Is punishment necessary to right an injustice?

Question

I am usually against the idea of punishment and think of the state and law as a means of social control rather than desert etc.. But do certain unfair acts - perhaps not necessarily the most evil, but the most corrupt - warrant punishment because they are injustices?

Answer 1

There is a private and a public aspect to this question. If it is a private matter, one party has the right not to know, and the other has the right to privacy. My next thoughts are on the public aspect. There is no justification for corporal or capital punishment. This is iterated in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Acceptable punishments are financial penalties, imprisonment, and restorative justice. Financial penalties are disproportionately punitive to poor people. They are justified for wealthy individuals and corporations in proportion to the damage done. Prison is ideally intended to protect society from violent individuals, to demonstrate punishment for heinous crimes, and reform offenders. Restorative justice aims to provide restitution to victims and society while reforming offenders. When you mean punishment by the state, do you mean by society? The Principle of Duty by David Selbourne is a good source about accountability to society rather than the state. It also deals with punishment. States do not own citizens. Citizens are accountable to society for their behaviour. As regards the revelation of a historical injustice, it is justified to make this known in the interests of truth and restitution.

Answer 2

One might "punish" someone:

• to prevent them from committing future offences
• to prevent/dissuade others from committing a similar offence
• to just generally make other people feel better about what happened

One could certainly argue about which of these are "good" reasons (especially the last one) or how effective they are at achieving their intended goal (especially the second one), but here I'm merely presenting them as possible reasons.

Although whatever you do to the perpetrator doesn't undo what happened to the victim (of course if someone stole something, you could return it to them, but I wouldn't include that under the definition of punishment).

One might say one generally cannot entirely "right" the injustice caused by an offence.

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This might lead into a discussion about what justice even is.

One could say a lot on that topic, but in my opinion, on cursory reflection, most of what we care about there can be classified under:

• fairness: if we both stab people under similar circumstances, we should face similar consequences; if you stab someone and I poke someone, you should face more severe consequences
• freedoms and safety AKA rights: we might say you have the right to not get stabbed, or the freedom to go about your business without getting stabbed, and we add consequences for stabbing to try to avoid you getting stabbed

For punishment to be reasonable, it would need to follow from the above.

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Some people may try to justify punishment under some vague idea of justice that's outside of the above, but I have not heard a case for that which convinced me that it's justified. And unjustified punishment would come at the high cost of causing unnecessary suffering. If someone wrongs you, it may be a common human response to want them to suffer to some extent, but that doesn't mean it's just.

Answer 3

Main theories for punishment

• retribution
• deterrance
• reform

Prevention of further crime can be a practical result of imprisonment, but that isn't a motivation to punish.

There is a substantial body of research on these, mostly ignored by policy makers, who are generally driven by public sentiment that also feels intuitions about justice are more important than practical consequences.

"It [torture] assured the articulation of the written on the oral, the secret on the public, the procedure of investigation on the operation of the confession; it made it possible to reproduce the crime on the visible body of the criminal; in the same horror, the crime had to be manifested and annulled. It also made the body of the condemned man the place where the vengeance of the sovereign was applied, the anchoring point for a manifestation of power, an opportunity of affirming the dissymmetry of forces."

-Foucault, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Our thirst for vengeance has changed since the era of the Bloody Code, Texas and Saudi Arabia excepted. Foucault has interesting perspectives on how punishments and social structures relate, and have changed over time.

The motivations a society chooses, and needs, will vary. For instance looting in war time often faces summary execution as punishment, because of the imminent risk and danger of social breakdown.

Japan's low crime rate is interesting. They certainly have draconian laws, with some of the harshest drug laws in the developed world. But they also have incredibly low rates of littering, without particularly harsh penalties for that. Strong social and peer influence can undoubtedly be powerful influencers of behaviour. They can also impose hidden costs, on resistance to social change, and a social 'cliff edge' which if passed return in to mainstream society is almost impossible.

I argue that many of the main theories of our moral reasoning are not consequentialist, but intersubjective - 'do unto others as you would be done by'. Discussed here: Is the Categorical Imperative Simply Bad Math? :) So in this picture, what kind of punishment we think is neccessary will depend a lot on what we think would shape our own behaviour.

Moral Foundations theory is a research approach that identified cross-cultural drivers of moral thinking, one of which is for 'justice'. These foundations are theorised to be evolved enablers of living together. An interesting point is that values of 'purity/sanctity' tend to be emphasised more in societies that feel under existential threat, with border conflicts, or serious endemic diseases. Reform might be the more moral priority for punishment, but perhaps it is also a luxury for more resilient and secure societies.

It's notable that often the 'arc of the moral universe' has only been bending a little and erratically, towards justice. But, moments of injustice can be flashpoints. Like the arbitrary crimes of King John of England that led to the Barons Rebellion, and then adoption of the Magna Carta. Or the self-immolation of Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi that started the Arab Spring. Or Mahsa Amini being arrested and beaten to death in Iran for not covering her hair in the prescribed way.

I would tend to think of a given societies attitude towards justice more as emergent, than evolved, eg as discussed here in relation to obscenity laws: Is artificially generating images of minors in sexual positions unethical?

Sociologist Durkheim in his analysis of human religious behaviour, drew out the conclusion that what we hold sacred together binds us together, whether that us an altar, or social norms like a Social Contract, or ideals. So say, the Universal Declaration if Human Rights, can if held sacred bind a community to it, and then shape how the people in the community live, for instance freedom of assembly can seriously constrain risks of totalitarianism.

Another way to think about emergence of justice systems, is game theory. And we can think of a Social Contract as an unstable equilibrium, which the social behaviour of holding it sacred, generates a kind of 'social immune response' to protect what has been invested into it.

So, I don't think there is one answer, it depends on era and society. But I would identify shifting away from punishment and towards reform, and changing social situations that lead to crime, as the direction of moral progress. It involves a shift to shaping society, away from individualism and selfishness.

Answer 4

We humans are built such that we have a psychological satisfaction when we see deserved punishments meted out.

A moral theory to justify this -- is has so far eluded the best of moral theorizing over millenia.

The best explanation for our desire for punishment, is that this is a useful psychological trait to maintain pro-social behavior within hunter-gatherer tribes. IE that we humans have developed this psychological rait as part of the suite of psychological attitutes that maintian our partial eusocial nature, and that it is a useful check upon abusive/overly selfish members of a tribe.

None of our best theories of Virtue Ethics, Rights Ethics, nor Utilitarian Ethics support "just deserts". Nor under the less respected but also useful Deep Ecology either. And under the less well respected but still useful Eusocial ethics -- we are now a SOCIOLOGICAL species, living in a rule-of-law civilization, not an antropological species living in small hunter-gatherer tribes, so our evolved inclinations should be overruled if they interfere with sociology today.

Answer 5

Punishment is the natural mechanism to discourage a specific behavior. Imitating nature is wise.

So, yes.