IT IS A STRANGE irony that it has been the atheistic utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham who have advanced the belief in the absolute evil of pain, whereas it has been the religious philosophers (whom the utilitarians like to label as absolutists) who have been prepared to see the two sides of pain. No doubt the Christian philosophers have been spurred on in their efforts to examine the role of pain in society by the prickly problems raised by young minds such as Tracey's in a recent movie that starred George Burns in the role of God:
"May I ask you a question?" Tracey asks.
"Go ahead," answers God.
"Why do you let bad things happen?"
"You ask hard questions."
"I mean why do you let little kids like me die? Isn't that bad?"
"Yes, that's bad, Tracey..."
"So why do you let it happen?"
"Well ... it's like this ... it's built into the system. Everything I built had to have two sides to it. You can't have a top without a bottom, a front without a back ... you see?"
"I guess..."
"A,nd so you can't have good without bad ... life without death ... pleasure without pain..."
How is it that, in a world reigned by a perfect and all good God, there can be pain and suffering
The Other Side of Pain
The classic answer to this question was provided by the eminent philosopher C. S. Lewis in a little book written some forty years ago, entitled The Problem of Pain. The thesis of Lewis's argument is that one cannot presume in advance the evil nature of pain. In fact it is invariably two-edged. The best example of this fascinating question is the Christian view of poverty, very often characterized as a life of pain:
Those who would most scornfully repudiate Christianity as the mere I opiate of the people' have a contempt for the rich, that is, for all mankind except the poor. They regard the poor as the only people worth preserving from'liquidation,' and place in them the only hope of the human race. But this is not compatible with the belief that the effects of poverty on those who suffer it are wholly evil. It even implies that they are good. The Marxist thus finds himself in real agreement with the Christian in those two beliefs which Christianity paradoxically demands-that poverty is twice blessed yet ought to be removed.(1)
If we wish to avoid the religious arguments in favor of the positive side of pain, we have only to look at any medical textbook to find that pain is given pride of place as an important indicator to the doctor and the individual that there is something amiss in his body. It is a way for one's body to cry out, to communicate its state.
Pain therefore performs a double function: it hurts and is sometimes unbearable, and in that sense is bad. But without it, we would often not know there was something wrong with our bodies. Dr. Thomas Szasz in his classic Pleasure and Pain insists that it is one of man's vital means of communication.
Pain as Sterilized Evil
Lewis characterized pain as sterilized or disinfected evil by which he meant that pain "has no tendency in its own right to proliferate." This is in contrast to the Christian view of sin or evil which is that one sin generates more sins only because it is the product of human error. For example, it is commonly believed that one lie should not be told because it will inevitably lead to many more. Pain, however, will not proliferate by itself-it requires human folly to accomplish that. In other words, pain is "natural" and in that sense, "disinfected." It is the expression of sin rather than sin itself.(2)
With this argument, Lewis makes sure that, in the situations where pain does proliferate, he lays the blame for this squarely on humankind, not on God. For, while he argues that the existence of pain makes for good as well as bad, he claims that the "bad" pain is largely of men's doing, not of God's, and that this probably makes up for four-fifths of the pain in the world. As he says:
It is men, not gods, who have produced racks, whips, prisons, slavery, guns, bayonets, and bombs. It is by human avarice or human stupidity not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork.
We have seen in earlier chapters that there is certainly the strong tendency for the administration of pain through legal punishments to proliferate. Lewis would argue that it is not the evil of pain itself that is proliferating, but rather the sins of men that make use of the evil side of pain. It wouldn't hurt, though, for us to remember that torture reached its heights during the great Inquisition-when used in the name of God.(3)
The idea that pain is not inherently evil is contained in other major religions. In the West, it is really derived from the early Greek and Roman philosophers. Pythagoras, for example, developed an entire system of philosophy based on the notion of the beneficial effects of pain in heightening awareness and sensitivity. This belief was probably taken over by the Christian religion when it incorporated much of the early Greek and Roman philosophy in its first few centuries, especially through the works of Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine.(4)
The major tenets of the Buddhist religion are based on an understanding of pain in social life. Buddhists accept pain as probably the central organizing characteristic of human life, and it figures in the four noble truths revealed to Buddha at Benares.(5)
We need go no further. The point is well made that pain is of crucial significance to man in the moral, religious and physical senses. It is something that everyone experiences almost daily, and in that sense it binds people together. But it also means that, if it is felt so keenly, feared so much, yet essential to identify illness and trouble of a general kind, then it is literally a force on a par with fire. Under our control it can do great things for humankind, but like all powerful resources, if it is used too much, it can create havoc and reap terrible destruction.
This brings us back to the notion of pain as punishment, because this is where pain should be under our control. We must heed Lewis's warning: that the weakness of men will allow the use of pain as punishment to proliferate.
There are a number of ways in which critics of penological practice say that it has proliferated, or might proliferate. These include the claim that any new alternative to current punishments never turns out to be an alternative at all, but rather an "add-on" punishment. Indeed, this has been well demonstrated in the case of probation. Would it also happen with the use of acute pain as punishment? And if it did, would it necessarily be a bad thing?
Acute Pain: An Add-on Punishment?
Should acute corporal punishment take the place of probation, it could not be inferred that this was a sin of proliferation. The case of Loftman described in the first chapter makes this clear. How can one totally ignore the complaints of the victims of muggings and killings when their assailants are let off on probation, which everyone knows in practice is not a punishment, but merely a warning? There is much to be said for increasing the severity of the punishment at this level.
Furthermore, probation was introduced upon the basis of an old ideology that first offenders could be "cured": the old medical model, even though it was well known that the first offender was likely to "get better" all on his own. We also know that in addition to first offenders, many repeat offenders in places like New York City have been put on probation. This policy, one suspects, reflects the realization of judges that if they sent these offenders to prison as often as they would like, enormous portions of the seamier element of New York would end up in prison, and the state simply could not afford to house them.
What is needed therefore is a punishment that is severe enough to take a place half way between prison and probation, a space perfectly filled by acute corporal punishment. It could also help to head off those sentences that are characteristically used by juvenile court judges, such as incarceration at a detention center for 4 1assessment" or under some such pretext, or when the sentence of prison is used as a "short sharp shock."
If a short sharp shock is what is needed, why not administer it?
Acute corporal punishment could also head off a recent trend to charge juveniles as adult felons so as to ensure that they are punished more severely with prison rather than to be let off lightly as a juvenile. This has led to the horrible specter of children and youths falling prey to adult degenerates in prison. Surely a sound application of acute pain is preferable?
Obviously, one cannot hope to predict how the rest of the criminal justice system would accommodate itself to these changes, for many studies have shown just how resiliently the criminal justice system can absorb changes in laws and procedures. We have no way of telling whether a new form of punishment will become add-on or not, although the reformers who have previously advocated new ways of dealing with offenders are now those who complain that their reforms became add-on punishments, and are now unacceptable. However, the evidence that they indeed became add-on treatments is largely descriptive, and there is no formal scientific study that can show conclusively that this is what happened.(6)
Now reformers have gone to the other extreme of complaining that all previous reforms have had not only no effect, but a deleterious effect, on the assumption that anything that results in an add-on punishment is in and of itself bad. But we have seen that there are morally sound reasons for adding to the punishments of some crimes and offenders, especially if the added punishment inflicts acute pain.
Corporal Punishment and Proliferation
What of the fear that corporal punishment will get out of hand because there is something special about bodily punishment (it excites the senses) that makes it more likely to be increased to greater and greater intensity? The opposite is more likely the case, since the application of physically acute pain to the body is so graphic that it cannot be easily augmented without a great deal of concrete understanding of what one is doing to the offender.
That is, if one increased the pain without limits, one would kill the offender. In contrast, when prison terms are extended to bizarre lengths, one does not kill the offender but rather maintains him in a state of living death, so to speak, a bit like a zombie. There is no clearly visible upper limit built into prison.(7)
This is not the case when physical punishment is compared with prison. Physical punishment does have inbuilt limits: the real possibility of openly killing the offender, or if not killing him, of causing severe bodily injury if one does not keep the intensity of the punishment within reasonable limits. There is no such limit with prison. Offenders can be killed and we hear little of it. Prison is as close to an eternal punishment as one can get. Indeed, prisoners often refer to the fact that "time stands still" for them while they are inside "doing time."
The problem of proliferation lies not with the inherently exciting aspects of physical punishment, but with the ever present problem that the numerical base of the punishment may get separated from the concrete base of the punishment. This we have seen is happening right now in alarming proportions with the use of prison.
Proliferation and Public Punishment
One of the important defenses against the possibility of the numerical base of punishment getting separated from the concrete base is that there should be a way of conducting the punishment so that it cannot be hidden from the public conscience. This leads to two very important points.
First, the application of corporal punishment must be essentially public.
Second, steps must be taken to open prisons to the public. Their cloak of secrecy must be broken.
When punishment is used there should be no mistake or doubt that pain is being administered, and that the offender is suffering it. This will ensure the concrete basis of the punishment, and this should be made especially clear to the sentencing judges.
All members of the public should be encouraged to visit prisons. They must be opened up for all to see, perhaps even selling tickets for weekend tours as used to be the practice a century or more ago in the case of mental asylums. The complaint would no doubt be that this would seriously impair security. But it seems that the security is not all that tight now, since it is well known that prisoners can obtain weapons, drugs and many other items in prisons under the tightest security.
By making the punishments public, we do not mean that they should be made into a spectacle as were the public hangings and use of the pillory a couple of centuries ago. Corporal punishment could be administered in a setting where persons representing the public at large could be present if they so wished, along with the victim or his representatives. Such persons might be members of the press, or any other person who could show that he represented the interests of any organized group. Only a small number of people would be permitted to observe the punishment at any one time.
Proliferation by Example?
There is some psychological research that suggests that those who watch someone punishing another in a violent way will not only learn that the behavior for which the person was punished is forbidden, but also learn through imitation that the way to deal with misbehavior is through violence. Thus, the pain of corporal punishment may proliferate through example.
It is difficult to make any firm conclusions about much of this research. Typical studies are those that show to young children a movie or TV tape of an adult acting violently against a doll. The findings usually are that, directly after watching the movie, the children will imitate the "violent" behavior of the adult.(8)
However, it has also been shown time and again in many experiments that certain, severe and immediate punishment is a very effective eliminator of unwanted behavior.(9)
It is also difficult to demonstrate the long term effects of watching violence, but it would appear that where such effects have been found, they have often resulted from the watching of violent cartoons (of the "Super Heroes" variety) on T.V. Since such situations are not concrete violence, but fantasy, one may argue that this is far different from watching violence in actual fact. The argument is the same for violence as it is for punishment: the more one abstracts violence from its concrete nature, the more likely it is to proliferate. The proliferation of nuclear weapons is the most obvious illustration of this point.
In the light of this research evidence, even if inconclusive, we should not take chances with our children, so they should not be permitted to watch corporal punishment.
There is another way in which the proliferating effects of watching corporal punishment may be minimized.
De-Personalizing Corporal Punishment
The critics may say: will not those who watch the administration of pain to the offender's body have their "sensibilities" inflamed and go away wanting to administer this violence themselves? For the sake of argument, let us grant the critics that the modeling of aggressive behavior may occur in such situations (though as we have seen, this is by no means certain).
The picture of someone lashing another with a whip is very violent and is popularly described by its opponents as "demeaning" to the person who must administer it. Why this should be so is never stated, since all that happens in such a situation is that the confrontation between society and the individual becomes "personalized." We can here supply the critics with a reason: the person who punishes is ','demeaned" because he acts not as a person but as a "puppet" of the State.
This is why, except in cases where the crime or criminal deserve violent punishment, the process of punishment must be cold, deliberate, and efficient, so that it is perfectly clear that it is the State that is applying this punishment, and not an individual who 4 6wishes to satisfy his sadistic urges." No doubt such a prejudice would develop against those who punished, if corporal punishment were introduced. The same prejudices already exist against prison guards, that they are "bullies" or "sadists" or "racists," as if they had more of these attributes than the rest of us.
Currently, the way in which the State manages to project its cold and inhuman image in its treatment of offenders is through the prison system which has developed an enormous and largely secret bureaucracy. That is, secret in the sense that prisons are so isolated from society, and that people simply do not make it their business to know what goes on inside them.
We now see the distinct advantage of electric shock as a punishment. The actions of the punisher, rather than being "heated," are cool and methodical, requiring little overt physical effort. There is less observable aggressive behavior for others to copy in the use of electric shock, and thus less violence is learned. In addition, the State comes across as what it really is: the cold, inhuman and calculating machine.
In Sum...
Pain, the central feature of a retributive system, cannot be assumed to be evil, and in fact plays an important positive role in punishment and in our lives generally.
While pain is easily justifiable in a general sense as a criminal punishment, we have seen that the acute pain of corporal punishment is even more morally defensible than other chronic pains such as prison, since it works against the major religious sin: that of proliferation. (10)
However, there is one more feature of pain as punishment which we have saved till last, since it is considered the most serious criticism from the liberal point of view, and is also the most misunderstood. There is the confusion and fear, that once we begin own the path towards painful punishment, we are on a slippery lope to torture.
1. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London: Macmillan, 1973).
2. See, for example: S. Bok, Lying (New York: Vintage, 1979).
3. H. C. Lea The Inquisition of the Middle Ages New York: Harper, 1979).
4. Kosterlitz, Pain and Society.
5 .
1) "What then is the noble truth of pain? Birth is pain, decay is pain, sickness is pain, death is pain..."
2) "What then is the noble truth of the Origination of Pain? It is the craving which leads to rebirth, accompanied by delight and greed seeking its delight now here, now there, craving for sensuous experience..."
3) "What then is the noble truth of stopping pain? It is the complete stopping of that craving, the complete withdrawal from it... "
4) "What then is the noble truth of the steps which lead to the stopping of pain? It is ... right views, right intentions..." Quoted in Bonica, World Congress.
6. See Rothman, Conscience and Convenience.
7. One of the reasons why whipping was abolished so early in the military in both Britain and in the United States was that the number of lashes meted out did indeed become divorced from the actual effects they were supposed to have on the offenders, so that some were dying as a result of the extraordinary number of lashes. It was enough to point to the few examples of the extreme use of whipping to argue that it was a punishment without limits, and thus should be abolished.
This does not work with prison where a double standard operates. When someone commits suicide in prison or jail, it is seen as a kind of "accident" unrelated to the initial punishment of prison. When death has resulted from a corporal punishment, it is considered to be a direct product of the punishment.
8. The research on this question is reviewed in G. Newman, Understanding Violence (New York: Harper, 1979).
9. This research is reviewed in Newman, The Punishment Response.
10. For a discussion of this "sin" see Bok, Lying .