Relation to others· Power and justice
Rehabilitation
Axis: The meaning of punishment — Why punish: to repay the wrong, to deter, or to rehabilitate?
The purpose of punishment is to transform the offender and prepare their return to society. Rather than inflicting suffering, the aim is to understand the causes of crime and reintegrate the person as a full member of the community.
Philosophers 4
Senecaexplicit
In On Clemency, addressed to Nero, and in , 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)
Show inferred positions (3)
Socratesinferable
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)
Marcus Aureliusinferable
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
Confuciusinferable
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?)
- PrescriptiveMoralHeal or punish
Treating crime as a sickness to cure seems more humane than inflicting suffering; but does reshaping someone « for their own good », without limit or their consent, respect them less than a deserved penalty?
the offender - 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 - PrescriptivePolitical & legalDo we need prisons?
Does incarceration truly reform the offender, or does the whole penal apparatus do little more than produce and manage delinquency, in the service of an order and a power?
the penal apparatus