural response, but so is stealing at times.We therefore must rise above our moral instincts. This rise is what makes it hard to be a virtuous person. And in the sphere of punishment, morality requires that we respect the humanity of the person we are punishing. In punishing a wrongdoer, we do respect their freedom: we take seriously the idea that she is responsible for what she did, and was free to do otherwise.So punishing a wrongdoer amounts to respecting his or her "rational will".
So on one hand, punishing a person may be a way of respecting his or her humanity. On the other hand, some forms of punishment violate the humanity of the person being punished, and in the process debase us. It is mostly universally accepted that punishing a torturer by torture is not an acceptable form of punishment. A wrongdoer who is tortured is a person who has, at least for the time being, had their humanity expunged. However, an opponent of capital punishment could ask: Isn't murder like torture in this respect? Doesn't a murderer rob his victim entirely of their humanity and by punishing a murder, we in return are robing him of his humanity? A counter response question could be, well if we execute murderers, might this not be one of those very cases, like torture, in which the jus talionis goes too far? Suppose a super inhumane criminal left his victims alive, but performed inhuman experiments on them that destroyed their mental capacities, leaving them catatonic state. Here, Kant would insist that it would not be appropriate to punish the wrongdoer by subjecting him to the same procedure. The fact that the criminal did not respect the humanity of his victims does not entitle us to rob him of his humanity. But if this is so, then one particular question arises: how could capital punishment be justified? When the state kills a murderer, the state take it upon itself to extract his humanity from him in the most final way. So in return, we must ask: can a system of punishment that takes the categorical imperative seriously really permit the death penalty? If torture and inhuman experiments are not acceptable forms of punishment, why is it that execution is an acceptable form of punishment?
Kant offers a pure statement of the retributive theory of punishment. The idea is that it is wrong to punish people for utilitarian reasons and therefore any sort of legal punishment must always be a response to guilt. If the only motive in punishing someone is to deter others, set an example or protect others or society in general, then the person who is punished is punished is punished wrongly. Thus punishment must always be in response to guilt. However, Kant goes deeper into this in so far as the guilty must be punished for justice and equality to be served. Equality is the principle that must be used in selecting a punishment. Kant uses a metaphor. He refers to the principle of equality as the one by which the pointer of the scale of justice is made to incline no more to one side than to the other.
One idea of Kant's theory on punishment is the familiar "an eye for an eye". Thus, the evil that a wrongdoer inflicts is the measure of how severely so/he should be punished. Kant's requirement is that the pain inflicted on the criminal should be equivalent to the pain inflicted on the victim. That is one part of the jus talionis -- the right of retaliation. Kant's second idea on punishment is found in the statement:
If you steal from another, you steal from yourself.
This statement infers that by stealing, criminals make property insecure in general. They act on a motive that, if it were universalized, would make their own property insecure and similarly, people who slander others make their own good names insecure in the sense that they operate from a maxim that, if it were made universal, would make it acceptable for anyone to slander anyone, themselves included.
The connection between this and the right of retaliation seems to be this: it shows that the wrong of stealing, for example, is the sort that the thief would suffer himself if his maxim were generalized. So the appropriate punishment for a robber should be that he is derived of his property. These two ideas link in a moral union between crime and punishment. What is less clear is how it leads to the conclusion that we must extract a punishment proportional to the crime. So again, if we don't punish the wrongdoer, something is out of balance; justice has not been served. When we come to the particular case of capital punishment, we see that Kant thinks it is both permissible and obligatory in the case of murder. The only thing that is proportional to the crime of killing another person is the execution of the murderer. Kant asserts that if a society were abut to dissolve itself, but it had murderers awaiting execution, "the last murder lying in prison ought to be executed" before the society dissolves itself. According to Kant, the two primary reason for this : "That everyone may realize the desert of his deeds". Kant goes further: "for otherwise they might all be regarded as participators in the murder as a public violation of justice."
But just exactly how far can the principle of retaliation go? If a murderer tortures his victim painfully before killing him, and if we take the jus talionis seriously, we would conclude that the murderer should be tortured before being executed. Torture is inhuman. Those who torture others are showing us their inhumanity. But if by doing as they do, even if its in retaliation, we sink to their immoral. We become morally polluted by the very evil that we respond to. Kant does touch slightly on this matter when we writes about the condemned person:
His death... must be kept free from all maltreatment that would make the humanity suffering in his person loathsome or abominable.
Kant is unclear here. The idea seems that even a person guilty of murder is to be treated with a certain sort of dignity, because even the murderer is still a person -- still an end in himself and therefore punishments that don't respect the humanity of the criminal are outside the pale of morality. They are not justice, they are pure, unadulterated revenge . Thus, it would be a mistake to confuse what Kant means by "retribution" with revenge. Revenge is a natural response, but so is stealing at times.We therefore must rise above our moral instincts. This rise is what makes it hard to be a virtuous person. And in the sphere of punishment, morality requires that we respect the humanity of the person we are punishing. In punishing a wrongdoer, we do respect their freedom: we take seriously the idea that she is responsible for what she did, and was free to do otherwise.So punishing a wrongdoer amounts to respecting his or her "rational will".
So on one hand, punishing a person may be a way of respecting his or her humanity. On the other hand, some forms of punishment violate the humanity of the person being punished, and in the process debase us. It is mostly universally accepted that punishing a torturer by torture is not an acceptable form of punishment. A wrongdoer who is tortured is a person who has, at least for the time being, had their humanity expunged. However, an opponent of capital punishment could ask: Isn't murder like torture in this respect? Doesn't a murderer rob his victim entirely of their humanity and by punishing a murder, we in return are robing him of his humanity? A counter response question could be, well if we execute murderers, might this not be one of those very cases, like torture, in which the jus talionis goes too far? Suppose a super inhumane criminal left his victims alive, but performed inhuman experiments on them that destroyed their mental capacities, leaving them catatonic state. Here, Kant would insist that it would not be appropriate to punish the wrongdoer by subjecting him to the same procedure. The fact that the criminal did not respect the humanity of his victims does not entitle us to rob him of his humanity. But if this is so, then one particular question arises: how could capital punishment be justified? When the state kills a murderer, the state take it upon itself to extract his humanity from him in the most final way. So in return, we must ask: can a system of punishment that takes the categorical imperative seriously really permit the death penalty? If torture and inhuman experiments are not acceptable forms of punishment, why is it that execution is an acceptable form of punishment?
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
