"Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility"
About this Quote
Szasz is picking a fight with a culture that wants the comforts of morality without the mess of judging anyone. Calling punishment "unfashionable" isn’t a nostalgic sigh for the whip; it’s a diagnosis of a modern aesthetic: we treat accountability like bad taste. The sting is in the phrase "moral distinctions among men". He’s arguing that egalitarian politics has mutated into a blanket aversion to ranking behavior as better or worse, because ranking implies hierarchy, and hierarchy triggers the democratic reflex to level.
The subtext is sharper: if nobody is truly blameworthy, nobody has to be truly responsible. Szasz frames "collective guilt" as a kind of moral fog machine. It produces the feeling of seriousness (we all share in the problem) while conveniently dissolving the hard work of naming an agent, an act, a consequence. That’s why he calls it "meaningless": it’s guilt without an address.
Context matters. Szasz spent a career attacking the medicalization of deviance and the psychiatric state’s power to re-label wrongdoing as illness. Read through that lens, the quote is less about prisons than about diagnosis as moral laundering: the more we explain behavior as symptom, the more punishment looks barbaric and responsibility looks naive. He’s warning that a democracy can become allergic to judgment and then outsource it to systems that claim neutrality - therapy, bureaucracy, public health. The result isn’t mercy; it’s a softer, more slippery coercion where no one is "bad", but everyone can be managed.
The subtext is sharper: if nobody is truly blameworthy, nobody has to be truly responsible. Szasz frames "collective guilt" as a kind of moral fog machine. It produces the feeling of seriousness (we all share in the problem) while conveniently dissolving the hard work of naming an agent, an act, a consequence. That’s why he calls it "meaningless": it’s guilt without an address.
Context matters. Szasz spent a career attacking the medicalization of deviance and the psychiatric state’s power to re-label wrongdoing as illness. Read through that lens, the quote is less about prisons than about diagnosis as moral laundering: the more we explain behavior as symptom, the more punishment looks barbaric and responsibility looks naive. He’s warning that a democracy can become allergic to judgment and then outsource it to systems that claim neutrality - therapy, bureaucracy, public health. The result isn’t mercy; it’s a softer, more slippery coercion where no one is "bad", but everyone can be managed.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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