With the best of intentions, sincerely wrong

When I was a teenager, perhaps around 15, my mother and an aunt were one day talking about the evil communist threat still lingering at that time in the form of labour unions, and I could not doubt their obvious sincerity when they said that "if the men didn't, they would go to fight to stop the commies taking over Australia." It was a sort of revelation to me because they were as wrong as they were sincere, although I didn't say anything on that occasion.

In "The US inmates charged per night in jail," Jessica Lussenhop (2015) describes the sincerely believed arguments for and against some US county and city prisons charging fees, at apparently capricious rates, to people locked up, leaving them with sometimes substantial debt burdens on release. Lussenhop also reports that the American Civil Liberties Union is collecting statistics in a bid to have the practice ended on the grounds that it is not only ineffective as revenue source, but also "fundamentally flawed."

This article reminded me, again, of the one about the moral harm that religion does to children. In both cases, people get an idea that sounds plausible to support an opinion they have about what should be done. And the idea that sounds plausible (religion makes children more moral) and the opinion about what should be done (religion should be taught in schools and encouraged by governments) are both wrong. In this case, some people think it's right to make prisoners pay for the cost of their imprisonment and that charging them rent for being in prison is a good way to do this. I think both parts of this opinion are wrong. As even the most committed prison rent supporter admits, it just doesn't work, so the idea that it's effective is false. But I think it's also a false moral belief to think that prisoners should pay for the cost of keeping them in prison.

To be fair, the ex-prisoners whose ideas and words are presented by Lussenhop also seemed pretty weak to me - they were just whining about having a debt. Their idea that the pay-to-stay system is unjust seems to me right, but I'm not sure that their supporting reasons are very strong.

So, what is the strong reason?

The Multi-County Correctional Center
in Marion, Ohio

When a society decides to make some acts crimes and to take away the freedom of people who commit those crimes, that society also takes on the obligation to care for those citizens, who do not stop being either citizens or human beings because they have been found guilty of a crime. If tax payers are unwilling to support in a decent and humane way the people they put into prison, then should stop putting people into prison and return to the bad old days of our primitive ancestors in jungles and caves who took justice into their own hands. Part of the responsibility that comes with the security, the comfort and other benefits of living in societies ruled by (more or less) impartial law is that you pay taxes to fully cover the cost of that, and those who have the most, who benefit the most, should be paying those costs. That they might very sincerely believe otherwise does not make a wrong idea right.

This is why free speech is so very important to a healthy society, not just economically but morally. My mother and aunt, in fact several of my aunts, had and still have some pretty awful ideas, apart from a desire to murder communists (I think this one might have passed over the decades). Although I usually try to keep my mouth shut, they sometimes say something so awful that I have to comment. I think my brothers and sisters let their elders get away with far too much. For example, when I was at home last year, my mother said to a visiting aunt that "something needs to be done about all the foreigners coming in and taking Australian jobs, living on the dole and being an economic drain on tax payers." Since my own family, as my last name suggests, have not been Australians for many generations, having arrived from Italy as economic immigrants in 1888, it seems a bit cruel to be saying such things of modern economic or political immigrants seeking a better life in a strange land. Her comment is also irrational: you can't both be taking the jobs of other people and living on tax funded welfare. In fact, modern immigrants are, like my own great grandparents from Italy, very hard working because they want to succeed, and in doing so they contribute a lot to the economic development of a country. And without it's immigrants, Australia, like the US and many other great nations, would be nothing.

This need to strengthen how people understand issues is one reason why I think it would be good to get religious teaching out of schools and replace it with philosophy. A better way, I think, to produce morally good children and citizens is to teach them how to think critically, especially about social and political issues so that they cannot be so easily fooled by politicians and others with ugly political agendas that make use of racist, nationalist and other tools to persuade normally good people to sincerely believe false ideas and support immoral laws.

I got a bit off the topic of the BBC News article, but that's no problem with response writing. The previous paragraph again reminds me of Roger Scruton, and I think for tomorrow I will summarize and respond to his article in the BBC News a couple of days ago. I was thinking we might read an essay about why it's morally wrong to eat meat, in which the author cites Scruton as the source of a bad reason to eat pigs but not baby human beings, but Tan has already read that essay last term, so we might read something different, leaving my blog response to Scruton as possibly your only introduction to his ideas this term. And that sounds like a good enough reason to be controversial.

Tomorrow.

If you would like to know why, if it's OK to eat pigs, then it's also OK to eat human babies, I'm sure that Tan can explain that for you, and also tell you how Scruton's opposing argument fails to separate babies from pigs.

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Reference

Lussenhop, J. (2015, November 9). The US inmates charged per night in jail. BBC News. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34705968