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UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title On the Possibility and Permissibility of Interpersonal Punishment Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8d25d975 Author Gillespie, Laura Publication Date 2017 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles On the Possibility and Permissibility of Interpersonal Punishment A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In Philosophy by Laura Gillespie 2017 © Copyright by Laura Gillespie 2017 ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION On the Possibility and Permissibility of Interpersonal Punishment by Laura Gillespie Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy University of California, Los Angeles, 2017 Professor Seana Shiffrin, Chair In the dissertation, I consider the permissibility of a familiar set of responses to wrongdoing in our interpersonal relationships—those responses that constitute the imposition of some cost upon the wrongdoer. Some of these responses are, I argue, properly considered punishing, and some of these instances of punishing are in turn permissible. Punishment as I understand it is a broad phenomenon, common in and to all human relationships, and not exclusively or even primarily the domain of the state. Personal interactions expressive of wrong-reactive attitudes like disappointment, anger, and guilt will sometimes constitute punishment so understood. I consider childhood punishment, self-punishment, and punishment between friends, concluding that punishment in the context of our personal relationships may sometimes be appropriate where undertaken not for the sake of deterrence nor of retributive justice, but for the sake of the aims constitutive of the relationship in which it occurs. ii The dissertation of Laura Gillespie is approved. Sharon Dolovich Barbara Herman Alexander Jacob Julius Seana Shiffrin, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2017 iii For Gram. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………...vii Vita……………………………………………………………………………………………….ix Chapter 1. The Possibility and Permissibility of Interpersonal Punishment………………….….1 Chapter 2. The Participant View: A Theory of Childhood Punishment………………….…..….31 Chapter 3. Between Friends: Punishment in personal relationships of equality...………………65 Chapter 4. Grace My Fear Relieved: An Alternative (to a) Theory of Self-Punishment……...101 Chapter 5. Toward a Relationship-Centered Account of the State……………………..……...143 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………..……………..180 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For the past several years I have had the honor of being allowed to walk casually into the offices of a roster of legends, to make a little small talk, and then, incredibly, to discuss my own work with them—to hear what they have to say about it. It’s astonishing, really. My thanks are due, first of all, to the legends in question: my committee, and especially its chair, Seana Shiffrin. Seana has given more to me and to this project than I could ever repay. She is a lion, and I sincerely thank her for the honor of being her student. There isn’t a single member of my committee, finally, whose attention to my work hasn’t had an enormous impact on its final shape, or on my sense of who I’d like to be as a philosopher. The impossible sensitivity, insight, care, and good humor they unfailingly bring to their own work, they've also brought to mine. If I live to be a productive philosopher of 100, I'll still be coming back to these conversations and learning something new from them. Thank you Barbara Herman, Pamela Hieronymi, AJ Julius, Sharon Dolovich, and Erin Kelly. My cup runneth over. Thanks also to the wide variety of friends and colleagues in the profession, and especially in the UCLA philosophy department, who have read and commented on drafts over the years, and generally made the academy into a space that feels sane and habitable for me. Particular thanks to the participants in UCLA’s Ethics Workshop (with special gratitude to Greg Antill and Adam Masters), and to Pamela Hieronymi for running it; to my comrades from day one, Jonathan Gingerich and Lauren Schaeffer; to Amelia Acker, of whom I am permanently in awe; and—finally, forever—to the thread. Thanks to my friends and family, who tolerated several years of relative neglect and showed up anyway, over and over again, to absorb some of the anxious vibrations and remind me of who I am. Particular thanks to Leah Gillespie, my sister and my person forever; to Barbara vi and T.C. Gillespie—you’re weird parents, but I love you; to Rosie Wagner (there aren’t words, honestly); and to my guy, Alex Delyle, who kept it all going. This dissertation was supported by a Dissertation Year Fellowship from the Graduate Division of the University of California, Los Angeles. vii CURRICULUM VITAE EDUCATION M.A. in philosophy, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts 2006-2010 B.A. in philosophy, Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts 2000-2004 GRADUATE AWARDS & HONORS 2016–2017 UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship 2015–2016 Departmental Distinguished Teaching Award 2014–2015 Dean’s Humanities Fellowship Summer 2014 Mellon Fellowship Summer 2012 Graduate Student Research Mentorship with A.J. Julius Summer 2011 Mellon Fellowship 2010–2011 Dean’s Humanities Fellowship PRESENTATIONS & CONFERENCE PARTICIPATION Summer 2016 “Between Friends”, Gothenburg Responsibility Project Workshop, University of Gothenburg Summer 2016 Session Chair, Athena in Action, Princeton University. Spring 2016 Session Chair, Pacific APA, San Francisco. Spring 2016 “Love as Reverence and Revelation: Mad Love in Plato’s Phaedrus”, Comparative Literature Graduate Student Conference, UCLA. Fall 2015 “Between Friends: Interpersonal Punishment in Relationships of Equality”, Seminar: Mutual Recognition with A.J. Julius, UCLA. Fall 2015 “Between Friends”, Ethics Workshop, UCLA. Summer 2015 Session Chair, Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference, University of Washington, Bellingham. Summer 2015 “The Participant View: A Theory of Childhood Punishment”, Rocky Mountain Ethics Conference, University of Colorado Boulder. (Selections published in invited post to What’s Wrong?, the blog of UC Boulder’s Center for Values and Social Policy.) Spring 2015 “Punishment Among Equals”, Albritton Talk, UCLA. Winter 2015 “Three Conditions on Punishment”, Ethics Workshop, UCLA. Fall 2014 “The Participant View: A Theory of Childhood Punishment”, Ethics Writing Group, USC. Winter 2014 “Against Shaming Punishments”, Ethics Workshop, UCL viii Chapter 1. The Possibility of Interpersonal Punishment The imposition of hard treatment in response to wrongdoing is a familiar feature of human life. A significant portion of us will at one time or another suffer formal, criminal punishment at the hands of the state.1 2 Virtually all of us will experience punishment in informal, personal contexts. As children we suffer the loss of certain pleasures and privileges at the hands of caregivers when we misbehave. As adults we stand as objects of our own recriminations and deny ourselves pleasures and rewards for our own perceived failures, and we condemn and withhold from one another as we ourselves feel wronged. We may also impose or experience forms of punishment that are public in nature, but distinct from that which the state may impose—setting out, e.g., either individually or collectively to shame or dislodge from her position a public figure whose behavior we determine to be hypocritical, cruel, or unjust. In whatever domain of human life one finds oneself there will be moral failure, and hard-treatment in some set of its myriad forms will always be among the familiar responses to it. While there is ostensibly a vast literature on the philosophy of punishment, it is better characterized as a literature on the philosophy of state criminal punishment. The central concern 1 According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics roughly 1 in 110 Americans at any given time are incarcerated in our state prisons, federal prisons, or county jails, and almost 1 in 37 is under some form of correctional supervision (Kaeble 2015). 2 Throughout the course of this chapter and the dissertation as a whole, I will draw out a contrast between punishment as meted out by the state and punishment (according to my understanding) as meted out in the context of our personal relationship. When I speak of state punishment in this context, I mean, in particular, criminal punishment. It issues not only criminal punishments, but levies civil penalties and awards punitive damages. Employees of our state-run schools sometimes punish students. I do not mean to deny that these are, in fact, instances of state punishment, or to imply that the theory of punishment I will offer has nothing to say about them. For current purposes, though, I am putting these cases to the side, and when I speak of state punishment, I mean to speak, in particular, of hard-treatment meted out for violations of the criminal law. 1 of philosophers writing about punishment has largely been to capture and provide adequate justification for the state practice of punishing law-breakers, particularly where punishment takes the form of incarceration or killing. Some have gone so far as to exclude hard-treatment imposed by an agent other than the state from the very definition of punishment. On this understanding, anything with punishment’s general character occurring before the advent or outside the purview of the modern state is
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