Hedonism Essay ⋆ Criminal Justice Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The term hedonism derives from the ancient Greek word hēdonē, which means “pleasure.” Hedonists hold that pleasure is the highest, or only, intrinsic good. In the realm of criminal justice, hedonism underlies many of the classical theories of human behavior, which was assumed to be based on a desire to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. The work of Cesare Beccaria (1738–94) and Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the founders of classical criminology, was based on a conception of criminals as following a principle of rational choice: a free-will decision based on weighing the pleasures and pains likely to result from their action, which would dictate whether they engage in crime or deviance.

Two relevant forms of hedonism are psychological hedonism and ethical hedonism. Psychological hedonism (also known as motivational hedonism) is the theory that the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain is in fact what all human activity is directed toward. Ethical hedonism is the normative claim that people not only do, but also ought to seek pleasure and avoid pain, since pleasure is the only good, and pain the only evil.

Some of the best-known hedonists include ancient Greek philosophers such as Epicurus and the Cyrenaics, and utilitarian philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Others who have contributed to debates about hedonism include Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, George Edward Moore, Henry Sidgwick, William James, Sigmund Freud, Sir William David Ross, C. D. Broad, Gilbert Ryle, Robert Nozick, and Michel Onfray.

Among the ancient hedonists, Epicurus provided the most fully fledged system. He argued that the way to achieve freedom from mental disturbance (ataraxia) and physical distress (aponia) was not by seeking to fulfill any and all desires that arise in individuals, but by regulating their desires and limiting them to those that are natural, necessary, and easy to satisfy without risking harm.

In the criminal justice sphere, jurist and philosopher Cesare Beccaria’s 1764 Dei Delitti e Delle Penne (On Crimes and Punishment) argued for reforms to the criminal justice system on the basis of a crime’s harm to society as a whole rather than the harm to individual victims. He reasoned that punishment will be more effective if it is more certain and immediate and that the greatest crime deterrent is, thus, a system of punishment that is swift and certain, as well as clear and easy to understand. The theory profoundly influenced the penal systems of many countries, encouraging consistency and codification in sentencing. The purpose of the criminal justice system, for Beccaria, is to prevent crime through deterrence, rather than focusing on punishment simply or primarily as a response to crime. Later criticism focused on such a system’s lack of sensitivity to the differences between how offenders respond to punishment, as well as a lack of recognition of the need for judges’ discretion in sentencing. The decisions of judges and juries can take into account the public face of trial and punishment, and the social recognition of rapid and effective trial and punishment can act as a deterrent in itself.

The idea of measuring the expected pleasure and pain of a potential action, and acting according to the outcome of that calculation, would come to underlie Jeremy Bentham’s “felicific calculus” (also known as the hedonic calculus), used as part of his proposed reforms to punishment. Bentham theorized that if criminals rationally weigh the potential pleasure of their actions against the potential pain, a system that graduated the pain of punishments to match the expected pleasure of a crime would prove an effective deterrent and produce maximal social utility. As part of his wider utilitarian theory, Bentham developed tables of crimes and correlating punishments, working on the principle that the pain in the outcome of the calculus need only be marginally higher in order to effectively deter potential criminals.

Bentham’s theory came under criticism due in part to its assumptions of rationality on the one hand, and a correlation between the seriousness of a crime and the potential gain to a criminal on the other. The felicific calculus assumes that potential criminals weigh the expected outcome of their actions in a deliberate and lucid way, which fails to take into account the impulsive, emotionally charged context for much crime. The graduated scale of punishment assumes that the more serious the crime, the more a criminal has to gain, when in fact the seriousness of the harm caused by a crime may not correlate with the expected gain of the criminal.

By the early 20th century, mainstream criminology had discarded these theories, claiming that the idea that people lead such calculating lives is untenable. The dominant current in crime theory came to include the idea that crime is often spontaneous and irrational, and that pleasure and pain calculations about the outcome of criminal behavior are not feasibly attributable to most criminals. Instead, hedonism came to underlie theories of the pathology of crime in positivist criminology and sociology, relying on the idea that criminals are unable to control their desire for pleasure and exhilaration or defer gratification through self-control.

Hedonism continues to play a role in modern criminological theory. By 1964, Hans Eysenck linked criminal behavior with extroversion (outgoing behavior) and neuroticism (unstable behavior) as part of the outcome of his personality questionnaire. He regarded offending as natural and rational, showing that extrovert personalities required greater stimulation to attain thrill and reacted weakly to pleasurable rewards and painful punishments. It was argued that they therefore seek stronger stimuli and are harder to deter, making them more likely to commit criminal acts. A neuropsychologized version of hedonism still underlies this theory. Rather than the felicific calculus, the desire to achieve pleasure over pain is attributable to the function of the brain of the criminal whose thrill-seeking behavior and weak moral self-control lead to crime. The strength of the conscience was appealed to in order to explain why everyone is not criminal.

In 1988, Jack Katz argued that criminology should extend the scope of the sources of a criminal’s pleasure-seeking behavior to include such thrills as the euphoric excitement of accomplishing a crime, righteous slaughter, and/or a larger commitment to a hedonistic lifestyle. Katz’s postmodern understanding of criminal hedonism pits these behaviors against a background of the mundane nature of modern life.

In 1990, Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi developed what can be seen as a modern version of the classical explanation for criminal behavior in their self-control theory of delinquency. They argued that all crime is the result of an individual’s tendency to pursue direct, short-term gratification, with little concern for the long-term consequences of their actions, based on a self-interested pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain.

Since 2000, hedonism has played a role in the rise of theories of cultural criminology and the carnival of crime that attempt to explain the rise in violent crime and hate crime with appeal to criminals’ search for a hedonistic “second life” wherein crime and deviance provide catharsis and an escape from the mundane.

Despite criticism, hedonism continues to play a role in criminal justice theory, albeit with its explanatory limitations, including lack of sensitivity to context, class, gender, and age more clearly in view.

Bibliography:

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