When Theft Was Worse Than Murder

http://nautil.us/issue/12/feedback/when-theft-was-worse-than-murder

by dnetesn • 12 years ago

99 49 12 years ago

kenjackson• 12 years ago

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.

jessriedel2• 12 years ago

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...

(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.

spatten2• 12 years ago

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.

innguest• 12 years ago

If you are interested in how much people have valued a human life, in money units, throughout history, I can give you at least one recommendation.

Medieval Iceland lived for 300 years without a government. Murder was punished by fine or exile, or becoming a slave or worse, an outlaw, if they refused to pay their debt to the victim's kin. This period is very well documented. Maybe you could find the exact value murderers were fined. That would give us a data point for 1000 years ago.

a-nikolaev• 12 years ago

Agreed. About a week ago, there was an article about artificial ligth, and the authors were listing the prices of lamp oil in ancient times, the price of candles 1-2 cenuries ago, and modern electricity. The improvement of our live compared to the past was remarkable.

The same probably applies to the social norms. The brain of human beings could not change too much in such a short period of time. So, most likely we did not become intrisically better. Yes, the social norms were improved significantly, but mostly thanks to the improvement of the quality of life.

I think, it's all about utility. Killing a person does not necessarily makes the murderer richer, most likely not; on the other hand, stealing something actually makes the thief richer, so the law in the past had to take coutermeasures. Nowdays, police works better, it's likely that you will be caught if you steal something, so the utility of stealing is pretty low, and the risk is high. On the other hand, a murder is frequently not about money, but hatred and personal relationships, this motive is less rational, and the utility of a murder can be rather high, even if it's likely that you will be caught. Of course, I did not do any analysis..

And it is very pleasing for us to think that we are much better than we were in the past, and out moral standards are higher compared to the crazy stuff we did before. But this bragging is just a reiteration of the words of William Blackstone cited in the article. In fact, we are not better, we just live in different time, and it is rather stupid to assume that just a few centuries ago we were less rational and less optimal. Most likely, the old cruel law was great and optimal in that historical period.

lovemenot• 12 years ago

> The OP article gives the misleading impression that society's changing values are mostly due to moral progress ... But it's almost certainly the case that you can explain the vast majority of the change by economic developments

Not to refute your point, but there is a further interesting dynamic described in the article: feedback. English legal practice is based on precedent in common law. There is a ratchet effect whereby past rulings influence: subsequent rulings; behaviour (morality) of citizens; perhaps too, laws subsequently enacted by those citizens' elected leaders.

I suspect the OP, who is connected to the Santa Fe institute, is interested in exploring such an emergent system.

dreamweapon• 12 years ago

That color sketch of the goings-on at Old Bailey was way cooler than any infographic.

jessaustin2• 12 years ago

Who was that standing up front in the white Empire gown? Lady Justice? I'm more accustomed to her portrayed as looking down than as looking up... Even if they deny her motion, with those Popeye arms she can take the law into her own hands.

spatten2• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

qnaal2• 12 years ago

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.

C7E0F338E42448• 12 years ago

Murder is theft. The worst kind of theft

chc• 12 years ago

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.

trhway• 12 years ago

Not really. A life is not property.

Life of other sentient beings, like dogs or apes, still considered a property. Wrongly so of course.

It cannot be acquired or given away.

only for about next 20 or so years until upload and cloned bodies become accessible. The killer (or his insurance) will have to cover repairs or replacement cost in case of "total", and be charged with intentional property destruction if it was intentional.

wyager• 12 years ago

Life can not be acquired or given away more than once (with current technology).

But that's not what property means to everyone. For me, property is something that is owned privately, and I claim private ownership of my life.

icebraining3• 12 years ago

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".

carsongross• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

skybrian• 12 years ago

But that doesn't fully explain it. There are other popular sites that do include charts and graphs. (Take Vox, Priceonomics, or FiveThirtyEight.) Perhaps this is a deliberate choice of the Nautil.us editors to appear more literary?

Steko• 12 years ago

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 {Opening passage of Foucault's Discipline and Punish, recounting the drawing and quartering of Robert-Francois Damiens for attempted regicide.}

clairity• 12 years ago

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...

etrevino3• 12 years ago

Okay, okay, okay. No no. I did my dissertation on these exact same documents working with these same people.

This is NOT about upholding a class-based system. The elite could not and did not buy their way out of anything any more than a base criminal could. A wealthy elite may be able to hide a crime more effectively, but once the crime was known it was extraordinarily important for the elite to be seen as fair arbiters. Here's the deal: the elite knew that they were ruling with the consent of the lower orders (classes don't come in as a useful classification tool until the rise of the Bourgeoisie), so they were concerned to preserve their status as the dispensers of justice. This meant that in many ways an elite charged with a crime would be held to a higher standard than your typical commoner and the punishment may be more aggravated.

Check out the case of the Earl Ferrers. He's a great example of an elite figure facing the same punishment as everyone else.

(to expand on your Foucault example: an attempted murder of the king is not the same as an attempted murder of a nobleman. The king was considered God's representative on Earth. Foucault's point, in any case, was about the aggravated nature of the punishment.)

fiatmoney• 12 years ago

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

jmadsen• 12 years ago

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

etrevino3• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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

etrevino3• 12 years ago

This review sums it up pretty well: http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1232

When Theft Was Worse Than Murder

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