Session 4(a): Violence, Imagination and Positive Reinforcement

Session 4A: Violence, Imagination and Positive Reinforcement
Chair: Christian Bundegaard

Violence and Evil: Imaginative Creativity
Rob Fisher
Inter-Disciplinary.Net, United Kingdom

The language of evil is often used in relation to violent actions and events. The question is: on what grounds is it possible to call violent actions evil? I will argue that ‘evil’ becomes appropriate to characterise certain kinds of violence. Violent evil is
a) unique but not exclusive to us as a species
b) is an act of intelligence which
c) demands creativity and
d) expresses imagination so as to be
e) personally satisfying

I will demonstrate, in the giving of the paper, the violently evil imagination at work!

Belief in the value of punishment is older than Exodus 21:23 (“eye for eye . . . bruise for bruise”) or Leviticus 23:19-22 (“If a man injures his neighbour, just as he has done, so it shall be done to him”) and its refutation is as old as Matthew 5:38-48 (“resist not evil”; “turn the other cheek”.) But in contemporary culture, punishment takes on added significance. Studies indicate that capital punishment in the United States, for example, is not only not a deterrent to crime, but in states in which it is practiced, crime and recidivism occur at higher rates. Justifications for punishment as a means of revenge are dubious as well.
The inverse of punishment is reward, and belief in its value is almost universal, but the consequences of reward systems have begun to be criticized as ineffective and even harmful (A. Kohn, Punished by Rewards).
This paper is a criticism of the concept of human nature that lies beneath the notion of punishment and reward systems, both in institutionalized forms and in informal means of overt behaviour modification. Behavioural psychologists assert that human beings have no real inner life or even mind, or at least not one that can be studied on its own. Yet they posit that humans supposedly “learn” appropriate behaviour through positive and negative reinforcement (reward and punishment). While humans appear to behaviourists to “avoid suffering” and “pursue pleasure” it begs the question to say this behaviour is “appropriate.” I explore the question of what else humans learn from systems of rewards and punishments and argue that not only does punishment as a sanctioned but unjustified practice of violence teach falsehoods about humanity, but also that rewards teach lassitude toward punishment and violence and that the practice of reward is a betrayal of human nature.