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The official attitude to crime, that is, the attitude implemented in the actual treatment of criminals, has undergone enormous changes in the last hundred years. Some people think the movement has gone too far; others that it has not gone far enough. It has certainly been a movement towards greater humanity. Has it also been a movement towards greater rationality? Or to make the question more comprehensive: what is a rational attitude to crime?
First we must be clear about the sense in which any attitude may be described as rational or not. A belief is rational if it is probable upon the evidence. But an attitude - for example about sentences, that they ‘should be’ stiffer (or milder) - is not the same as a belief; it is a desire at most conditioned by a belief - for example, that stiffer (or milder) sentences diminish crime. So it can be rational only in a derivative sense: namely, when it is conditioned by beliefs and when these are themselves rational.
We all know that attitudes are often not rational, but merely ‘rationalized’. This is the case if the belief that stiffer (or milder) sentences diminish crime is held without evidence to justify an attitude based only on vindictiveness (or sentimentality). What is less obvious is that the same mechanism, which operates so clearly in this example, may operate again at deeper layers of the mind. If we have an impulse which expresses feelings we do not like to admit, we become over-ready to believe it to be merely instrumental to some more acceptable desire. In other words we embrace an irrational belief about the external world (that the impulse is instrumental to this acceptable desire) in order to maintain a false one about ourselves (that we do not have these unacceptable feelings). But at the next level of