Thoughts on Damages and Penance

In most instances in the United States, punitive damages (extra monetary awards meant to punish the payer) are capped at three times the actual damages.  Many people are offended by this idea because if a person is wealthy enough, the cap on punitive damages arguably prevents the damages from fulfilling their punitive function.  For example, imagine that person A causes person B an injury worth $100,000.  The punitive damages for such an injury would be capped at $300,000 and this would be a significant sum to most people.  Yet if person A has a net worth of millions or billions of dollars he might not be fazed by a $400,000 fine.  Depending on what the nature of the injury and the guilty party’s intent or negligence, such an award could be inappropriately small.

Even so, there are disadvantages to having no cap on punitive damages.  One of those disadvantages is having personal injury lawyers deliberately hunt for rich defendants.  Most people would agree that such a situation would be unfair.  It could also “widen the field” re: the debate on damages that must take place during negotiations.  The plaintiff and the defendant would be negotiating over vastly different sums, which would make trials longer and settlements less likely.  For reasons like these, the courts have capped punitive damages at three times the actual damages or even less in some cases.

To put this into perspective, debate over the proper form punishments should take is not a new issue.  Past societies sometimes followed the rule of talion or “eye for an eye”.  This philosophy is still alive today; for example, the death penalty is applied to murderers.  Even so, it is not economically or socially efficient to apply talion in every case.  People do not always have an equivalent thing which they can suffer being taken from them and even when they do, putting out everyone’s eyes can have negative long-term results.  As such, economic damages (and/or jail time) are used in almost every case and those damages tend to be capped.

There is one other form of punishment used besides economic damages, jail time and rare applications of talion: community service.  Community service has as a unique advantage as a punishment in that it is equally costly to everyone.  Whether a person is rich or poor, their time is worth relatively the same to them as anyone else’s.  While this is also true of being put in jail, people in jail cost the public money and people who are doing community service are saving the public money.  Some states have been creative in applying community service but they could go further.  Economic damages have a vastly different impact upon people with different levels of wealth.  It is not truly enough to say that some people are harmed by economic damages and a minority are not; the reality is that everyone is harmed differently by them and the message this sends is that the rich are better than the poor.  A fairer system would be if punitive damages did not exist at all and if all punitive punishments had to be completed through community service.  Such a policy might even cross the line from punishment into penance, the latter state being an ideal reaction on behalf of any guilty party.  It would also slightly reduce hard feelings and resentment over lost court cases since any good person would resent needing to fulfill community service less than they would having to pay a burdensome fine.  Finally, instead of costing the community things, tort lawsuits might begin to benefit the community through the steady stream of community service workers it would produce.

What is Meaning? How to find Meaning?

The search for meaning is the search for something extra-normal.  Unless a person is very (for lack of a better word) shallow, they can never find a permanent sense of meaning in physical acts.  For as soon as any act becomes normal, it has lost its extra-normality and therefore it begins to feel meaningless.  The search for a permanent source of extra-normality is fundamentally spiritual in nature.  For most if not all people it must come from religion.  This is because the search for permanent extra-normality means transcending the “normal self” and replacing it with an “extra-normal” self.  Seeking a permanent sense of extra-normality from external things is an attempt to satisfy something that fundamentally cannot be satisfied (the self) because this self is a normal thing and not extra-normal by nature.  As such, any externality associated with it is brought down to that same base level and transforms from being extra-normal to being merely normal.

In contrast, when a person has achieved “transcendence” their normal self is replaced with an extra-normal self.  Their previous goals and interests are largely replaced with new goals and interest.  When they do bring a thing to themselves, that other thing is viewed as presumptively normal (for it is material) instead of presumptively extra-normal merely because it is new.  When they associate this presumptively normal thing with their extra-normal self, a curious thing happens.  Instead of reducing the faux extra-normal (merely new) activity down to their normal level, any presumptively (and truly) normal thing is elevated by their extra-normal nature.  This is for practical purposes the reverse of the experience that normal people have.  Normal people sometimes become unable to enjoy even fantastic things for long, whereas an “enlightened guru” can find greater joy sitting in a chair or even through something like meditation, even though to normal people meditation appears the be doing nothing.

One of the most pressing challenges we face today is that we are often discouraged from seeking out a permanent sense of meaning.  Subjects like fertility, the acquisition of power and spirituality are treated as unpopular, politically incorrect or to some degree even illegal (depending on where you live).  By extension, any meaningful statements are treated the same as these goals are treated.  That is because these are traditional paths towards finding a lasting sense of meaning.

A truly successful and powerful person has the option or ability to see themselves as part of a larger whole.  This cannot be done without some form of cognizable kinship.  It need not be a physical kinship (as America’s success proved) but it must at least be cognizable, rational and somehow spiritual if it lacks a physical aspect.  Otherwise the sense of meaning will grow stale and be replaced by disinterest or, in a worst case scenario, a shallow form of lust in which increasingly smaller joys are pried forth from a spiritually dead thing.  Modern Americans are increasingly severed from spirituality and their country becomes increasingly genetically diverse.  Much is said about equality and the fight against “political polarization” (as if that is the problem and not a symptom) but levels of empathy for fellow citizens drop steadily despite these platitudes.  Many modern Americans cannot conceive of why they would want to associate with other Americans who disagree with them.  This should not be surprising.  The fetishizing of “equality” has reached such a high note that it is assumed people who share no cognizable interests will want to be equal with each other and this will never work.

The answer as usual would be to offer a unified religion.  Nationalism used to do this to a limited degree but it also relied upon genetic similarity.  Without even that nationalism and patriotism are clearly dying in the west.  I don’t think there is a solution to this for the west, eventually people will admit they have nothing in common and stop cooperating with each other whenever there is no profit to be made.  Individually people can still seek out a lasting sense of meaning for themselves but they first need a clear understanding of what that is.