Abstract
It is entirely banal but nonetheless true to say that criminology has one essential objective, namely to understand or to explain why people commit crimes. That goal applied to the problem of crimes of the state becomes more complicated for various reasons. Sometimes, for example, ordinary men and women find themselves being asked to do terrible things. Like the five hundred or so ordinary, middle-aged German men who were members of the ‘Order Police’ (Ordnungpolizei) sent in behind the German Army (Wehrmacht) after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. These men were members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 on duty in occupied Poland: all had been rejected for regular army service because, having been born between 1901 and 1910, they were deemed too old.
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Notes
- 1.
Osiel offers a brilliant analysis of the problem of ‘due obedience’; how, in both international law and the majority of military codes, the soldier is excused from criminal liability for obedience to an illegal order unless its unlawfulness was thoroughly and blatantly obvious. Litigated cases traditionally have involved the intentional killing of non-combatants. Against this Osiel proposes that we need to take into account insights derived from what he calls a sociology of military atrocity (1998: 946).
- 2.
This parallels Duff when he says, ‘to deny the possibility of a priori normative theorizing is not to deny the possibility of rational normative theorizing: it is rather (or should be) to insist that such theorizing is possible and intelligible only within some human practice’ (2012: 364).
- 3.
Exultant killing in the twentieth century is evident early on in anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia before 1917 or in the killing of Jews in the Baltic States and Poland after 1941. As Kalyvas (2006) suggests the conditions of civil war provide a context for this kind of spontaneous mobilization of murder squads in Greece after 1948, Rwanda in the 1980s and again in the 1990s, through to the activities of Serb militia forces in Bosnia in 1993–5 and in Kosovo in 1999.
- 4.
- 5.
If Weber’s injunction has been treated with excessive reverence, it should also be insisted that it is not to be taken as implying either that sociological theory and research have ever been value-free, or that moral issues per se have been regarded as irrelevant by sociologists. Anyone remotely familiar with criminology in Western sociology will be aware that most sociologists and criminologists, in spite of Weber’s best efforts to enjoin them to a position of professional value neutrality, have smuggled in all manner of moral positions and preferences.
- 6.
There is a lot to be said on behalf of the Republican tradition which Braithwaite claims to be developing, e.g. with Pettit (1990) (see also Pettit 2012). For reasons which cannot be elaborated here, Braithwaite seems to be confused. He claims on the one hand to be pushing past the ‘failed theories of liberalism, Marxism and utilitarism’ (sic) to the vista afforded by Republicanism which he then glosses as a ‘consequentialist theory that posits the maximisation of dominion [of the freedom of the social world] as the yardstick with which to measure the adequacy of policy’ (1992: 1). This is simply muddled, granted that ‘consequentialism’ is the nom de plume of utilitarianism which Braithwaite claims to be bypassing.
- 7.
Braithwaite seems to have forgotten his own pioneering work on crime committed by pharmaceutical companies which back in the late 1980s pointed to high levels of corporate crime (including faked research, misleading advertising, bribery and selling dangerous drugs) by the then leading companies like Hoechst-Roussel and Bayer based in Germany and Ciba-Geigy and Hoffman-La Roche, two huge Swiss companies.
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Watts, R. (2016). Criminology, Society and the Ethical. In: States of Violence and the Civilising Process. Critical Criminological Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49941-7_8
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