Relation to others· Power and justice
Deterrence
Axis: The meaning of punishment — Why punish: to repay the wrong, to deter, or to rehabilitate?
Punishment is justified only by its effects: preventing future crimes by deterring the offender and others. It must be certain, swift, and just severe enough to discourage, without needless cruelty.
Movements 2
Utilitarianismexplicit
For , 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
The Enlightenmentexplicit
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)
Philosophers 4
Schopenhauerexplicit
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
Benthamexplicit
Punishment is in itself an evil, a pain, and is justified only by the utility it yields: all punishment in itself is evil; upon the principle of utility, if it ought at all to be admitted, it ought only to be admitted in as far as it promises to exclude some greater evil. Its first end is the prevention of offences, chiefly by deterrence and secondarily by the reform of the offender; Bentham explicitly rejects retribution and the lex talionis as an evil added to an evil, with no profit.
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. XIII-XIV (punishment, its ends and its measure)
Show inferred positions (2)
Machiavelliinferable
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)
Millinferable
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)
- PrescriptiveMoral Thought experimentPunishing an innocent to keep the peace?
If punishment is worth only its effects, sacrificing an innocent to avert a greater harm sometimes seems required: but is condemning one who did nothing still punishment, or the very negation of justice?
punishing an innocent - PrescriptiveMoralMaking an example of an offender
Punishing to deter is using one man to frighten others: does only the penalty deserved for what he did treat him as a responsible person, rather than as a means?
the offender - PrescriptivePolitical & legalThe right measure of the penalty
Retributivism measures the penalty by the gravity of the wrong (eye for an eye), deterrence by what it takes to discourage: two measures that can demand far more, or far less, than each other.
the penalty - PrescriptivePolitical & legalThe death penalty
Is killing the criminal the only penalty matching the worst crimes (Kant), or a punishment that deters no better than another, forecloses any return, and lowers the society that inflicts it (Beccaria, Camus)?
capital punishment