Word: psychologists
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Moralist Moberly's thesis, first spelled out in a series of lectures at the University of Durham, is based on the fact that there are two current conceptions of responsibility and hence of moral judgment. The lawyer-moralist has one idea. The psychologist has another. And society is torn between them...
Progress & Poison. To the psychologist, says Sir Walter, the proper approach to the delinquent is "therapeutic rather than juridical; the offender is to be regarded as a sick man to be healed rather than as a malefactor to be chastised . . . Ultimately then, all praise and blame are irrational." Bernard Shaw put the moral, says Sir Walter, when he once suggested that a man should no more be punished for having an inefficient conscience than for having an inefficient lung...
Merit & Demerit. Is the lawyer-moralist wholly right? According to Sir Walter, he is in many ways as wrong as the psychologist. At their worst, courtroom judgments are nonmoral, stressing too much the deed and too little the doer, treating the offender simply as a nuisance that must be removed. At their best, they are sub-Christian. "They witness to a moral order which commands a deep respect. But [they miss] the supreme heights of human experience . . . for [they leave] room for no gospel and no salvation...
Above both judge .and psychologist, says Sir Walter, "there is a distinctive, Christian approach to wrongdoing, which is based on a distinctive estimate of the nature of wrong and of the way to put it right ... In the first place 'Sin,' as the Christian conceives it, differs from 'Crime' not only in degree but in kind. It is a morbid condition of the whole self rather than a series of overt acts ... In a certain sense, personal responsibility ... is here at its most extreme ... It is an obligation to answer not only for particular acts...
...putting things right, the Christian partially agrees with the psychologist. He, too, puts the criminal above the crime, is not primarily concerned with" settling "a bill in accordance with some tariff." But unlike the psychologist, he does not regard guilt as "an illusion, a form of groundless self-torment." He regards it rather as indispensable, for "in the life of the soul no magic wand is waved, no slate is simply sponged." The Christian's final responsibility is not to abolish the delinquent's guilt-the one means of redemption- but to share it. "He will regard...