Social sanction

“ If the criterion of sanction or coercion is insufficient to draw a distinction between individual and social laws, we can still less use it to divide the social laws into customs or unwritten laws, and political and juridical laws. Both customs and laws carry with them sanctions, though of a different order, or, to put it in more precise terms, both offer a choice between probable consequences to the free individual will. ”

“ The gods inevitably become protectors of social justice.
To the personification of the law, religious morals inevitably joined that of the sanction which plays so capital a rôle in every human society. The celestial government has always been a projection of the human government, with a penalty at first terrible and subsequently softened. To say the truth, the theory of a sanction is the systematization of that of a providence. ”

“ The sanction upon which social life reposes is, in our moral theory, the legal punishment enforceable in our Courts, and the basis presupposed for the security and material happiness of our citizens is the possession of goods which shall guarantee us from anxiety and permit us an independence of action in the midst of our fellowmen. ”

“ The powers that impose the obligatory sanction are Law and Society, or the community acting through the Government by public judicial acts, and apart from the Government by the unofficial expressions of disapprobation and the exclusion from social good offices". ”

“ It may originate in a body of social sanctions, but it is hardly political power until these sanctions are implemented with a police force. In any case, it is exercised by human beings and therefore must be related to the all-pervasive law of human action, the drive to get the most for the least. ”

“ It is obvious that all the rules, which were enumerated above as likely to be useful in almost any state of society, can also be defended owing to results which they produce under conditions which exist only in particular states of society. And it should be noticed that we are entitled to reckon among these conditions the sanctions of legal penalties, of social disapproval, and of private remorse, where these exist. ”

“ For under 'society' what is not included! Sanction society, and you sanction, or at least you admit the possibility of a sanction for every kind of common activity and end; and the motives of men in undertaking these common activities become a matter of comparative indifference. ”

“ Founded in violence, sustained only by violence, such a wrong must by a sure law of compensation blast the master as well as the slave; blast the lands on which they live; blast the community of which they area part; blast the Government which does not forbid the outrage; and the longer it exists and the more completely it prevails, must its blasting influences penetrate the whole social system. ”

“ The modern judges for himself—makes his own laws, as a god, knowing good and evil. No doubt in time a new social law will emerge—with new sanctions. Meanwhile, here we are, in a moment of transition, manufacturing new types, exploring new combinations—by which let those who come after profit! ”

“ If a glance is cast over the assemblage called to the ordeal, how mean and trivial are the vociferations in defence of property, the threats of revenge for light, the boast of physical force, the appeal to the compromises which constitute the defects of human law! How low and how sad appear the mercenary interests, the social fears, the clerical blindness or cowardice, the morbid fastidiousness of those who, professing the same principles with the abolitionists, are bent upon keeping those principles for ever an abstraction! ”

“ If the criminal asks, How do you justify yourself for punishing me? the reply must be, Because the inflexible administration of the law is an essential precondition of the whole system, under which alone progress is possible. A society in which peace and order are preserved is superior, in morals as in other respects, to a society in which peace and order are made impossible by violence; and the suppression by punishment of offenders is involved in the system. ”

“ This travesty of the law by those who had been in its clutches revealed a vicious psychology lost to all shame and decency, but was also a condemnation of society which produced such types of men and women, for the most part victims of slum life, foul surroundings, and evil upbringing, tolerated, and indeed created, by the social system of England. ”

“ There is too much crime, too much killing, too much hatred in this country. If the legislatures could eradicate these elements from our lives by utilizing capital punishment, then there would be a valid purpose for the sanction and the public would surely accept it. ”

“ The construction of a central authority which will keep the peace is a necessary part of the process of civilisation, and the criminal law is involved in the process. For, of course, it follows that, so long as anti-social elements exist within the borders of society, and some people resort to the old methods of the knife or the bludgeon, they must be put down; and the hangman and the jailer, clumsy as the action may be, represent the only kind of machinery which has hitherto been invented for the purpose. ”

“ The more we study the question, the more we are brought to the conclusion that society itself is responsible for the anti-social deeds perpetrated in its midst, and that no punishment, no prisons, and no hangmen can diminish the numbers of such deeds; nothing short of a reorganisation of society itself. Three-quarters of all the acts which are brought every year before our courts have their origin, either directly or indirectly, in the present disorganised state of society with regard to the production and distribution of wealth—not in the perversity of human nature. ”

“ Whether the regulation be formally made by a legislature, or informally made by society at large—whether the penalty for disobedience be imprisonment, or frowns and social ostracism, he sees to be a question of no moment. ”

“ In addition to all other reasons, the honor of our nation, and the cause of free institutions should plead with us to defend the laws from insult, and social order from subversion. The moral influence and reputation of our country are fast declining abroad. ”

“ All countries, from the most despotic to the most liberal, from the most conservative to the most radical, have left this question of the social evil to the police, and have not dared, through their legislative bodies, to thoroughly consider and pass laws to eradicate it. ”

“ Does the political sanction exert an influence over the conduct of mankind? The moral, the religious sanctions do so too. In every inch of his career are the operations of the political magistrate liable to be aided or impeded by these two foreign powers: who, one or other of them, or both, are sure to be either his rivals or his allies. ”

“ Now, we never can annihilate a penalty. We can only divert it from the head of the man who has incurred it to the heads of others who have not incurred it. A vast amount of "social reform" consists in just this operation. ”

“ For a positive and detailed criterion of just punishment, we must wait till a system of rights has been established in which the claims of all men, as founded on their capacities for contributing to social well-being, are perfectly harmonised, and till experience has shown the degree and kind of terror with which men must be affected in order to the suppression of the anti-social tendencies which might lead to the violation of such a system of rights. ”

“ It is, however, generally believed and held that to sanction anything of the sort would be to loosen the bonds of society, to sap the foundations of morality and to produce certain disastrous consequences not clearly defined but probably all the more dreaded on that account. ”

“ And last, though not least, to this end, too, is directed the effort to purge society of social evils, such as drinking and litigiousness, and of the sin of untouchability which condemns a vast proportion of the population to a position worse than that of lower animals. ”

“ Society without such a collective determination to resent and punish anti-social acts would be a welter of anarchy and disorder. Let us not then be tempted in the goodness of our hearts, and in the strength of our human pity and sympathy, to overlook the necessary foundation of punishment, which is the assertion of the system of rights by pain or penalty—not pain in its physical sense, but pain that comes from degradation and the loss of self-respect. ”

“ I hope we shall never be so totally lost to all sense of the duties imposed upon us by the law of social union, as, upon any pretest of public service, to confiscate the goods of a single unoffending citizen. ”

“ No agitators, no clubs, no epidemical errors, ever were, or will be, fatal to social order in any nation. Nothing but the guilt of the upper classes, wanton, accumulated, reckless, and merciless, ever overthrows them Of such guilt they have now much to answer for—let them look to it in time. ”

“ But a great majority of the spectators are so bound up in the interests and the habits of social union that no temptation would be sufficiently strong to induce them to a commission of the enormities to which this penalty is assigned. The more powerful, the richer among them,—and a numerous class of little tradesmen are richer and more powerful than those who are employed by them, and the employer, in general, bears this relation to the employed,—regard their own wrongs as, in some degree, avenged, and their own rights secured by this punishment, inflicted as the penalty of whatever crime. ”

“ While groups are bargaining about their rights, their official advisers and lawmakers are skimming the cream off the milk. Not justice, but social injustice is the incentive of these worthy gentlemen. ”

“ And the same may be said of large classes in our own society, which are perfectly capable of being converted into good citizens, though they may retain certain propensities developed under a rougher and more brutal system. To employ excessive and brutalising punishments in order to suppress small offences, is, therefore, to abandon the aim of civilising, to declare internecine war against the class, and to regard them simply as a nuisance to be abated. ”

“ By a carefully devised and properly graduated system of penalties each citizen is thus furnished with the strongest inducement to refrain from those acts which may injure or annoy his neighbour. Another characteristic of the legal sanction is that, though it is professedly addressed to all citizens alike, it actually affects the uneducated and lower classes far more than the educated and higher classes of society. ”

“ Suppose the House of Commons and the Lords Temporal and Spiritual obtained the royal sanction to an act for kidnapping boys and grilling them daily for a table-d'hôte in their respective legislative assemblies, would such an atrocity—or any worse atrocity, if such be possible—in any respect alter the question of right and wrong between master and slave? Let any charge of cruelty or injustice in England be advanced on its own simple grounds, and, wherever it comes from, it will find plenty of people, I am proud and happy to say, ready to inquire into it and to work hard for its removal ”

“ Separate interests, goaded on by an avarice, awakened by unjust laws, and rendered unconscious of guilt, by the sanction of the statute book, have filled the old world with crimes, and perverted the primitive end of society to secure property, by making it the instrument for its invasion. ”

“ Could we imagine a society in which prison or pillory carried no hint of shame, caused no forfeiture of public esteem, no loss of religious peace, no wound to self-respect—and this is the case of political offenders in many countries—its legal penalties would have just the deterrence they would have in the hands of brigands pirates, invaders or despots. It is when this wholesome alliance between society and the police is broken that virtue departs out of the law and it ceases to bind men. ”

“ Certain alarmists will exclaim that such an alteration in our manners would bring about a public dissoluteness which would be frightful; that the laws, and the customs which prompt the laws, could not after all authorize scandal and immorality; and if certain unavoidable abuses do exist, at least society ought not to sanction them. ”

“ Consequently we find, that in all well governed states, wholesome laws have been enacted to restrain those, who disturb those opinions, which have always been regarded as the chief support of social order; and all contempt, shewn to those opinions, has always been considered as contempt shewn to society itself, which it consequently has a right to punish. ”

“ The 'physical' sanctions are such pleasures and pains as follow a given course of conduct independently of the interference of any other human or supernatural being; the 'political' those which are annexed by the action of the legislator; the 'moral or popular' those which are annexed by other individuals not acting in a corporate capacity ”

“ If the Rulers will not attempt to abolish a social system [232] opposed to the feelings of natural affection by the denunciation of the severest temporal penalties, the good sense of the people who are victimised by it must be appealed to for its total suppression. ”

“ The Will to Power (for which the State still stands) must always lag behind the Will to Love in its [Pg 44] understanding of human nature. And while it lags behind the penal code of the State will always be a drag upon the social conscience.
Now so far we have been considering this doctrine of punishment in relation to the criminal section of society—force and punitive treatment being necessary, we say, for the discipline and control of the waste products of our civilisation. But in the whole body politic what does it all come to? ”