In Praise of Bureaucratic Punishment

Sometimes I rage at bureaucrats. Bureaucratic offices, even in the most mundane encounters, fill me with anxiety and self-suspicion. Did I remember my XYZ documents? Have I missed a secret deadline? The only saving grace of bureaucracies is that they have no investment in my anxiety or self-suspicion; they are exclusively interested in my XYZ documents.

The terror of bureaucracy resembles the terror of Kantian ethics: agents interact through the bulletproof glass. Or worse, emotional and fallible bureaucrats regard their own actions as impartial, categorical imperatives.

Yesterday I participated in two bureaucratic events that gave me some hope in the ideal of bureaucracy. Without addressing the details, these events were punitive. In very loose terms, in one case a professor "punched down;" in another, a student "punched up." In both cases, bureaucrats responded with punishment.

Punishment, of course, can be retributive, rehabilitative, deterrent, and incapacitating. Educational punishment leans towards incapacitating and rehabilitative punishment. Deterrence violates student privacy in current US law, and academic institutions have little authority for retribution. While academic institutions--as legal bodies--have little interest in deterrence or retribution, professors have the full range of human social sanction. Scorn, shame, intimidation--professors can, with relative impunity, punish students beyond the acceptable limits that are granted to academic institutions.

When professors punch down, bureaucrats can offer recourse to people who have no personal power. When students punch up, bureaucrats can offer consistent and dispassionate rehabilitation and incapacitation. The faults of bureaucracy in one situation can become the strengths of the bureaucracy in another situation. When the powerful want recourse against the weak, the bureaucrats are dispassionate and consistent. When the weak want recourse against the powerful, the bureaucrats are dispassionate and consistent. Even if this is lacks the ethical subtlety for personal behavior, it has virtue as institutional policy.