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The Will to Deviance
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16275 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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3 / 1989 |
3,843 Words |
| Author
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Jeffrie G. Murphy
Jeffrie G. Murphy is professor of law and philosophy at
Arizona State University. This essay is adapted from the
author's much longer essay, "Getting Even: The Role of the
Victim," in Social Philosophy and Policy, volume 7, no. 2, and
is used with the permission of the copyright holder, Basil
Blackwell Ltd. It also builds on some ideas developed in the
author's book Forgiveness and Mercy (co-authored with Jean
Hampton and published in 1988 by Cambbridge University Press). |
In his novella Billy Budd, Herman Melville struggles to explain the malicious evil present in his character John Claggart--the master-at-arms who sets in motion the chain of events that ultimately destroys the innocent and beautiful Billy. Despairing of gaining understanding either through common sense or ordinary science, Melville finally lights on the concept of "natural depravity"--a concept that transcends our ordinary secular consciousness of ordinary badness and engages a perspective (one of extraordinary evil, seductive sin, and self-chosen loathsomeness) that seems mythic and theological.
In his Seductions of Crime, Jack Katz is also struggling to understand evil--mainly the kind present in those cases of extreme criminal violence that make the TV news and terrify us all--and he finds the traditional patterns of explanation that dominate the behavioral sciences lacking in their power to illuminate. Behavioral scientists tend to practice what the philosopher Robert Nozick has called "normative sociology"--the study of what the causes of social problems ought to be.
Since most of these writers are from the political Left, it is not surprising that they want the primary cause of crime to be economic, or material. For if this is the cause of crime, several views of appeal to the Left will seem to gain support--for example, criminals, portrayed as alienated victims of economic discrimination and oppression, will not be viewed as fully to blame for their wrongdoing, and the curer for crime will thus not be viewed simply as more and harsher punishments. The primary cure will rather be the elimination of poverty (and thus the climate that produces alienation) through more extensive programs of social welfare and perhaps even a
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