Today’s episode of Dr. Phil was all about vigilante justice. As someone very interested in non-vigilante justice, this is, of course, of great interest to me. Furthermore, while the issue may not be at the forefront of contemporary political dialogue, it does at least weave through many current controversies—from immigration and the “minute men” border guards to Guantanamo Bay where the U.S. government can hold prisoners without trials. See Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 (2004). What is so interesting about Dr. Phil’s take on the subject is that it’s absolutely insane, unsupported by the vast cannon of Western philosophy, and downright dangerous. Perhaps it isn’t so unique after all. But when I saw yesterday’s sneak peak with individuals pulling people out of cars and pushing them, or beating them, I really figured Phil would give these people their come uppings. After all, when it comes to drug addicts, abusive spouses, child predators, and even people who are bad neighbors, Phil gives them his special treatment. One dose of derision, a condescension drip, a shot of common sense, and a prescription for changing their deplorable lives. Today, when we met an old woman who, as a dissatisfied Comcast customer, went into their office and smashed telephones and computers with a hammer, next being introduced to a man who spotted a suspected drunk driver rolling down the highway and boxed him off the road with his truck, only to tackle and physically restrain the supposedly inebriated man. How did Phil react? With praise, admiration, and cheer. Only on the rarest occasion did he criticize any of the guests’ actions or motivations and, even then, it was in the most casual and subtle of ways. There are justifications for vigilante justice, of course. Law enforcement resources are limited, they can’t be everywhere, and it seems innately unjust that two identical crimes and criminals could meet two disparate fates simply because one failed to get caught. On the other hand, being addicted to drugs or abusing spouses are actions which involve the violations of one or two specific laws, while vigilante justice, in itself, runs against all laws. Perhaps this is not clear. Let’s reference chapter 28 of Thomas Hobbes’s famous work, The Leviathan, which outlined the first conception of the social contract. In Hobbes definition of punishment he writes “neither private revenges, nor injuries of private men, can properly be styled punishment; because they proceed not from public authority.” One could argue that this simply means that private actions may resemble punishment, without actually entailing punishment. Yet this does not seem to be the author’s intent. After all, Hobbes writes that members of a government “assist him that hath the sovereignty, in the punishing of another.” This assistance is not by way of actually contacting those punished in any direct way, however, but rather through all of society consenting to the sovereignty of a public power. Hobbes is quite to the point about the dangers of what Dr. Phil terms vigilante justice when he writes: “the fact for which a man is punished, ought first to be judged by public authority, to be a transgression of the law.” In the case of the angry, old woman—who was also the most boastful—it is clear that, without a trial, and without public authority, a single citizen has, in the name of justice, levied her own punishment. This has the appearance of being somewhat just, but only when one forgets that the woman is, in fact, overlooking public departments, non-governmental organizations, and alternative private providers, to say nothing of sovereignty and the big picture of justice. Even more ominously, she has committed her own crime—admittedly destroying property—in order to remedy a situation she views as criminal. In her mind, no doubt, the Comcast office got a fair desert. However, it is not for individual citizens in their private capacities to decide such matters. For one, this old curmudgeon might be biased against Comcast for some reason, she might be hateful in general, or outright insane. The same goes for the drunk driver; as it is, unfortunately, far too easy to think of a “reason” why two white men would want to beat and subdue an African-American without conventional legal recourse. Furthermore, if everyone could privately take action to right their own wrongs, it is easy to imagine how a back in forth would continue where the next logical step would be a whole fleet of Comcast trucks showing up and this senile desperado’s door to seek their revenge. Intranational nuclear war is the next obvious step. The fact of the matter is, vigilante justice is not fit for society, but rather, as many social contractarians note, the state of nature. In Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, he describes the state of nature as a place where “every man hath a right to punish the offender, and be executioner of the law of nature.” In fact, Locke is far more optimistic about this natural state than Hobbes, yet only because he feels this natural state is governed by the law of reason. Even if Locke is right, it is nonetheless possible that vigilante justice can subvert the law of reason. In any case, we no longer live in the state of nature and, as Locke points out that it is “legislative and executive power of civil society, which is to judge by standing laws, how far offences are to be punished. Many benefits have been proposed that are said to arise from democracy, such as Kant’s idea that democracies do not fight with each other, thus leading to perpetual peace. Democracy, indeed freedom itself, does have its inevitable drawbacks, though. For democracy to even appear to work, people necessarily must give up natural freedoms in order to gain democratic ones. Increasingly, modern writers like Rousseau and Marx began to question whether it wasn’t actually industrialized economies and systems of labor and property which bound naturally free and content people, making the otherwise carefree state of nature seem objectionable. However, what is clear among most traditional political theorists—Dr. Phil excluded—is that, for good or bad, vigilante justice works outside and against the sovereignty of the ruling government (its political forms and figures) and other important foundations of society, such as the economic order. If the day ever comes when the masses feel as though it’s just and equitable to act in the manner of Phil’s dear old Comcast subscribing guest, it will become impossible to watch the Dr. Phil show. For one, televisions would be smuldering, broken in the rubbled remains of city streets, as individuals and sub-societal groups ravage each other in ever-escalating acts of revenge. Secondly, lacking the public remedy of courts, surely one of Phil’s many legal adversaries would make certain that McGraw would fail to see the full realization of the post-governmental state, existing, as it necessarily must, without citizens.
