
When Theft Was Worse Than Murder - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/12/feedback/when-theft-was-worse-than-murder
======
Steko
400 years ago justice systems were based on the desires of the crown and
aristocracy and the needs of the aristocracy demanded they be able to buy
their way out of murdering common folk but have their precious wealth
protected at all costs. Murder of the ruling class was, obvs a different story
[1]. Among other things the strengthening of the middle class is what slowly,
reverses this.

[1]
[http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/punish.html](http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/punish.html)
{Opening passage of Foucault's Discipline and Punish, recounting the drawing
and quartering of Robert-Francois Damiens for attempted regicide.}

~~~
clairity
i've only read a bit of foucault but one of his fascinating expositions is the
mechanisms of discipline that run through us unconsciously (i've heard it
termed micropower). it's tangentially related to the panopticon, which is what
many people think of in relation to foucault. foucault makes claims that
normative forces (micropower) are more powerful than direct coersion.

micropower breaks down when individuals start othering people (contrasting and
disassociating others from themselves), particularly those we call criminals
(recall zimbardo's prison experiment and milgram's as well). reformation
efforts in the criminal justice system, then, have been focused on replacing
punishment and coercive tactics with rehabilitative ones to bring offenders
back into the fold so that normative forces rather than coercive ones can act
to create social stability.

but our justice system has a ways to go on this front. minor offenses like
petty theft can lead to months/years in prison and acute othering (yet we
don't even prosecute those who brought our financial system to its knees and
millions of livelihoods along with it). instead sentences for most offenses
should not separate offenders by putting them into jail but instead should put
them in the middle of a normative group of people. this surely requires a high
degree of collective empathy and compassion though. but at least we no longer
have debtors prison...

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carsongross
It is depressing, but perhaps expected, that an article about a quantitative
approach to historical analysis includes one anecdote and no additional data.

I was able to dig up this paper:

    
    
      http://www.pnas.org/content/111/26/9419.full
    

which is sufficiently dense to require some time to read and consider.

~~~
blatherard
Looks to me like nautil.us is aiming at a general readership that is
interested in science. Many articles like this gloss over the numbers in favor
of narrative and anecdotes, because that's what's interesting to general
readership. The provides plenty of opportunity to delve deeper by seeking out
the source material, as you have done.

There's many people, myself included who you could send the original paper and
I'd give it a glance and probably leave it. Not because I'm stupid or
uneducated, but because I don't even know if its a paper that says something
new or relevant to the field or has something to offer me as a person. An
article like this makes it much more likely that people will engage the
research by giving me some initial sense.

~~~
r00fus
Shouldn't the Nautil.us article simply have a reference (link enabled)? It's
important for those of us who want to verify the analytical model and what
inspired the ideas. For everyone else, it's a link they wouldn't click.

It's not exactly a new practice in the literary world.

------
jmadsen
Read this just last night and wanted to quote it somewhere:

"For instance, the law of England is much more severe upon offences against
property than against the person, as becomes a people whose ruling passion is
money. A man may half kick his wife to death or inflict horrible sufferings
upon his children at a much cheaper rate of punishment than he can compound
for the theft of a pair of old boots."

"Alan Quartermain", H. Rider Haggard

------
kenjackson
This article could use some nice infographics and charts. The way it is
written makes it hard to see exactly how things have changed over time.

~~~
jessriedel
Agreed. What I would really love to see is whether a "historical economist"
(or whatever those are called) could estimate the statistical value of a human
life as defined by people's own revealed preferences. This is the sort of
calculation where we infer how much each of us values our own lives based on
the amount we are willing to pay to avoid small chances of death. In the US
today, the number is about $8 million now, and is surprisingly consistent
(within a factor of 2) over many possible inference methods.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Life_Value_in_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Life_Value_in_the_US)

(Of course, there are exceptions where people effectively pay rates of many
billion dollars per life to avoid emotionally salient risks, like terrorism.)

The OP article gives the misleading impression that society's changing values
are mostly due to moral progress (presumably arising, I guess, from people
being persuaded by moral arguments, or from certain societal norms taking
hold). But it's almost certainly the case that you can explain the vast
majority of the change by economic developments, especially following the
dramatic rise in per capita wealth starting with the industrial revolution.
The dark implication of this is that if per capita wealth falls drastically in
the future, which is possible depending on technological developments, then we
are likely to see a regression in moral attitudes.

~~~
spatten
Interesting. My take on it is slightly different: it feels like a necessary
condition of economic progress is that you trust that you will get to keep the
fruits of your labours.

The way this happened in our history (I'm assuming that it's not the only way)
is through institutions like The Old Bailey and the codification of laws and
the visibility into the not always completely fair, but always getting fairer,
application of those laws that they provided.

~~~
jessriedel
Well, I agree that certain institutions for law and order appear to be
prerequisites for the sort of economic/technological progress that occurred
during the industrial revolution. And it is plausible (though definitely not
obvious) to me that such institutions really did arise from the slow and
steady accumulation of ideas. But the sacredness of life as compared to
property seems mostly a result of per capital wealth. I'd guess we can find
many times and places in history where there have been periods of predictable
(and reasonably just) law and order, without the sacredness of life.

------
spatten
If you're interested in the main thesis of this article -- that the reason
that our attitudes to violence declined steadily was due to a feedback loop
"feeding the output of the Old Bailey the day before to the input of the Old
Bailey the day after.", I highly recommend "The Better Angels of our Nature"
by Steven Pinker.

~~~
kiba
I read that book. It was very enlightening to say the least.

That being said, my view is in line with the book: cautiously optimistic.

I believe that the domestication of mankind will continue, but that isn't
inevitable. Maybe in the future, the trend will reverse. It's up to us and our
responsibility to ensure that doesn't happen and to accelerate the trend of
less violence over time.

~~~
qnaal
My view is that many people are quite domesticated- traditionally, would you
not agree that society flourishes wherever the strong and fair have the
capacity to exclude the psychopaths?

Unfortunately, domesticated people often somehow get convinced to vote for
open borders.

~~~
sanderjd
Borders are only one way to exclude people from society, and not a very
efficient one if the only goal is to "exclude the psychopaths", which are no
more likely to be on one side of the border than the other.

Or maybe I missed your point?

~~~
jessaustin
qnaal's point, of course, was to derail the interesting conversation HN is
trying to have with some meaningless contingent political bullshit. I envy
you, that such intent wasn't clear upon reading. Suffice to say, there is a
certain class of American political lizard that enjoys pretending there's no
problem we can't solve without some more of that good old-fashioned racism.
Just downvote and move on.

------
C7E0F338E42448
Murder is theft. The worst kind of theft

~~~
chc
Not really. A life is not property. It cannot be acquired or given away. Even
if we were to just go along with it and categorize life as personal property,
a murderer does not take the victim’s life into their possession in any way I
can tell. Murder ends life rather than appropriating it, so murder would be
destruction of property, not theft.

~~~
icebraining
_Even if we were to just go along with it and categorize life as personal
property, a murderer does not take the victim’s life into their possession in
any way I can tell._

That never stopped copyright holders from calling infringement "theft".

~~~
talmand
If the copyright holder is deprived of resources they otherwise would have
received due to the infringement, it is indeed "theft". It wasn't until it
could easily be done on a wide scale that such infringement was a real
concern.

~~~
Karunamon
That's not how it's seen legally. _Dowling_ explicitly made clear the
distinction between theft and infringement. No taking with intent to deprive
== No theft. Copyright is unique in that there's no "taking" when you copy
something.

~~~
talmand
The laws can vary from area to area, but a number of them do refer to
infringement as a form of theft. Any law that refers to the negative impact of
the criminal act to the economy is almost certainly speaking of theft. It
might not be literally spelled out as theft, but in most cases it is. Heck, in
the US there's a law referred to as the Net Act, which stands for No
Electronic Theft Act, that literally names it electronic theft even if there
is no monetary gain.

EDIT: Which upon reading up on this I'm assuming you mean Dowling vs US from
1985. The Net Act I mentioned was passed in 1997. Plus Dowling is strange, it
seems to suggest that copyright infringement isn't theft because the alleged
thief didn't steal the actual copyright and didn't deprive the owner of the
use of the copyright. The decision didn't seem to have anything to do with the
physical materials that were copies, most of which weren't copyrighted to
begin with.

The "taking" is not the copying, that's a truly sad defense. The taking is
depriving the original owner of the resources due them for the time and
resources expended during the creation itself. If they created it then they
have the right to dictate terms in how you consume it. If you don't agree to
the terms then the proper response is to not consume it, not to copy it
outright and make some silly claim that they lost nothing because you made a
digital copy so that they still have the original.

~~~
Karunamon
_Heck, in the US there 's a law referred to as the Net Act, which stands for
No Electronic Theft Act_

This means nothing, and is certainly not a defense to your (and the copyright
lobby's) misuse of the word "theft". There is absolutely no requirement that a
bill amending the USC be titled anything that has to do with what it actually
regulates or contains. The Patriot act has little to do with patriotism...

 _The taking is depriving the original owner of the resources due them for the
time and resources expended during the creation itself._

A good counterpoint to this:

* Inviting a friend or any random person to watch a movie with me: Perfectly legal.

* Inviting a friend etc. to watch my entire collection of movies with me: also perfectly legal.

* Ripping my own DVDs so I don't have to deal with physical media: Arguably legal and fair use.

* Giving that ripped copy to said friend: Copyright violation, and many would argue morally wrong.

* Downloading a copy of a movie I already purchased from a torrent site for whatever reason: Also a copyright violation, but few would argue that this is morally wrong somehow.

Replace "movie" for "song" or "game" and the same argument holds.

Where your logic breaks down is that the net effect to the copyright holder in
every one of those scenarios is the same. Someone else enjoyed some product
without extra compensation being required.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
That's a stretch. The effect to the copyright holder is the same only if the
frequency of the acts is the same. Giving a copy to someone is very easy,
disconnects the time and place of playing completely. Those are easily enough
to disincentivize the friend from buying the movie.

Which is nobody's business but the two friends, right? Sure, if all those
other situations are a right and not a privilege. Socially, people feel they
must be able to share their movies in their own home, and the movie industry
begrudgingly permits this without charging. But when you start giving it away,
the argument that its your business is clearly strained to the breaking point.

~~~
Karunamon
So are we talking about laws or morals here? My stance has always been that
the legal argument carries zero weight for the average person, along the same
lines as the slight speeding that anyone who owns a car has done. Yeah it's
illegal, but who cares? You're not going to be in trouble unless you make a
business out of it.

Morally? Then, admittedly, it's murkier. There's a point to be made there
though that the "damage" the industry always crows about is less of a real
thing (supposed damages higher than the country's GDP, suing networked
printers, that kind of thing.. these are not the actions of rational actors
with facts on their side) and more of an excuse to be made for exerting
greater control over culture. That's getting a bit meta for this thread,
though.

Are we at the moral event horizon? I can only speak for myself: We blew past
it sometime around the Sony Rootkit scandal. Respect is earned, not given
freely - I certainly don't lose any sleep over that blockbuster movie sitting
on my NAS or that EA game I download to ensure it's not garbage before
shelling out $80.

For you and anyone else? Can't speak there. I just wish everyone would stop
conflating legal and moral.

~~~
talmand
I would say that you are mistaking moral and legal issues. It's your moral
right to commit illegal acts because of the Sony rootkit fiasco or other
similar nefarious acts? Really? I guess we can all go rob banks now because of
the financial industry misbehavior over the last few years? We can steal cars
to determine if we like them before dropping twenty or thirty grand?

~~~
Karunamon
And there's the strawman.

~~~
talmand
Is that response in the negative or the positive? I always get confused when
people toss out the fallacy card to answer simple questions. It's not like I
claimed no true Scotsman would commit copyright infringement, they are simple
questions awaiting a yes or no response.

~~~
Karunamon
You went directly for the bank robbery line, which is at the very least
dishonest when talking about copyright infringement.

Your simple questions are loaded and therefore will not be answered.

------
etrevino
So, I did my dissertation on these documents working with these same people. I
don't really have an argument with Dedeo's argument. Now, my work was mostly
qualitative (I tried to infer meaning from the text) than quantitative, but my
work relied heavily on quantitative underpinnings. The only argument I have is
with the title. In 17th, 18th, 19th century England thievery is never
considered worse than murder. Ever. That doesn't mean that people weren't
executed for it, but it's usually under what we would call "aggravating
circumstances". So, a woman who stole something might be pardoned, sent to the
workhouse, or "transported"\-- that is, sent overseas. In fact, if you were a
young and fertile woman you had a better shot at getting out of trouble-- and
the women knew it.

Were people executed for property crimes? Sure they were, but the property
crime could have very well been the precipitating legal event, not necessarily
the larger "social" crime that the person committed. What do I mean? Well,
juries were often a group of men impaneled to sit in on trials throughout the
course of a day. They sometimes knew the defendant, sometimes not. During
trials, a defendant might call character witnesses to his or her defense. The
prosecution might call character witnesses to the character witnesses, and on
and on (though usually this was more effort than anyone put in). Character
witnesses mattered a lot, because it showed that you were viewed as
respectable and therefore clearly not guilty (strains of Calvinism here). If a
nobleman stood for you then your chances were pretty good. Now, if no one
stood for you, or if people came in to defame you for the prosecution, that
showed that you were a transgressive individual. As a transgressor you might
very likely be worthy of death. It's notable that a lot of folks who were
executed in the 17th and 18th centuries would confess to their crimes on the
gallows. And even if they did not confess to the crime for which they were
charged, many would admit that they deserved the punishment for other acts
they committed. So, judgment in a criminal court case is often the judgment of
a person's whole life.

Now, execution was the basic form of punishment in this era because the
options are execution, occasionally a workhouse, transportation, the stocks,
and ... that's about it. Jail (gaol) was only a place to hold people until
they were ready for trial. No one stayed there long term. Okay, well more
gradation is needed for punishments. If a man kills another man in a fight
then he may deserve to die, but he may simply die by hanging. His end may be
gruesome, but if he's viewed as a decent fellow who made a mistake then the
hangman may give him a "drop" that actually breaks his neck or the crowd may
gather around to pull his body down and thus speed his death. The woman who
murders her husband in cold blood was often strangled and then her dead body
was burned at the stake. A premeditated murder could see the dead body
quartered and hung up in his or her's hometown. The important thing here is
what happens to the body _after_ it's dead.

Dedeo's point about the changing nature of society and the role of violence
therein is correct. I don't buy Pinker's argument, really, but what Dedeo
describes here reflects an accurate understanding of the changes in the
English justice system.

A few things worthwhile to know:

* Foucault is the starting point for studying crime, but he's just that, a starting point. His general conclusions are so-so, but he asked really important questions. Anyone who relies on the work of Foucault as a theoretical basis ends up having to expand it to make sure they can derive meaning according to the situation their research is examining.

* We can't talk about class at this point, because this is not a society organized by its relationship to the means of production. We can talk, however, about social orders. There's a lot of gradation and variation on this, but you have a very small elite group and a very large group of commoners. The elite are responsible for justice and protection. The commoners cooperate in this because they believe that the elite (in a general sense) are upholding their responsibilities to fair justice and providing protection. When they disagree this does break down and the elite knew it.

If you have questions, let me know. I'll be in and out all day.

~~~
rictic
Do you have any pointers for someone outside the field to get an overview of
critical responses to Pinker's thesis and work?

~~~
etrevino
This review sums it up pretty well:
[http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1232](http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1232)

------
fiatmoney
You might very well want to punish theft more harshly than murder, because
it's significantly more difficult to find the perpetrator.

