The meaning of punishment

Punishment is demanded by justice itself, as retribution proportionate to the crime (juridical law of retaliation), never as a mere means of social utility: punishing someone to deter others would treat him as a means. This is classical retributivism.

Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Right, §49 E

Home again, Odysseus seeks neither to correct nor to deter: he renders their due to those who have betrayed the house. The fault, for him, calls for a punishment to its measure, and his domestic justice is retributive: to restore the order that was wronged is to make the offense pay, at the risk of a harshness the poem lets one feel.

Odyssey, XXI-XXII (the return to the household and the confrontation with the suitors)

Punishment looks to the future, not the past: to punish for the wrong already done, with no further end, would be to return evil for evil, mere vengeance without right. The law is a threat meant to counterbalance the motives of crime by fear, and its execution merely keeps the promise of that threat so that it retains its deterrent force.

The World as Will and Representation, §62

Punishment aims at political effect, not desert: the dread of punishment is the surest bond of subjects, and the exemplary execution of Remirro de Orco, left cleft in two on the square at Cesena, leaves the people at once satisfied and stunned. Deterrence and the appeasement of opinion prevail over reparation or reform.

The Prince, ch. VII (Remirro de Orco) · The Prince, ch. XVII (the dread of punishment)

For Bentham, all punishment is in itself an evil, since it inflicts suffering: it is justified only insofar as it prevents a greater evil, through deterrence and the offender's reform. Retributivism, punishing for punishment's sake, is rejected as a pointless addition of suffering.

Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, chapter 13 · Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments

Justice itself reduces, for Mill, to a demand of utility: punishment is justified not by the retribution of a past wrong but by its effects, the deterrence and protection of society, and secondarily the reform of the offender. He rejects the notion of a desert of punishment independent of its consequences, without excluding rehabilitation.

Utilitarianism, ch. 5 (justice and punishment reduced to utility)

Beccaria shifts punishment from the register of expiation to that of social utility: the penalty should not avenge the crime or satisfy a retributive justice, but prevent it. From this flow his reforms, the abolition of torture and the death penalty, the proportion of penalties to offences, the certainty rather than the cruelty of punishment, and prevention through education and good laws. Punishment is measured by its effects on the social body, not by the moral evil committed: a reforming programme that utilitarianism will take up.

Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments (1764)

If wrongdoing is ignorance, the guilty party is less a villain than someone sick in soul, and punishment should cure rather than return evil for evil. To undergo a just penalty is even a good, since it frees the soul from the injustice that spoils it; punishing for revenge corrects nothing. The sanction counts as care and correction, placing Socrates on the side of a rehabilitative justice.

Plato, Gorgias, 476a-481b (punishment that heals the soul)

Faced with the wrongdoer, Marcus's first move is to instruct him and show him his error, for he acts in ignorance of the good; failing that, to bear with him. Punishment, where he contemplates it, thus aims at correcting the strayed far more than at requiting his fault, in the spirit of rehabilitation.

Meditations, IX, 42 · Meditations, V, 28 · Meditations, XI, 18

In On Clemency, addressed to Nero, and in On Anger, Seneca rejects vengeance: one punishes not because a wrong has been done but so that none be done again, looking to the future, not the past. Punishment aims at correcting the offender and deterring others, never at satisfying a retributive anger.

On Anger, I, 16 and 19 (punishing to correct, not to avenge) · On Clemency, I (the clemency of the prince)

Confucius prefers to prevent wrongdoing by forming the moral sense rather than punishing it: governing by punishments yields a people that evades them without shame, governing by virtue and the li 禮 (rites) gives them honour and reforms them from within. The aim is moral amendment, not retribution or mere deterrence: why kill in order to govern?. Punishment, when it must come, should restore harmony and reintegrate the offender into the community rather than cast them out.

Analects, II, 3 (punishments yield a shameless people; virtue reforms them) · Analects, XII, 19 (what use is killing in order to govern?)