There are some ideas that are so absurd that, as Orwell observed, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that”. Unfortunately, though, the airy speculations of intellectuals can sometimes have devastating real-world consequences. The intellectual onanism of Marx’n’Engels and their ideological heirs are proof enough of that. More recently, the idiotic academic onanism of gender theory is having the very real consequence of mutilating large numbers of a generation of children.
Jeremy Bentham was a 19th century English philosopher and social reformer who is generally regarded as the founder of the ethical theory known as Utilitarianism. The fundamental axiom of his philosophy was that “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong”. Bentham advocated everything from women’s and gay rights to the abolition of slavery.
But, right here in Tasmania stands a monument to one of Bentham’s foremost ideas — prison reform — put into action. The Separate Prison at Port Arthur is remembered today as a singular exercise in psychological cruelty. The prison was designed so that a single watchman could keep prisoners under observation at all times. Inmates were subjected to forced social, visual, auditory isolation. As part of the system, designed to allow inmates to quietly reflect on their crimes, they were forced to remain utterly silent at all times and wear hoods or masks when not in their cells.
But Bentham looks like a paragon of saintly motherliness, compared to what some contemporary philosophers want to inflict on prisoners.
Philosopher Rebecca Roache is in charge of a team of scholars focused upon the ways futuristic technologies might transform punishment. Dr Roache claims the prison sentence of serious criminals could be made worse by extending their lives.
Speaking to Aeon magazine, Dr Roache said drugs could be developed to distort prisoners’ minds into thinking time was passing more slowly.
“There are a number of psychoactive drugs that distort people’s sense of time, so you could imagine developing a pill or a liquid that made someone feel like they were serving a 1,000-year sentence,” she said.
This is the plot of a SF dystopian horror story.
A second scenario would be to upload human minds to computers to speed up the rate at which the mind works, she wrote on her blog .
“If the speed-up were a factor of a million, a millennium of thinking would be accomplished in eight and a half hours… Uploading the mind of a convicted criminal and running it a million times faster than normal would enable the uploaded criminal to serve a 1,000 year sentence in eight-and-a-half hours. This would, obviously, be much cheaper for the taxpayer than extending criminals’ lifespans to enable them to serve 1,000 years in real time.”
Hands up who thinks anyone would come out of such an experience and not be a gibbering blob of mental jelly?
Like Bentham, Roache is advocating inflicting indescribable cruelty and calling it “humane”.
“To me, these questions about technology are interesting because they force us to rethink the truisms we currently hold about punishment. When we ask ourselves whether it’s inhumane to inflict a certain technology on someone, we have to make sure it’s not just the unfamiliarity that spooks us,” Dr Roache said.
“Is it really OK to lock someone up for the best part of the only life they will ever have, or might it be more humane to tinker with their brains and set them free? When we ask that question, the goal isn’t simply to imagine a bunch of futuristic punishments – the goal is to look at today’s punishments through the lens of the future.”
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I struggle to imagine inflicting such a punishment on even the worst person imaginable. 1,000 subjective years trapped inside your own mind? Capital punishment would seem like a mild alternative.