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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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I also think the people who valorize prison rape are doing a bad thing.

Because the brutal parts of prison life are "technically not supposed to happen," we get to have our cake and eat it, too, with regards to sentencing people to tortures and feeling innocent about it. It is, at the least, not in-line with most people's professed ideals, I think.

In my view, effective self-defense is a natural right, and any reasonable approach to imprisonment abridges that right pretty harshly. I am not therefore opposed to imprisonment! There are contexts where natural rights may be properly abridged, and this is one of them.

However, you can't abridge a natural right without consequences, and in this instance, I believe that the state takes on the moral responsibility for the prisoner's defense, since the state has so sharply limited his ability to provide that for himself. The state--and in a democracy, the people--can't shirk this moral responsibility by just shrugging and saying, "shit happens." The state should prevent prison rape where and when it can, in balance with its other responsibilities, and punish the inevitable failures.

How would that reasoning not lead to getting rid of jails completely? You could similarly argue that if the state takes away someone's freedom, they are obliged to provide him with freedom.

(If your answer is that the state only needs to provide some, but not as much as it took away, that would affect your original argument too.)

Imprisonment, as a punishment, is intended to restrict a prisoner's ability to commit crimes, by separating him from the rest of society and putting him under the supervision of guards. This is a direct, and intended, removal of liberty.

However, there are also second-order effects, that are not intended, but are--practically speaking--inevitable. One of those is the limitation on the prisoner's right of effective self-defense. This limitation isn't justified by the standard philosophical defenses of imprisonment-as-punishment, so in my view, the state needs to step in to replace what it has taken without justification.

You could similarly argue that if the state takes away someone's freedom, they are obliged to provide him with freedom.

More precisely, I'm arguing that if the state takes away someone's freedom without justification, they are obliged to provide him with something in exchange. In this case, if you remove someone's right to effective self defense without justification for removing that right specifically, then you're obliged to step in and make a reasonable effort to provide protection.

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