What to Do About Crime
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 1 hour, 41 minutes
Surveying the contemporary accounts for criminal behavior, Dr. Leonard Peikoff offers a radically different account that places philosophy at the center. Drawing from the statistics detailing the rise in the crime rate, Peikoff identifies pervasive cultural ideas that match these phenomena. Peikoff argues that crime is caused by the ideas held by criminals, and these ultimately trace back to the education they received and the culture in which they live. He concludes that fixing the crime problem can only be done by repairing America’s core ideas.
Study Guide
This material is designed to help you digest the lecture content. You can also download a printable PDF version below.
| What is the contemporary approach to answering the cause of crime? |
| What are the five broad attributes or character types of a criminal? |
| Why is the rejection of reason at the root of the cause of crime? |
| How can one understand the variation in the rate of crime in history? |
| What ethical doctrine has been deeply influential in the crime problem? |
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 1:01:02 | Three years ago you urged us to vote for Bill Clinton, in part because you hoped it would re-energize a Republican opposition, and your plan seems to have worked better than I had thought. What do you think of the new Republican majority, with its Contract with America, and especially the Contract’s provisions on crime? |
| 1:06:59 | What comment would you have about the recent bombing in Oklahoma and specifically the philosophies of those suspected of being responsible? |
| 1:13:57 | One of the other “causes” of crime that has been discussed by conservatives is the doctrine of “family values” and the rise of illegitimacy, both of which have coincided with the rise in crime. Are these philosophically if not causally related to the rise in crime? |
| 1:17:15 | Since, as you said, crime is the result of a philosophy, and you also indicated that children seem to show traits that will lead to criminality early, does that seem to imply that children have acquired some abstract philosophic ideas by the age of 4 or 8? Could you comment on any educational consequences of that fact? |
| 1:21:24 | I’d like to suggest that your answers are no answers at all for what the problems are in this country. First off, you said that prayer in schools wasn’t an answer, and I’d like to call your attention to a book called America: To Pray or Not to Pray, which was a statistical analysis of a question asked of educators by the Gallup organization, which, as you know, is not a religious organization. Their question was “what do you feel are the ten worst offenses occurring in the classroom today.” The offenses given in the past were minor (e.g., “running in the hallways”) but later serious (e.g., “murder”). This book found that where prayer in schools was taken away, we went off into a chasm. So I think the answer lies there. If you have three million students praying to a creator they’ll all be fearful… I think, secondly, from the womb to the tomb that you have to protect all human life, whether the unborn or the elderly, that the Dr. Kevorkian’s of the world will become vultures and the country will collapse. I suggest that these are more the relevant answers than what you gave… |
| 1:28:30 | As a follow-up to a question that was asked previously, I was wondering when it may be too late for a child or an adult to change his way of living? |
| 1:32:38 | Doesn’t forbidding an action or banning an organization like a militia based on potential threat rather than an actual, specific concrete, action violating rights, constitute positive law—preemptive law—which to my knowledge, Objectivism does not uphold? |
| 1:35:07 | I’d like you to respond to what I perceive as a major flaw in some of your analysis going back to your equation with low crime rates and teaching of objective criteria for promoting reason and rationality. You implied that the phenomenon of relatively low crime rates in the midst of the depression was directly equatable to these objective standards that were taught at schools. But you overlooked, typical of hyper-libertarians, what actually held crime down through these objective standards that everyone held in those days, including the Soviet socialists, and the ideas of the New Deal, essentially what kept these gangs of workers from storming Washington because these programs that were implemented by the Federal government and why FDR was elected was because he offered highly principled, rational alternatives to what was perceived as a laissez-faire perspective. And in those days, socialists had just as much structured rational criteria. We may not have agreed with them, but it was not a question of political perspective, but a rational approach shared by everyone in those days. Could you comment on these differences? |