- Position‹2 of 3›
- No, corporal punishment is bad
In choosing corporal punishment, the authority figure makes no effort to understand the motives and emotions behind a person’s actions. For this reason, it is a superficial punishment that damages emotional wellbeing.
The argument
The objection concerns what corporal punishment leaves undone rather than the pain it inflicts. When corporal punishment is administered, no attempt is made to understand the emotional factors that went into the transgressive behaviour. The student, child, or lawbreaker is simply told that the behaviour they exhibited is unacceptable, and this message is reinforced through bodily pain. The whole intervention is contained in the delivery of a verdict, and nothing in it requires anybody to establish why the behaviour occurred. That matters because behaviour of this kind ordinarily has causes, and the causes are what determine whether it happens again. People act out of frustration, fear, distress, or an inability to manage a situation they have no other way of handling, and none of those states is altered by being told that the resulting conduct is forbidden. The person may understand the prohibition perfectly well, and understand it more vividly for having been hurt, while remaining in exactly the condition that produced the conduct in the first place. This does nothing to address the underlying causes of that behaviour. The consequence follows directly. Without addressing these causes the person is likely to exhibit the same behaviour again, which means the punishment fails on its own terms: it is administered in order to stop something, and it leaves untouched the thing that generates it. Repetition is then usually met with further punishment, so the exchange continues without either party learning anything about its source, and the relationship between them comes to consist of the cycle itself. What is required instead, on this account, is that attempts be made to improve the emotional understanding behind a transgression, since only an intervention that reaches the cause can change what follows from it.
Context
Society functions best when authority figures attempt to emotionally understand their subordinates. The good parent understands the child’s emotional space. The teacher understands the reason behind their student’s misbehaviour, and the boss understands the employee's sub-par performance. Corporal punishment hinders this understanding.
Premises
Counter-arguments
We don't necessarily need an emotional understanding of bad behaviour to correct it. If a dog eats its food when it has been told to "leave" it and it receives a hit on the nose, it will modify its behaviour. This behavioural modification wasn't induced by a deep emotional understanding of the reasons why the dog chose to ignore its instructions, or by an emotional understanding within the dog for the reasons why it wasn't allowed to eat the food. Demonstrating that this action, will invoke this painful response is sufficient for maintaining law and order.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] We don't need to understand the emotional causes of bad behaviour to correct it.