When people argue for capital punishment, one of the considerations they sometimes raise is deterrence. We can ask about general deterrence: does the death penalty tend to lower the murder rate? That's not your question. But we can also ask about specific deterrence: do we need the death penalty to keep particular, especially dangerous murderers from killing again? Someone could argue that death penalty statutes need provisions to deal with cases of the sort you've described: murderers who are likely to be a serious danger even if they're incarcerated. I'll confess that I find it hard to imagine a case where we had no other way of protecting guards and other inmates; far as I know, so-called super-max prisons already do that, though of course I could be wrong about how well they succeed.* If your question is whether there's a potentially legitimate question here, I'd say the answer is yes. But whether it will amount to an important part of a case for capital punishment, all things considered, is harder...

Not better in any sense I can think of. On the "set punishment" question: I'm struggling to think what the point of inflexible sentencing laws would be given that the circumstances can vary in ways that seem clearly to be relevant. On the second question: the way you phrase it seems to provide the answer. If a 5-year sentence for littering is more aggressive than needed, then it's more aggressive than needed . Of course, if we had really harsh penalties for minor offenses, very few people would commit them. But the ones who did would be punished much more severely than their transgressions would justify. That seems like a high cost. Also, the citizenry would live in fear---another high cost. Mistakes in the judicial process would lead to innocent people bearing burdens that would be unreasonable even if they were guilty, and there would be reason to fear that laws like this would be abused and used to target unpopular minorities; that already happens as things stand. It's hard to see how what...

If I understand correctly, you're asking whether it would be acceptable to seek some sort of revenge now against someone who robbed you of a small sum 15 years ago. I don't know where you live, but in many jurisdictions the statute of limitations would have expired. (In New York, for example, the statute of limitations for robbery is five years.) That would mean that you have no legal recourse. Harming the robber or stealing from him would also not be acceptable. It would be a case of taking the law into your own hands and even if there are cases where that's acceptable, it's hard to see that this is one of them. Also: you say you want to find thief. But what are the chances of that happening? Would you even recognize him 15 years after the fact? And even if you think you would, this is the sort of thing people can easily get wrong. So you run the risk of wreaking vengeance on the wrong person. Moreover, you say that the trauma has lasted and left you with emotional scars. You say that an act of...

Two comments. The first is that if you have a good reason to think something is wrong, the fact that it happened in another country or culture isn't a reason not to say so. I'm happy to put the shoe on the other foot. If there are practices in my country (the US) that someone from elsewhere has reason to think are wrong (and I'm sure there are), I wouldn't think it was arrogant to offer up the criticism. I agree that there are serious questions about the history of Western behavior toward other countries, but we can distinguish the issues at least conceptually. For example: I'm quite willing to say that it's wrong for a country to execute people for being homosexual, whether or not the West has things to answer for in how it has dealt with that country. There may be more or less arrogant ways of making the point, but that doesn't make the criticism illegitimate or inappropriate. The second point is that if it's wrong to execute people for drug trafficking, then the traffickers don't deserve to be...

Someone might say that punishment should fit the crime and therefore that raping rapists is a just punishment. Someone might also say that torturing torturers is a just punishment. My reaction is that examples like this show the unacceptability of a strict "eye for an eye" notion of justice. Torturing someone as a form of punishment strikes me as depraved; so does raping a rapist. Torture and rape are crimes that show an utter and complete lack of respect for the victim's humanity. That's something that an acceptable judicial system should avoid, in my opinion. As for your hypothetical about rape in the case of near-extinction, I don't feel the force. Why is the continued existence of humanity so important that it would justify raping an unwilling woman and forcing her to carry a baby? Is the sort of "civilization" that would stoop to such things work preserving? What's so hot about humanity from the point of view of the cosmos? Are there any circumstances that would justify a different...

On the substance of your question, it may well be that different philosophers will respond differently, though I'd guess that naturalist/determinist/compatibilist more often goes with a view of punishment as having broadly utilitarian goals rather than retributivist ones. But I was struck by your last sentence: you find it disturbing that compatibilists would be willing to punish people whom incompatibilists see as innocent. Isn't this really just a way of siding with the incompatibilists? Compatibilists argue at length that we can be morally responsible even if determinism is true. Indeed, some compatibilists have argued (Hobart is a famous example from many decades ago) that we can't be responsible unless determinism is true. If compatibilists can make their case, then their point of view is only superficially disturbing. The apparently disturbing character, they would argue, is an illusion borne of misunderstanding what's required for moral responsibility. The compatibilist, in other words, thinks...

Yes. To say it's okay to kill in self-defense usually means that it's okay to kill in response to an immediate threat to one's life or safety. We could add various qualifications, but on anything like this understanding, capital punishment isn't self-defense. The person executed almost never poses an immediate threat to anyone's life or safety. Of course it's sometimes argued that capital punishment protects society in general from a more hypothetical threat of doubtful probability, but that's presumably not what you mean when you say you think killing in self-defense is acceptable. So there's a distinction and hence no problem of consistency.

I hear two things in what you say. One is that, quite understandably, you want to deal with your sorrow. The other is that you want a "serious, fair and moral" way past your situation. But I'm not sure these amount to the same thing. When it comes to curing heartache, philosophers have no special expertise. A philosopher could offer you some obvious platitudes, including the suggestion that if you are really having trouble coping, there's no shame in seeking professional help, but a philosopher is not a doctor of the soul On the other part of your plea, there may be a bit that a philosopher could say. You've accepted — intellectually, at least — that your former fiancé has lost her regard for you and that this is something you brought on your self. She is entitled to get on with her life, and the right thing to do is to respect that. But you're also looking for some way to atone and make amends. Making amends may not be possible, because making amends isn't the sort of thing that can just...

My impulse is to say that we're mixing apples and eggnog. It's true that retribution is part of the way we thinkabout punishment. But however we understand retribution, it's hard tosee how the State's wrong against you would make it okay for you to rob me or beat me up. After all, even though I'm part of the body politic, qua private citizen, I don't represent the state. And in any case, robbery, embezzlement, assault and various sorts of mayhem are the kinds of things we should shy away from. Giving someone a free pass on future misdeeds because of past mistreatment by the State seems to miss that point. If Mr. Tankleff is indeed found not guilty, then it's not unreasonable to think that he should receive some sort of compensation. But 17 years (or even 17 days) of punishment-free crime doesn't seem like the right way to go. Things being what they are (no time machines, no guaranteed life-extending potions...) monetary compensation sounds like a much better idea, even though it...

A good question! As it turns out, not everyone agrees that the purpose of punishment is to reform people. In fact, some philosophers (Kant is perhaps the foremost) held that the only justification for punishment is that the person deserves it, and if we punish for the sake of making someone better, we fail to show proper respect for them -- we manipulate them for our own ends. Setting the question of Hell aside for the moment, we can see that the argument you raise, if correct, would also count against capital punishment. But whatever one's views on the rightness of capital punishment, the widespread support it has in some places makes clear that many people see punishment as a matter of giving people what they deserve rather than reforming them. This idea, fleshed oout and elaborated, is often called the retributive theory of punishment, though it's important not to confuse retribution with revenge. Retributive theorists would maintain that the punishment must always be proportional to the...