Kumbaya Watch: This Thing Called “Justice”
The latest in foolish commentary.

By Ross Douthat
September 21, 2001 10:00 a.m.

nyone who wants to know exactly why people have a desire to punish those responsible for last week's attacks need look no further than Robert Wright's latest "Earthling" column on Slate. The desire for retribution, he says, has been revealed by Darwinian theory to be nothing more than an evolutionary adaptation, useful only insofar as it serves as a deterrent for future lawless acts. Admittedly, some people persist in regarding the punishing of criminals as "a good thing in and of itself regardless of whether it actually has deterrent effects." Needless to say, they are hopelessly naive — but Wright is sufficiently puzzled by the prevalence of this outdated notion of "justice-for-its-own-sake" to attempt an explanation of its hold over the human mind.

"So far as I can tell," he concludes, "after listening to moral philosophers try to justify this principle, the answer is this: because these moral philosophers — and jurists over the ages — were born with the intuition that retribution is good. They are just trusting their instincts. And because this instinct feels loftier than, say, hunger or lust, they accord it a loftier kind of authority ... It's a kind of double counting. We say that retribution is good A) because it deters destructive behavior and B) because it feels morally right — when in fact it feels morally right only because of its tendency, during human evolution, to deter destructive behavior." So roll over, Aquinas, and tell Aristotle the news — Robert Wright, with a little boost from Charles Darwin, has got this whole justice thing figured out.

Needless to say, Wright's view of justice as deterrence, and only deterrence, has practical consequences. Specifically, since "most of the popular support for retaliation seems to come from ... the intuition that retribution is good in and of itself ... in large part our policy is being driven not by reflection on the consequences of retribution, [but] by an emotion that once served as a good proxy for such reflection, but, in a modern social/technological/political environment, may well not." Indeed, "the current technological environment makes retaliation — retaliation of certain kinds, at least — a dubious idea." And if you want to know why, well, you'll have to wait for Wright's next column, in which he promises to prove why retaliating against terrorism will fail to deter future crimes — and thus, on sound Darwinian terms, will be pointless.

Wright, anticipating criticism, also gets in some digs at "people who consider themselves Christians" yet push for retributive justice. "This is ironic," he writes, "because one of the more widely noted things Jesus said was that the retributive impulse is one instinct you shouldn't uncritically obey." Never mind the acres of Christian thought on the differing responsibilities of states and individuals, on just-war theory, on the significance of "render unto Caesar," on Jesus's friendship with Roman soldiers, and so forth. Having dumped 3,000 years of moral philosophy into a Darwinian dustbin, offering a facile gloss on the Christian tradition is just part of a day's work for Robert Wright, deep thinker.