December 20, 2009
Vigilante
Why can’t people take the law into their own hands?
When sentencing Munir Hussein – who chased-down a burglar and beat him so hard with a cricket it shattered in three places, leaving Walid Salem brain-damaged for life – the judge said:
“Sadly, I have no doubt that my public duty requires me to impose immediate prison sentences of some length upon you. This is in order to reflect the serious consequences of your violent acts and intent and to make it absolutely clear that, whatever the circumstances, persons cannot take the law into their own hands, or carry out revenge attacks upon a person who has offended them.”
He added:
“It may be that some members of the public, or media commentators, will assert that Salem deserved what happened to him at the hands of you and the two others involved, and that you should not have been prosecuted and need not be punished,” the judge added.”However, if persons were permitted to … inflict their own instant and violent punishment on an apprehended offender rather than letting justice take its course, then the rule of law and our system of criminal justice, which are the hallmarks of a civilised society, would collapse.”
And indeed there’s been the typical apoplexy on the right about criminals now having more rights than law abiding citizens, Hussein being a hero, and the rest.
My own tribe normally takes the other route, typically assumed to lead to The Moral High Ground. That it would be barbaric if individuals could take the law into their own violent hands, result in an end to the rule of law before which we are all equal, effectively licensing murder, and the rest. Catherine Bennett puts a powerful case forward for the High Grounders.
Now, being of High Ground persuasion I tend to think there’s a lot to these arguments. But it would be naive and dishonest of me not to acknowledge something lurking in the conceptual background: the intimate relationship between violence and the modern state.
Max Weber gave the classic account:
“What is a ‘state’? Sociologically, the state cannot be defined in terms of its ends. There is scarcely any task that some political association has not taken in hand, and there is no task that one could say has always been exclusive and peculiar to those associations which are designated as political ones: today the state, or historically, those associations which have been the predecessors of the modern state. Ultimately one can define the modern state sociologically only in terms of the specific means peculiar to it, as to every political association, namely, the use of physical force
…
Today the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one. In the past, the most varied institutions – beginning with the slib – have known the use of force as quite normal. Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”
And Weber is right. Crucial to the State’s authority and capacity to maintain order, control and power over the disparate actors is the (successful) monopolisation of violence, delegated officially through army, police forces and maybe even Community Support Officers.
Furthermore, the state’s having a monopolisation of violence is something that, in general, we ought to be damn grateful for. I’ve just finished reading Simon Schama’s Citizens, a chronology of the French Revolution. Schama claims that the revolution began when insurrectionary rhetoric about the people’s power was actually put into practice, and the King’s forces lost control over the use of force. But Schama also contends that from 1789-94 the revolutionary government simply could not put the genie of violence back in the bottle, and it was this lack of state monopoly of force that led to The Terror and the deaths of hundreds of thousands.
Dark as Weber’s diagnosis may strike us, there are reasons to be grateful when it obtains.
Which brings us back to the sentencing of Mr Hussein. We on the High Ground may be right in our usual arguments about barbarism, the rule of law, and all the rest. But lurking behind that is a basic truth: we don’t allow vigilantes in this society because violence is the preseve of the state and its specially licensed agents.
And that, ultimately, is about power, control and domination. It just happens to be power, control and domination that we are in favour of.
Peter said,
December 20, 2009 at 3:28 pm
I don’t think that we need any of these high-falutin’ Weberian observations in the case of Munir Hussein. The law allows you to use reasonable force to defend yourself or your family (in some circumstance, perhaps reasonable force is lethal force, or can have lethal consequences). Hussein’s actions did not fit this bill. He chased down the intruder once his family were no longer in danger. It was thus wrong for him to seriously attack the man, though we may express sympathy with his motivations and so on.
The only people who I think disagree with that are loonies who think we should have Castle Laws, and those people aren’t worth talking to (instead, they should be laughed at or avoided, as they’re typically nasty, nasty people).
Paul Sagar said,
December 20, 2009 at 4:08 pm
There’s nothing high-falutin’ about the observation that part of the reason the state’s judge sent Hussein to prison for 30 months was because one of the functions of state judges is to maintain the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
That this is a fact about our society, it lurks in the background, and needs to be considered alongside all your High Ground points about the reasonable use of force.
After all, who decides what constitutes “reasonable use of force”? And who inflicts the punishments when that reasonableness is transgressed?
There’s much more going on here than Right and Decency being upheld in the name of the Collective Good. Though of course, those of a Rawlsian disposition will be resistant to such emphases…
David Weber said,
December 20, 2009 at 9:12 pm
I agree with the general thrust (though I’m unsure whether I’m happy with the actual (rather than suspended) prison sentences; it’s important to note that this was a case of the judge applying his discretion rather than there being an absurd mandatory sentence though). What I do find worrying is that the burglars escaped prison.
Rob said,
December 21, 2009 at 10:44 am
“There’s much more going on here than Right and Decency being upheld in the name of the Collective Good. Though of course, those of a Rawlsian disposition will be resistant to such emphases…”
Yes, of course, because after all anyone who’s read Theory of Justice immediately loses the ability to see members of the police. It isn’t true, for example, that the avowed ambition of one the canonical critiques of Rawls to justify a state monopoly on force (through a bizarre hypothetical invisible hand explanation, it’s true, but nonetheless), whilst Bernard Williams doesn’t describe the model of political theory he takes Rawls to be paradigmatic of as about the moral conditions of co-existence under power. Arguing about who ought to be able to use violence in the terms of analytical moral philosophy does not deny that it is, in the end, the use violence that’d being discussed: there wouldn’t be a problem if someone wasn’t being coerced, presumably. If you think that morally relevant features of the fact that it’s violence are being ignored, make that argument, rather than pretending that no-one apart from Weber had ever noticed that the law gets enforced.