Florida, Retributivism, and Old Ass Intarwebs

Ah, the Sunshine State

So far I’m a little angry at the South for not conforming to my stereotypes.  Granted, there are a great deal of people cruising around in confederate flag shirts and I have seen more than one sign for Ronald Reagan (!?) around town, but all this could just as easily be found in Bakersfield, California.  So far, the biggest difference is the humidity.  The air is so thick you can drink it.  That and the high temperature guarantee that if I spend more than 5 minutes outside I will come down with what is known here in the South as the vapuhs.  So I spend the majority of the day cloistered inside an air conditioned house reading or watching TV.  As it happens, I buckled down to the omnipresent ads on TNT and finally watched “The Closer.”

Sweet, Sweet Retributivism

The episode of “The Closer” I watched was mildly interesting and revolved around a spunky Kyra Sedgwick bouncing from one preposterous clue to the next trying to solve the murder of two corrupt Tijuana cops found in pickup truck bed in Los Angeles.  By far, the most fascinating part about the show, though, was the ending.  Not because of what happened – there was, as in all procedural dramas, a stupid twist – but because of what it suggests about people’s intuitions about morality and punishment.  Sedgwick figures out that a liason officer from Mexico that had ostensibly been aiding her investigation is actually crooked and had placed a bounty on the (innocent) suspect’s head so that as soon as he was booked he would have been murdered by other inmates in L.A. county jail.  Instead of booking the corrupt cop on another (and, it should be noted, the only provable) charge that he could easily slip out of, Sedgwick arrests him as the suspect – thus ensuring he will be murdered by inmates the moments he is put in prison.  That is exactly what happens.  So the bad guy gets murdered, the innocent suspect gets away, and the audience is expected to pump their fists and boo-yah.

There are, of course, other shows that embrace a simplistic, stick it to the bad guys morality.  24 comes to mind in particular; the audience roots for Jack Bauer and his Geneva-Convention-be-damned attitude because he’s taking out terrorists, drug lords, and other baddies.  Dexter, a much more ambiguous show in terms of morality, still asks the audience to root for the eponymous serial killer/police investigator who takes out the trash that the justice system can’t successfully prosecute.  But in each of these shows it’s implicit that what the character is doing is wrong – we either feel it’s justified anyway or it’s just fun to root for an anti-hero.  What disturbed me about The Closer was that it portrayed Sedgwick as a squeaky clean, if somewhat irritating, hero whose actions were not only morally justified, but morally right.  For a TV show to get away with this, it’s reasonable to assume that they expected the end to be consistent with prevailing intuitions about punishment in the viewership.  I think the following two are the most likely candidates:

-That the prevailing intuition for viewers is some kind of retributivism; that we punish crimes because it is ethically correct to do so and any other benefits accrued are purely bonuses.  Proportionality often figures into this conception of punishment, too – most people don’t want to punish speeding tickets with death – so the murder of the corrupt Mexican cop would be perfectly justified, since he was also guilty of murder.  In essence, the old “eye for an eye” formulation.  Wrong deeds deserve punishment. 

-That there are several goals or justifications packed into punishment along with retribution, perhaps utility and deterrence, but these all get suspended in favor of retributivism when it’s expedient.  Everyone can approve of trying to reform a serial rapist, but if that rapist openly boasts they will attempt to rape anyone who approaches them and will never stop raping, a lot of people would probably look the other way if they were quietly disposed of.   

A third way of looking at this, I suppose, could be that our legal system is broken so whatever way one can punish criminals roughly in proportion to their crime, be it legal or extralegal, is justified.  That seems unlikely to me, since the show centers around law enforcement.  Hell, even Dirty Harry, for all his badassery and devil may care brattitude, was at core a believer in the legal system and spent the whole movie Magnum Force sticking it to vigilantes on the SFPD.  It’s because Sedgwick is a cop that her punishment has an air of legitimacy.  All three of the outlined intuitions strike me as distasteful, but especially the one that I think is most likely: the second.  It’s the same kind of thinking that has delivered humanity unjust kangaroo courts in the past and today is probably one of the main reasons why those involved with the Guantanamo Bay prison can rest easy at night.  I certainly hope it isn’t an intuition shared by a substantial sector of the population, but I guess I’ll never know since no one fucking watches The Closer.

Nostalgia, 1996 Style

Also, check out this post of what some popular websites looked like 12 years ago.  I can almost hear my 28.8 squealing. (from reddit)