This is an expansion of my short Twitter thread on disproportionate retribution, cause and effect, and the language of consequences. We often use terms like “consequences” to gloss over the deliberate choice to harm someone by making it look like simple cause and effect and therefore the victim’s fault. I’ll be looking at how this language is used by abusers to justify their abuse and what does and doesn’t constitute true cause and effect, and then I’ll look at three applications: Palestine, criminal justice, and online harassment. Content warning for all these topics.
As I noted on Twitter, our culture simply has no concept of disproportionate retribution:
For instance, I’ve spoken to people who adamantly defended that, if a toddler runs up and slaps a black belt, the black belt has every right to hit back and break the kid’s arm. Never mind that the black belt was never in any danger whatsoever and didn’t need to hurt the kid in order to defend themselves; the kid “started it,” and therefore it’s the kid’s own fault if their arm gets broken. If they didn’t want a broken arm, they shouldn’t have hit a black belt. Note how this framing completely absolves the black belt of responsibility and removes any need to consider whether their response was reasonable or whether they could have responded differently. The black belt didn’t cause the arm-breaking; the kid did. The arm-breaking is just “consequences.”
If you’ve ever been in an abusive relationship, you’re familiar with these kinds of “consequences.” You burned dinner, therefore they hit you. If you hadn’t burned dinner, you wouldn’t have gotten hit. They may even sadly explain that they didn’t want to hit you, but, well, you burned dinner. It’s your own fault. In some cases, the language of victimization comes into play as the abuser casts themselves as the real victim; this, again, minimizes their own role and creates the impression that they had no control over what happened.
This framing works by removing the abuser’s agency and making the consequence seem like simple cause and effect. If you forget your umbrella on a rainy day, you get wet; if you burn dinner, you get hit. We are so used to these “consequences” that we often accept this framing uncritically. But we can examine how cause and effect works to determine what’s a genuine consequence and what is not.
If you forget your umbrella on a rainy day and you get wet, you are experiencing natural cause and effect. We know this for several reasons. First, no other people are involved. If another person is involved, then inherently we have a situation where they could have acted differently and there would be a different result. Second, the consequence consistently happens if you perform the action–in other words, if you do forget your umbrella on a rainy day, you will get wet, and this is always true for everyone. Third, conversely, the consequence won’t happen unless you perform the action–in other words, if you don’t forget your umbrella, you won’t get wet, and this is always true for everyone. Fourth, and this is really part of the second point, but it’s so important that I’m mentioning it separately: The consequence happens to everyone equally and does not disproportionately affect certain demographics, especially marginalized people. If you go out in the rain without an umbrella, you will get wet, regardless of your race, gender, income, or anything else about you. If a supposedly “natural consequence” only seems to happen to people who society has already marginalized, we should be looking very, very hard at whether that consequence is so natural after all.
Let’s return to the burned dinner. Does it follow these rules? It doesn’t follow the first rule, because it involves another person. It doesn’t follow the second rule, because not everyone who burns dinner gets hit. If the abuser’s boss invited them over for dinner and then burned it, the abuser would miraculously find the self-control to not hit them. It doesn’t follow the third rule, because not burning dinner will not prevent the victim from getting hit. An abuser will always find a reason to be abusive. If dinner wasn’t burned, it would be because dinner was late, or it wasn’t the right kind of food. It’s impossible for a victim to avoid abuse by anticipating everything that will set the abuser off, because the rules are always changing. And finally, it doesn’t follow the fourth rule, because some demographics–racial minorities, marginalized genders, and queer people–experience abuse at much higher rates than others.
We see, therefore, that an abuse victim is not “just experiencing consequences.” The victim’s actions did not cause them to be hit; to put it another way, their behavior was neither necessary nor sufficient to cause the abuse. (In this context, “necessary” means that the abuse would not have happened without the behavior, and “sufficient” means that the abuse would inevitably happen due to the behavior; as shown above, both are false.) The abuser was, in fact, making a deliberate choice to harm the victim. The responsibility for that action lies entirely with the abuser, and people have every right to criticize that action as disproportionate and unnecessary.
We can apply these rules to many situations. Because the internet finds lists and comparisons challenging, I will pause here to clarify that I’m not saying that these scenarios are all identical to an abusive relationship or to each other. They are different situations, each with their own complicated context. However, they are all contexts where we often use the language of consequences, and where we can apply the four rules laid out above.
Israel’s airstrikes on Palestine have been a major focus of world news in the past weeks, and what strikes me is how often I hear the familiar language of consequences: “Hamas could have prevented those children from dying by not firing those rockets.” We immediately notice that this language violates the first rule: It completely elides Israel’s active role as the nation that’s actually carrying out the airstrikes. Were the rockets necessary to cause the children’s deaths (that is, no children would die if the rockets were not fired)? No, because there was violence against the Palestinians before the rockets were fired. Were the rockets sufficient (that is, every nation that fires rockets then has children killed)? No, and indeed killing children is a war crime that no nation is supposed to engage in, regardless of what hostilities the other country has engaged in. And finally, clearly one specific group of people is being targeted with this disproportionate payback. If, say, Iraq were to bomb the US and kill hundreds of civilians in retaliation for our actions there, it’s hard to imagine anyone accepting that as “just defending themselves.”
Thus, we can conclude that bombing Palestine is not just “consequences.” Israel bears full responsibility for their own actions, and we can and should denounce their response as disproportionate retribution. Put simply, it’s irrelevant how bad Hamas is or what they did because no action gives you the right to kill children.
Nowhere is the language of consequences more common than in criminal justice. I’ve had many long, fruitless, circular conversations with people who seemed unable to grasp that there exist additional steps between “do an act that is against the law” and “go to prison.” This mindset is instilled in us very early on. When our parents punish us, they say “You talked back, so you got spanked. It’s just consequences.” We deliberately remove the simple fact that the parent is making a voluntary decision in order to make punishment seem impersonal, objective, and unavoidable. And we carry this view into our opinions about the criminal justice system.
Let’s apply our rules to the common example of “You smoked weed, so now you’re spending a year in prison.” Clearly another person is involved; if you smoke weed by yourself and nobody else ever finds out, nothing bad happens. Smoking weed is not sufficient to send you to prison; lots of people smoke weed and get off with a warning. Nor is it necessary (that is, you won’t be arrested unless you smoke weed); police are experts at finding pretenses to arrest anyone they become suspicious of. And finally, without a doubt, certain types of people, especially Black and Latino young people, are vastly more likely to go to prison for drug offenses than anyone else.
So criminal justice is not a simple matter of cause and effect, but a deliberate choice by human beings to single someone out for a punishment that is neither objectively merited nor consistently applied. Thus it’s perfectly reasonable to call for a reexamination of the criminal justice system. Common anti-reform lines like “He’s just experiencing consequences” or “Are you saying you’re in favor of drug use?” we can recognize as false logic designed to paper over the active roles of police, judges, and prosecutors. That latter argument in particular–taking condemnation of the disproportionate response as endorsement of bad behavior–is a common one you’ll hear in many contexts, but it’s just another phrasing of the same language of consequences.
Everyone who has ever been on the internet will be personally familiar with our last example. Online harassment has become a ubiquitous part of everyday life, and in a bizarre shift, our culture has moved from condemning harassment as a serious problem creating a toxic online environment to embracing it as a necessary and important service in the name of justice. And without a doubt, you’ve been told that the people being harassed for posting a bad take are “just experiencing consequences”–often by the exact same people who are doxxing them and sending death threats.
But what do our rules say? Other people are most certainly involved. And the “necessary and sufficient” guidelines don’t check out either: The arbitrary and capricious nature of online harassment is one of its key hallmarks. Posting a bad take is not sufficient to get you harassed; one person will frequently be singled out for harassment for a take that many other people posted with no pushback. Often the discourse will change midstream and a take that was praised will suddenly be attacked; occasionally it reverses course and everyone–temporarily–denounces harassment and rallies to protect the person who posted the take. Nor is it necessary, that is, nobody gets harassed unless they post a bad take. A person singled out for harassment will be stalked and their every act will be combed through for anything that could provide fodder for harassment, often reaching back a decade or more to find things that the victim long since recanted and apologized for. The purported misdeeds may be decontextualized, misrepresented, or flat-out fabricated; anyone who questions the allegation (or the response) will be accused of supporting bad behavior and risks becoming a victim of harassment themselves.
And then there’s the final rule. Certain people suffer from online harassment much more than other people. The profile of a typical online harassment victim is very consistent: A woman, usually with multiple marginalizations, typically in a creative field, likely to be young, just starting out, and without a large support base. The more socially vulnerable a person is, the more likely they are to become a target for harassment. Indeed, it’s inherently true that a form of “justice” that requires society as a whole to turn against someone will disproportionately affect people who society was already primed to reject. The results of harassment, too, vary enormously depending on who you are. A famous politician or actor who gets harassed has staffers to filter through the hate mail, security to follow up on serious threats, and industry connections to line up a new gig and ensure that they land on their feet. These people then get held up as proof that harassment “doesn’t actually harm anyone.” Meanwhile, a marginalized person with no clout or connections–the vastly more common victim of harassment–can lose their entire career, their friends, and the safety of their home; they develop PTSD and suicidal ideation from the constant stream of threats that they must face unassisted.
And so we see that online harassment, like our other examples, is not “just consequences.” Being harassed over something you posted is not a simple case of natural cause and effect, but a planned and deliberate campaign that specifically singles out vulnerable people for disproportionate punishment. Here, as in our other examples, the people inflicting the harm use the language of consequences to deny their own responsibility for their actions.
Now, you may have noticed that these rules only determine that a response is not causal, not that it’s wrong. But the language of consequences exists precisely to circumvent discussion about whether a response is right or wrong by turning such acts as killing children, imprisoning people, and sending death threats into simple results of cause and effect as natural and unavoidable as getting wet when you forget your umbrella. Rejecting that language allows us to evaluate these acts for what they are, and in every case, the obvious fact is that it’s a cruel and unnecessary act of disproportionate retribution.
All I’m truly asking for is a little honesty about what’s really happening and why. If you send someone hate mail on the internet, you should be willing to tell the truth and say “I think this person sucks, so I am going to send them a mean message because I want to ruin their day.” If you think that’s a defensible act, you are free to do so. But take responsibility for your actions and don’t hide behind the language of consequences.