Jail Time for Garlic Mustard

There is so much Garlic Mustard around this time of year, and it is all choking out the native wildflowers and natural beauty. It would be so nice if there were an army of free labor available to remove this foreign invasive weed from our park system and local forests.

Immanuel Kant, the philosopher has written on Beauty in his "Critique of Judgement". 1791:

"This thought then must accompany our intuition and reflection on beauty, viz. that nature has produced it; and on this alone is based the immediate interest that we take in it. Otherwise, there remains a mere judgement of taste, either devoid of all interest [e.g. as pure reason] or bound up with a mediate interest, viz. in that it has reference to society; which later [interest] furnishes no certain indications of a morally good disposition."

and...

"Now I say the Beautiful is the symbol of the morally Good, and that it is only in this respect (a reference which is natural to every man and which every man postulates in others as a duty) that it gives pleasure with a claim for the agreement of everyone else. By this the mind is made conscious of a certain ennoblement and elevation above the mere sensibility to pleasure received through the sense, and the worth of others is estimated in accordance with a like maxim of their Judgement."

David Hume, another philosopher made the observation that people are not born to be criminals, it is rather from their own conclusion that they have nothing to offer to civil society that they turn from moral behavior to criminal behavior.

Henery David Thoreau wrote: "The perception of beauty is a moral test"

It is fairly obvious that our sense of beauty originates in nature, whether it is the human nature from which genius springs or from the beauty of wild nature. Beauty is that perception of purposiveness without seeing an immediate utility for our own use. Once utility enters the picture, beauty is no longer the sentiment we perceive, rather it may be taste or desire or something of that sort. Ultimately, the feeling of pleasure we feel in the presence of beauty derives from the awareness of causality and the potential for causality that lies in nature. It is the potential or basis of providence, say as represented in the potential fruit that we know will emerge from a flower, or the potential that lies dormant in the mass of trees in a forest, or the stock of fishes hidden beneath the ripples on a lake. In art, it is the potential genious of humankind that gives us hope for future benefits.

Hence, beauty springs not from the immediate utility of nature or human performance, but rather from the potential bounty or providence it represents untapped. In small urban parks for instance, there is the potential for food and materials for human uses, but the primary beauty lies in the diversity and resiliance of those species that persist there, and gives us hope and ideas for our own resiliance. When these parks and green spaces are destroyed, we lose hope, we lose the beauty, which is the good feeling that accompanies the awareness of potential those spaces represent. When we lose hope in our own viability, we lose hope in our own morality, as morality, the sense of duty we feel toward others such that we adopt maxims of behavior with the principal that they could be "universal laws of behavior", is grounded in the potential benefit we hope to receive in exchange for our moral behavior. Morality fades as hope of reward for moral behavior (Sumum bonum) fades.

Nature is the parallel of human society, both are complex, mechanistic and probabalistic at the same time. They are interdependent systems, but in non-linear ways. The difference being that in human societies, the individual is understood to be an end in themself and not a means to the ends of others. In nature, everything is a means to the ends of everything else.

It is this difference that makes human societies civil societies: A functional human being treats others as ends in themselves and not as a means to their own ends. Crime is predominantly the overlooking of this principle, with the criminal treating the victim(s) as means to their own ends, rather than as individuals with ends of their own. The way, then to dispense with the criminal mentality is to encourage activities that are meant to provide benefit toward the ends of others. Providing three square meals, shelter and a bed, in a way, is exploiting society, treating us all as means to the ends of the criminal, rather than showing us as ends in our own right. Obviously, there is another side to that coin, in that we are showing the criminal that human beings do not treat of others in careless and sensless ways, but seeing and practicing are two different beings.

With nature and the beauty of nature being a teacher of morality by the principal of purposiveness, but without the expectation of utility, exposing criminal elements to this organic teacher is a step in the direction of reform, which our criminal justice system seems to have forgotten is its purpose. Combine this with using the labor of inmates to clear the parks and forests of foreign invasive species, such as Garlic Mustard, gives them the practice of treating the rest of us as ends, rather than means. This is especially benign, since no one in particular benefits from this, but at the same time, we all do. The more diverse and interactive nature is, the more models and sources of inspiration persist there for individuals, especially the young, to learn from and develop their own sense of morality.

Ultimately, using criminal labor to clean up foreign invasive weeds and improve the quality of our parks and forests serves to increase the moral health of our society on many levels. It contributes to the reform of existing criminals and reduces the scarcity of lessons in morality for future generations. It also increases the actual beauty of our parks and forests, improving the abundance of moral lessons available, represented by the potential utility of these places.

Peace