Criminalization - Ontological Basis of Crime

Ontological Basis of Crime

Put in the most simple terms, ontology deals with or establishes the clear grounds for being. (Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, introduction, referencing Plato's Parmenides.) In some of the traditional schools, such as those of the post-1688 English or Americans (many of the writings of the American Founding Fathers, but especially The Federalist) and their Dutch predecessors (see Kossmann, E. H. Political Thought in the Dutch Republic, 2004) ontology proper is deemed beyond the scope of legal thought, in accord with the modern distinction between society and state (which some consider based in the distinction the Romans made between themselves and their Italian allies, the socii, but not given the theoretical articulation we recognize today until emphasized by Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. See state.) However, some classical theorists, such as Aristotle, in his Politics and Metaphysics, and to a lesser degree in his Topics, suggest that the distinction is at least problematic. One need consider no further than the claim that man is a political animal to see this is so.

As a political animal, man has come to see himself as possessed of rights, whether these are the Rights of Englishmen of old, or the universal human rights advocated vigorously toward establishment today through the matrix of commercialism. At least in the today dominant American model, deprivation of right amounts to injury (consider especially Justice Stevens dissenting opinion in Castle Rock v. Gonzales), and injury—so goes the prevailing theory—amounts, when coupled with requisite intent, in most cases, to crime, when it does not admit of civil redress. Thus, again in simple terms, and to the extent that human beings are indeed political beings, crime does seem to have an ontological basis. (For one approach to the question of criminal ontology, see "Understanding Crime and Social Control in Market Economies: Looking Back and Moving Forward" by Robert Bohm in Jeffrey Ian Ross, ed. Cutting the Edge: Current Perspectives in Radical/Critical Criminology and Criminal Justice. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 1998.) This, further, seems to hold if ontology itself is divided into political and trans- or supra- or meta- political ontology—i.e., what once was the realm of Christian theology. Of course, it does not matter whether that theology is Christian or belonging to some other apolitical belief. The point is that one may, with some justice, argue persuasively that being is divided. This need not, however, force the question of meta-political crimes. Our purposes here, in this article, are limited to the political. For the question in general see Ontology.

Baker argues that only objective harms and other objective bad consequences (or actions in the case of inchoate and endangerment offenses) are prima facie criminalizable. By other bad consequences Baker means privacy violations and conduct that does not necessarily result in tangible harm, but does result in unwanted consequences. Baker argues that the privacy violations that result from being forced to receive unwanted obscene information in public places (exhibitionism) would amount to a sufficient bad consequence for the purposes of invoking the criminal law, but argues that proportionate punishment means that such conduct should only be punished with fines rather than jail terms.