Session 3a:  Equality, Punishment, Therapy
Chair: Rachel Waterstradt


Punishment as the Legitimate Use of State Power
Aysel Doğan
Department of Philosophy, University of Kocaeli, Izmit, Turkey

Mill argues that freedom of a person can justifiably be restricted if and only if he or she attempts to inflict harm on others. That is, the condition of being incurred to harm is the essential criterion of justifiably interfering with individuals’ actions. Under any other circumstances, it is illegitimate to use power to confine a person’s actions—even for the good of the person himself—according to Mill. By contrast to Mill’s contention, I argue that the state may reasonably interfere with an individual’s actions even for the good of the individual, and such interference may be compatible with the idea of individual autonomy.

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The Technology of Individual Responsibility in the Life Cycle Arrangement
Anja Eleveld

In 2006 a new law, the life cycle arrangement, was introduced in the Dutch law. In this new law workers are fiscally facilitated to save a part of their income in order to finance a (tax facilitated) leave, for all kind of purposes.
Though the law was initiated by the aim of  reconciliation of work and family life, according to the life cycle arrangement the worker doesn’t have to explain why he takes a leave. Probably this ‘neutral’  arrangement will result in maternity leaves for women and earlier retirement for men. Besides, this arrangement  embodies a reform of social security law which instead of aiming for equality, increasingly emphasizes individual responsibility. It is curious how emancipation of women has resulted in a diminishment of social protection based on solidarity and has lead to an increase of the inequalities between men and women. The author will try to explain this outcome by analyzing the legislation process. It  will be shown how divergent groups were united in one discourse coalition in support of the live cycle arrangement. The method of discourse analysis will further be used to analyze the process of reframing of the value of equality.  Finally, it will be discussed in what way the lifecycle arrangement, can be conceived as a Foucaultian governmental technology, now workers are being directed at becoming rational life planners.  

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Therapeutic Death
Ruth Miller
Department of History, University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA

This paper will explore the therapeutic potential of capital punishment in the United States.  A number of recent US Supreme Court rulings have suggested that the death penalty might be incorporated into a broader jurisprudence of rehabilitation, pedagogy, and cure.  Scholarship on these decisions has for the most part read them as disingenuous at best and a ghoulish parody of medicine at worst.  The medicalization of the death penalty, for example, has frequently been described as an attempt to circumvent the moral questions surrounding capital punishment by transforming the moment of death into a medical operation.  The link between psychiatric therapy and death has likewise been seen as a doomed attempt on the part of the state to privilege both its duty to keep prisoners healthy and its duty to carry out punishment.  These latter analyses argue that the Supreme Court has ignored—deliberately or not—the logical absurdity of death as the endpoint to therapy.
I want to take a slightly different approach in this essay.  Rather than assuming that these recent decisions obscure or ignore the contradictions inherent in desiring both the health and the death of a convicted prisoner, I am going to take the Supreme Court at its word.  I want to argue, in other words, that the death penalty has in fact become therapeutic in the United States.  Moreover, the reason that the Supreme Court has been so concerned with defining certain subjects as death-competent (“sane”) and certain subjects as death-incompetent (“insane”), I will suggest, is precisely that only the sane can benefit from the therapeutic benefits of legal execution.  In order to undergo the therapeutic transformation promised by the death penalty, that is, the subject of this therapy must start from a position of competence—of understanding the meaning of capital punishment as cure.