Ethics of Practice in Southern Criminology

More Than An Intellectual Project Towards An Ethics Of Practice In Southern Criminology Presented by: Mr. Brown Date: November 03, 2022 Contributions Of This Paper - 1. Addresses the question not of what southern criminology does as a project, but rather of how northern criminologists like me should engage with 'the south', with southern people, southern lives - 2. Develops an ethics of practice grounded in Kantian philosophy - 3. It arrives there by staging a dialogue between South Asian scholars of critical social science, history and theory, with - 4. An influential text of European hermeneutics: Hans-Georg Gadamer's (1960) Truth and Method What Is The Problem? - It is the question of how we turn intentions into practices: • Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000: 20) - we must create "create plural normative horizons" • Raewyn Connell (2007: 214) - we need "a new formation of knowledge" based on "a principle of unification" of knowledges • David Rodriguez Goyes (2019: 63) - we must engage with the south with a "deep respect for ethical considerations" • Case study: the persistent efforts to "create 'better' prison places and systems" [in the South] are a sham and will only end when everyone engages "more honestly" and tells "the 'truth about prisons'." (Drake, 2018: 2) Prefacing My Conclusions - That extant accounts of ethical practice are too general to inform personal criminological practice (generally, and southern practice particularly) - That by staging an encounter between convergent European and South Asian thought traditions we can begin to understand what "unification" might look like - That from such an encounter we can derive: • A norm of ethical engagement- that is, a set of prescriptions about what ethical engagement demands • And an epistemology of dialogue- that is, describing the conditions under which knowledge may emerge Ten Key Points Developed In The Paper - We must distinguish institutional ethics approaches from a personal ethics of practice • Jerry Johnstone (2005: 62) on the UK Social Research Association's Ethical Guidelines:  [It] makes it quite clear that such codes emerged, less from a concern to provide serious ethical guidance to researchers genuinely troubled by some ethical dilemma, but rather from the need to meet new public and political demands upon large organizations that affect public wellbeing (such as universities, the police, providers of financial services, and providers of heath and social care, etc.) - Foundations: Kant • I propose a Kantian approach and, specifically, Kant's categorical imperative (2nd formulation). This distinguishes treating others as instruments vs intrinsically valuable moral beings: • Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end. • Though deceptively simple this poses major problems for much social science. • Examples:  Mainstream criminology - offender risk prediction  Criminology in the south - generation of data from Indigenous people - Gadamer, H-G. (1960/2013) Truth and Method. London: Bloomsbury. • I discovered Gadamer via the Indian Dalit scholar Gopal Guru (below) • Gadamer draws on Kant to ask how (method) we can reach understanding (truth) across boundaries that are incommensurable • For Gadamer, the boundary is time (the past). For us, how do we traverse boundaries of power, knowledge, location, history, culture, experience ...? • His answer: The other, viewed and engaged across those boundaries, must be treated as fully human, never as simply a means to our own ends - Gadamer proposes that the fundamental point of our connection with others may be understood as an I-Thou relationship. "A Thou is not an object," he notes, because it "relates itself to us" and, in so doing, draws us into an ethical space (Gadamer 1960/2013: 366). - • This is far more problematic for social science method than first appears • The foregoing cases of risk prediction and data ownership are "means" egg’s. To treat Another as a fully autonomous moral actor (equivalent to ourselves) we must accept that that person may know what we do not: we must be open to the truth of Another (person, people)  I use the example of progressive criminology's criticism of prisons and penal reform in the south to illustrate how northern truth - "the fiasco of the prison" is used to 'school' or 'teach' southern people, organizations, governments - Gadamer's insight • Gadamer illustrates how what at first blush looks like well-meaning engagement understanding another, or 'telling the truth' about things constitute a form of "reflective domination" • By understanding the other, by claiming to know him [sic], one robs his claims of their legitimacy. In particular, the dialectic of charitable or welfare work operates in this way, penetrating all relationships between men as a reflective form of the effort to dominate. The claim to understand the other person in advance functions to keep the other person's claim at a distance. We are familiar with this from the teacher-pupil relationship, an authoritative form of welfare work. (p.368) - South Asian approaches to domination • Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai (2012) The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory  Consider domination in the case of India's Dalits  Who can say what is good for Dalits?  Guru: Dalits must "become the subject of their own thinking rather than becoming the object of somebody else's thinking" (p.23)  After Gadamer: "epistemological empowerment" or "epistemological charity" are forms of welfarist domination • Prathama Banerjee, Aditya Nigam and Rakesh Pandey (2016) 'The work of theory':  Critique "can expose the Eurocentrism of dominant traditions, but it cannot produce autonomous theory" (p.42) - Convergence on dialogue as method • Banerjee et al.: How can we escape the elision of history with theory?  "Aspects of European history continue to function as philosophical/ theoretical archetypes rather than as what it is, namely, empirical history" (p. 46)  Northern experience: "at once theoretical norm and historical necessity" (ibid)  Thought or knowledge "becomes 'theoretical' [only] when it liberates itself from its origins and opens itself out to strange places and times" (p. 50) • Advocating syncretic dialogue as method, they draw on B.R. Ambedkar whose importance, they propose, is illustrated by the way he:  sought to ... arrive at a future [for Dalits]-a future that the present could not engender from out of its own logic-by staging a complex encounter between the modern and the non-modern and between tradition and counter-tradition in his thought (p. 49) - The primacy of human dignity – to be treated as an end in oneself • Gadamer: Human dignity is secured by a methodology grounded in dialogue, structured by practices of questioning not telling  In a discourse founded on reciprocity and engagement with the other's very difference  "The significance of questioning [in dialogue] consists in revealing the questionability of what is questioned." (p. 371) • While the primacy of the question is constantly renewed by the openness of its possible answers-of what is not settled and what is thus indeterminate-the power of dialogue lies in the meeting of horizons.  Questions themselves are not infinitely open  We rely now on incommensurability: on the other's questions coming from a place beyond our own horizons Conclusion - I propose an integration of these thought traditions - European and South Asian - to provide criminologists with a norm of ethical engagement, and an epistemology of dialogue - Recalling Banerjee and colleagues' phrase these ways of doing southern criminology (or other social sciences) offer a vision of ethically grounded criminological practice - These, I hope, will move us toward something new: a future that the present cannot engender from its own logic