That is the fetching title of an article written by Stephen L. Carter, a Yale University law professor. Harsh, collective punishment is what I think should be done to Penn State and Penn State people. Professor Carter writes that "collateral damage" to innocents does occur legally and ethically in America. As example he uses a hypothetical high-tech company that is bankrupted when it loses a patent infringement case. What of all the innocent people employed by the company? "So what," says Carter. It happens and its legal. Or when international entities impose economic sanctions against a "rogue" regime. Innocent civilians, victims of the regime themselves, are deprived of food and basic necessities. He gives the example of sippenhaft, the traditional German practice of familial punishment for the wrongs of a member; he may well have given the example of 株连九族, the traditional Chinese practice of exterminating nine generations of the wrongdoers family. Carter recognizes the moral and ethical insult of such practices. He points out that in addition to being common harsh, collective punishment deters others. Thus Professor Carter defends the recent sanctions levied against Penn State.
No. Collateral damage is wrong and should be avoided at all reasonable costs. Innocents should never be punished within our earthly power to prevent it. The case for harsh, collective punishment against Penn State and Penn State people is that it and they are guilty. It and they sold the soul of an entity nominally a university to the false god of football, instantiated in Joseph Vincent Paterno. This sale occurred over a period of 50 years and reaped for the guilty hundreds of millions of dollars. Nearly every student who went to Penn State over the last half-century did so because of Paterno and football. Every merchant around Nowheresville who jacked up motel room rentals six weekends a year, who sold "Nittany Lion" merchandise, who opened restaurants catering to 100,000 on those weekends, every dollar made off Paterno and football was an ill-gotten dollar reaped by people who knowingly bought into the sale of a university's soul. They are not innocents. They are guilty. Professor Carter points out that institutions like his hypothetical start-up and like Penn State are "legal fictions" behind which are real people. Penn State people are, legally and ethically, no more entitled to continued receipt of their ill-gotten gains than is the family of the drug cartel dealer who gets caught. And Penn State as an institution should be prosecuted under racketeering laws and shut down just as the drug cartel institution is. That is not collateral damage.
