Beccaria and Camarilla Justice

(edited version of email I sent to the OWBN-ST list.)

Hi Folks,

I'm not the Camarilla Coordinator, this isn't canon, this is me (Zephyr), whose PC is Cam Law expert, being a nerd trying to create a richer game world by perhaps explaining some ideas Elders have.  This grew out of something I'm writing in character, but it's good enough that I thought it's worth exploring here.

I believe it's better to have monsters make a certain kind of sense, and I recently read some stuff that has been helpful in that regard. Bear with me, you might be thinking half way through this, "what the hell are they talking about?" but trust me I have a point.

Anyway, Cesare Beccaria changed the world with a little pamplet, and you might have never heard of him, and that's a shame.

In 1764, during a time we now called the Age of Reason, Beccaria, a 25 years old lawyer authored, with the help of two members of his circle, a slim volume in Milan.

18 months later it was in its 6th edition.  The Italians read it.  By 1766 it was translated for a second time  into French with a foreword by Voltaire, who also told everyone he met to read it. Voltaire is someone you think of as an author, but back then he was a huge influencer. People listened to him. Several of the US founding fathers definitely read it.

What was this short pamphlet that took the world by storm? On Crimes and Punishments.

See back in the day they used to torture the innocent to confess, and then torture them again when executing them,Why? Well mostly out of tradition.  But there were two fundamental possible understandings of how to measure crime that could explain that that Beccaria explored  and rejected.

One is that the dignity of the injured party is how you measure crimes.  That is killing a king is worse than killing a peasant.  The killing of a King's deer likewise a huge crime.

The second is the idea, expressed in the bible and antiquity, of in making the punishment fit the crime, eye for an eye, or in Latin what was called the Lex Talionis, the Law of equivalent retribution.

Becarria rejects both these ideas for what are perfectly logical reasons for him.  The former because people don't punish blasphemy worse than we punish regicide, the latter basically because all people are equal before god.

Beccaria had the idea that justice shouldn't be about making the punishment fit the crime or the dignity of the acused, but be done purely for the utility of preventing crime. That is, nobody wants crime to be done to them, and yet some people do crime, so government should act to discourage crime so that everyone can be happy. That is, justice should deter criminal behavior, so that through reason and the principles of pleasure and pain people can live their lives in a good and godly way.  Reason wasn't considered anti-god in the age of reason... reason was god's gift to man to govern himself, and so can be applied to all things man does to bring about good ends. 

Beccaria believed in what was then a new fangled idea, a social contract, in which men were governed by their own implicit consent, so they could enjoy civilization. This was in contrast to the idea that governments, kings, ruled by divine right.

Thus the idea he believed in was that punishment was done for deterrence, as any other reason to do so was tyrannical and illogical and thus ungodly.

Anyway, why is this relevant to the Camarilla?  Well the idea that the dignity and position of the offended and offender matters, well that's how status works basically.  And the Lextalionis is absolutely used for Camarilla criminal justice in the books.

But both of those were Beccaria trying to reason out why people do things the way they do them.  The truth is some things are just done because of tradition... there isn't a logic to understand them, they just are that way. Roman law from Constantinople was the basis of a lot of legal practice in his time and people were taught to apply it. The idea that things should be reasonable and logical or done towards a purpose, that's shockingly recent and modern.

Anyway, when NPC Elders act "unfairly" in the modern sense, one way to make them make sense to the players is to pick one or more of those three elements to base their actions on and explain it thusly.

1. They are doing it because that's what's always been done.  Those who steal on Elysium always lose their hands to sunlight, because that's what they learned was the punishment.  Or it's always been theirs to decide, and this is the punishment they've always used.

2.  They are doing it because of the difference between the Dignity of the offended vs the dignity of the offender.  Thus an independent Ravnos stealing from a Ventrue Seneschal absolutely deserves to lose his hands, whereas a Tremere Primogen taking a magical item from a Nosferatu neonate might get a literal slap on the wrist, assuming that it's not understood that the Primogen had every right because Magical items are part of his Domain in that city, just like Police are part of the Ventrue Domain in London.

3. They are doing it because it's equal retribution, for some value of equal. Losing your hands is a suitable punishment for taking something with them.

And if you are portraying a Brujah Elder or older Anarch or Loyal opposition member, this maybe also gives you some ideas regarding where to take them.  Honestly just reading a book about enlightenment thinkers is a wonderful way to think about the Anarchs as a sect in opposition to the Camarilla. 

And that tension, between the old ways of doing things and a more modern understandings, perhaps ones based on equity, or deterrence, or even rehabilitation, I think can absolutely create drama for PCs.

A blog post that helped inspire this email
https://www.exurbe.com/on-crimes-and-punishments-and-beccaria/
The pamphlet in english
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/voltaire-an-essay-on-crimes-and-punishments