It’s fun sometimes to introduce students to ideas that they’d already held but didn’t have names for, and the lights were going on as we took on Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy of mischief-analysis as it pertains to legal questions yesterday.? Bentham is a bear to read, largely because he seems to imagine politics as an algebra problem to be solved, and because he imagines himself setting forth universal mathematical principles, he seldom offers a concrete example of what he’s talking about.
But that’s what teachers are for, right?
So I invented an imaginary proposal for a city law for Athens, Georgia: the 3.7-second rule.? The rule goes that pedestrians must wait a minimum of 3.7 seconds after the “Don’t Walk” signal changes to a “Walk” signal to protect them from people running red lights.? Cameras would photograph everyone entering the intersection on foot before the 3.7 mark, and anyone violating the law would go to jail for three months.? Using that as our starting point, we analyzed the law in terms of the mischief caused by coercing people to follow it (none), the anxiety about punishment that it would produce in the populace (plenty), the harm it would do to people who broke the law (quite a bit), and the residual harm that would come to employers, family, and friends of those who broke the law (again, plenty).? Then, analyzing the potential benefits of such a law, we decided as a class that the 3.7-second law would ultimately cause more mischief than it solved, and we opted not to make it city law.
After my rather silly example, we read John Howard, the Quaker prison reformer who rightly saw that prisons in his day were basically deathtraps for those who stayed inside but entirely too easy to escape and who wrongly decided that the way to fix that was to institute a regimen of solitary confinement in utter silence.? Again we did the Bentham on his ideas, and I emphasized, as my students remembered what they’d learned in their psychology classes about prolonged sensory deprivation, that science must always be part of political philosophy.
We ended with a look at Cesare Beccaria, a philosopher I’d never heard of before I planned this class, and his move towards a philosophy that we 21st-century folks might call libertarianism.? Ultimately my students, except for my principled skeptic, could not live with a philosophy of law and punishment that, like Beccaria’s placed absolutely zero importance on motivation and all of the importance on concrete harm.? (My skeptic, of course, agreed that laws should do just that–after all, how could we possibly know someone’s motivations?)
Overall the lesson was a good one, and I feel confident that I’ve given my students the tools they need to shape the philosophies of common life that they’ll look back on, ten or so years from now, and wonder how they could have thought that.
