DPS meeting
Government as organised crime
Wednesday 31 August from 5-6pm in ib3.307

This week from 5-6pm in ib3.307 the Deakin Philosophical Society will discuss the idea that government is akin to organised crime. The discussion will focus on Charles Tilly’s (1985) article ‘War making and state making as organised crime’. Find a PDF copy of at http://deakinphilosophicalsociety.com/texts/tilly/state_making_organized_crime.pdf.

Tilly looks at the development of the modern states, drawing comparison between the activities of successful states and the activities of organised criminal gangs.

I know, I know; it’s another lengthy reading. Apologies. Pressed for time? Read from p. 181.

Our discussion of Tilly’s article this week will lead into next week’s meeting. Next week we’ll look at recent research indicating that violence, measured as the percentage of the population dying at the hands of another human being, has declined significantly since the development of modern states. This research will ring a bell for those of you present when we discussed Steven Pinker’s TED lecture ‘The myth of violence’.

So, here’s the dilemma that will guide the next two weeks’ discussion:

1. Modern states are like organised criminal gangs (this week)
2. Homicidal violence has declined since the advent of modern states (next week)

So, if modern states are akin to organised criminal gangs but they protect us from violent death at the hands of our neighbours, are they good?

This week our meeting will finish at 6pm to give people a chance to get to Philosophy Café.

Kind regards,

Dylan Nickelson,
President, Deakin Philosophical Society.

August Philosophy Café
Dr Francis Kung presents ‘Ways to better living and the way life works’
Wednesday 31 August from 7-9pm at The Barking Dog hotel, 126 Pakington St, Geelong West

This Wednesday 31 August from 7-9pm at The Barking Dog hotel, Dr Francis Kung, author of Ways to better living presents ‘Ways to better living and the way life works’.

Dr Kung introduces his presentation as follows.

Understanding the way life works is essential to living a balanced and satisfied life. This is because our views of the way life works can affect our thoughts and interpretations of events, which in turn may have either positive or not so positive impacts on our emotional, physical, social and spiritual wellbeing.

Our views of the way life works are dependent on our experiences, upbringing, education and spirituality. Therefore, we may have to drop some of our outdated assumptions and beliefs that limit us in one way or another, because our map is not the territory.

1. The way life works
   • Life is difficult. If we accept this concept, then life is no longer difficult, because even if it is difficult, it does not matter anymore. Then, we will take our daily challenges as lessons to be learnt and respond in a mature way rather than wishing that everything is sweet and cared for.
   • We are in control of our lives. Those who believe that they are in control of their lives are more likely to take positive actions to solve their problems. They will take responsibilities rather than blaming others.
   • Nothing very good or very bad lasts for very long. Once we realize, then we would not be too concerned if our world changes every now and then, sometimes in our favour, sometimes not.
2. Ways to better living
   When we set meaningful goals for ourselves, then we would not be busy doing things that are not important. If we want happiness, give happiness to others. The way to get what you want is to help others get what they want.
   • Our purpose is giving ourselves to care for others and help them grow.

Philosophy Café takes place on the last Wednesday of each month, February to November.

Entry is free and includes a glass of wine and nibbles.

Dr Kung’s book, Ways to Better Living, is available from Readings Melbourne or as an E-book from the publisher.

Friends,

DPS meeting
The purpose of punishment: from judging guilt to judging normality
Wednesday 24 August from 5-6.30pm in ib3.307 on Deakin’s Waurn Ponds campus

This Wednesday 24 August from 5-6.30pm in ib3.307 the Deakin Philosophical Society will discuss the first chapter of Foucault’s Discipline & Punish. Find a PDF copy of the chapter here [2.8MB].

Foucault highlights the modern turn away from the view of law as a means of judging guilt and sentencing as the administration of proportionate punishment toward law as a means of judging perversion and sentencing as a process for normalising the guilty.

Here’s a lengthy excerpt that gets to the heart of Foucault’s thesis:

During the 150 or 200 years that Europe has been setting up its new penal systems, the judges have gradually, by means of a process that goes back very far indeed, taken to judging something other than crimes, namely, the ‘soul’ of the criminal.

And, by that very fact, they have begun to do something other than pass judgement. Or, to be more precise, within the very judicial modality of judgement, other types of assessment have slipped in, profoundly altering its rules of elaboration. Ever since the Middle Ages slowly and painfully built up the great procedure of investigation, to judge was to establish the truth of a crime, it was to determine its author and to apply a legal punishment. Knowledge of the offence, knowledge of the offender, knowledge of the law: these three conditions made it possible to ground a judgement in truth. But now a quite different question of truth is inscribed in the course of the penal judgement. The question is no longer simply: ‘Has the act been established and is it punishable?’ But also: ‘What is this act, what is this act of violence or this murder? To what level or to what field of reality does it belong? Is it a phantasy, a psychotic reaction, a delusional episode, a perverse action?’ It is no longer simply: ‘Who committed it?’ But: ‘How can we assign the causal process that produced it? Where did it originate in the author himself? Instinct, unconscious, environment, heredity?’ It is no longer simply: ‘What law punishes this offence?’ But: ‘What would be the most appropriate measures to take? How do we see the future development of the offender? What would be the best way of rehabilitating him?’ A whole set of assessing, diagnostic, prognostic, normative judgements concerning the criminal have become lodged in the framework of penal judgement. Another truth has penetrated the truth that was required by the legal machinery; a truth which, entangled with the first. has turned the assertion of guilt into a strange scientifico-juridical complex. A significant fact is the way in which [he question of madness has evolved in penal practice. According to the 1810 code) madness was dealt with only in terms of article 64. Now this article States that there is neither crime nor offence if the offender was of unsound mind at the time of the act. The possibility of ascertaining madness was, therefore, a quite separate matter from the definition of an act as a crime; the gravity of the act was not altered by the fact that its author was insane, nor the punishment reduced as a consequence; the crime itself disappeared. It was impossible, therefore, to declare that someone was both guilty and mad; once the diagnosis of madness had been accepted, it could not be included in the judgement; it interrupted the procedure and loosened the hold of the law on the author of the act. Not only the examination of the criminal suspected of insanity, but the very effects of this examination had to be external and anterior 10 the sentence. But, very soon, the courts of the nineteenth century began to misunderstand the meaning of article 64. Despite several decisions of the supreme court of appeal confirming that insanity could not result either in a light penalty, or even in an acquittal, but required that the case be dismissed, the ordinary courts continued to bring the question of insanity to bear on their verdicts. They accepted that one could be both guilty and mad; less guilty the madder one was; guilty certainly, but someone to be put away and treated rather than punished; not only a guilty man, but also dangerous, since quite obviously sick, etc. From the point of view of the penal code, the result was a mass of juridical absurdities. But this was the starting point of an evolution that jurisprudence and legislation itself was to precipitate in the course of the next I50 years: already the reform of 1812, introducing attenuating circumstances, made it possible to modify the sentence according to the supposed degrees of an illness or the forms of a semi-insanity. And the practice of calling on psychiatric expertise, which is widespread in the assize courts and sometimes extended to courts of summary jurisdiction, means that the sentence, even if it is always formulated in terms of legal punishment, implies, more or less obscurely, judgements of normality, attributions of causality, assessments of possible changes, anticipations as to the offender’s future. It would be wrong to say that all these operations give substance to a judgement from the outside; they are directly integrated in the process of forming the sentence. Instead of insanity eliminating the crime according to the original meaning of article 64, every crime and even every offence now carries within it, as a legitimate suspicion, but also as a right that may be claimed, the hypothesis of insanity, in any case of anomaly. And the sentence that condemns or acquits is not simply a judgement of guilt, a legal decision that lays down punishment; it bears within it an assessment of normality and a technical prescription for a possible normalization. Today the judge – magistrate or juror – certainly does more than ‘judge’.

(pp. 19-22)

See you Wednesday,

Dylan Nickelson,
President, Deakin Philosophical Society.

Friends,

DPS meeting
The purpose of punishment: the exemplary value of capital punishment
Wednesday 17 August from 5-6.30pm in ib3.307 on Deakin’s Waurn Ponds campus

This Wednesday 17 August from 5-6.30pm in ib3.307 the Deakin Philosophical Society will discuss the exemplary value of capital punishment.

The discussion will focus on Albert Camus’ essay ‘Reflections on the guillotine’ [2.6MB]. We discussed this essay a year or more ago, but few pieces on the problem of sanitised punishment surpass its clarity of argument and expression. The essay runs to 50 pages. Those of you who are pressed for time could read the short piece by Charlie Brooker in The Guardian, ‘Bring back hanging? Only a wuss would want to do that. We should bring back the saw instead’, which touches on Camus’ point.

See you Wednesday,

Kind Regards,

Dylan Nickelson,
President, Deakin Philosophical Society.

DPS meeting
The purpose of punishment
Wednesday 10 August from 5-6.30pm in ib3.307 on Deakin’s Waurn Ponds campus

This Wednesday 10 August from 5-6.30pm in ib3.307 the Deakin Philosophical Society will discuss the purpose (or purposes) of punishment.

The Victorian Department of justice website notes:

The Sentencing Act 1991 sets out five purposes for sentencing adult offenders in Victoria. They are to punish, deter and rehabilitate offenders, to denounce their behaviour and to protect the community. The Act states that sentences can only be imposed in order to:

• punish the offender to an extent and in a manner that is just in all of the circumstances
• deter the offender or others from committing similar offences
• establish conditions that will foster the offender’s rehabilitation
• make it clear that the court denounces or condemns the offender’s behaviour
• protect the community from the offender.

We’ll begin this new topic by discussing Hugo Bedau and Erin Kelly’s (Tufts University) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on punishment. The entry gives a general overview of theories of punishment. (Note that the entry has a US focus.) Over the subsequent two weeks we’ll look at particular approaches to punishment.

Friends,

DPS meeting
Conspiracy theories (final): the confirmed, the plausible and the busted
Wednesday 3 August from 5-6.30pm in ib3.307 on Deakin’s Waurn Ponds campus

This Wednesday 3 August from 5-6.30pm in ib3.307 the Deakin Philosophical Society will wrap up its discussion of conspiracy theories with a look at confirmed, plausible and busted conspiracy theories. This is the third and final week of what has been a high-level discussion of this controversial area. A look at particular conspiracy theories should round out the topic nicely.

We’ll focus the discussion on the emotively mild yet plausible Barnes Foundation conspiracy. A group called Friends of the Barnes Foundation argue that power brokers and charitable trusts in the Philadelphia area conspired to acquire $25 billion dollars worth of artwork from the Barnes Foundation (an educational institution in suburban Philadelphia) against the will of its late founder. Find a brief overview of the conspiracy on the Vanity Fair website. The conspiracy is the subject of a recent documentary The Art of the Steal, to which the Barnes Foundation has responded.

The point of Wednesday’s meeting is to highlight the difficulty in determining the plausibility of conspiracy theories, and the confusion between sound and unsound inferences. Bring along a conspiracy theory of your own to discuss, plausible or not.

Kind Regards,

Dylan Nickelson,
President, Deakin Philosophical Society.