Topics Punishment

Question I think that a lot of our common intuitions about punishment require that pure retribution be considered as one of the goals thereof. It is easy to conceive of scenarios in which punishment does not act (1) as a deterrent to crime or (2) to relieve the suffering of any injured parties. Often it seems that one of the main reasons we have to punish someone is simply our conviction that he somehow "deserves" to suffer. I'm sure that most people don't see this as problematic. Yet I wonder in particular how a utilitarian would address the question of retribution, since it is not obvious (at least to me) just what the utility of retribution is.

Accepted:
October 5, 2008

Comments

I agree that standard utilitarians would find it hard to justify retribution as such, that is, without appeal to such further effects as you mention: deterrence and satisfaction to injured parties. But I do not agree that this leaves many punishments without a utilitarian justification. The problem you see is that "it is easy to conceive of scenarios in which punishment does not act (1) as a deterrent to crime or (2) to relieve the suffering of any injured parties."

In fact, I believe, this is not so easy. Let's start with (2). Suppose someone murders a man who was a bit of a loner and not much liked by the few people who knew him. He won't be missed. So it may seem that punishing the murderer won't give satisfaction to any injured parties because no one is really injured by the man's demise. But this overlooks that there are others who have lost a loved one to murder and others on whose life an attempt has been made. They, too, are injured parties -- not injured, to be sure, by the murderer of our man, but injured by others with murderous intent. And they are likely to get satisfaction from the fact that murderers get caught and punished appropriately. Or so the utilitarian might say in response to you.

Somewhat similar thoughts apply to your (1). Here you may have in mind, perhaps, very rare crimes that virtually no one has any inclination to commit. It may seem that punishing such a crime would not deter anyone. But now imagine that we accepted your argument and stopped punishing crimes that virtually no one has any inclination to commit. Then those who have such very rare inclinations would take notice and feel much freer to follow them. The utilitarian response then is that, by punishing a crime that virtually no one would want to commit we are deterring not merely crimes of this kind, but also all the many other kinds of crimes that almost no one has any inclination to commit.

Perhaps you had another thought in the deterrence case. Perhaps you thought of crimes whose incidence would not be affected by the prospect of punishment. The law does recognize such cases, and does in fact offer leniency when the accused is shown to have been temporarily insane, for example. Utilitarianism would endorse such leniency, but with caution: there is a genuine danger that such leniency can have deleterious effects on deterrence by encouraging prospective criminals to believe that, with some advance planning and a good lawyer, they'll probably be able later in court to create some reasonable doubt about their sanity at the time of their crime.

In conclusion, I do not think that there really are many scenarios of pure retribution where punishment neither strengthens deterrence of crime nor gives satisfaction to any injured parties. With respect to the problem you pose, utilitarianism can account pretty well for our punitive practices. Utilitarianism does poorly, I think, in accounting for the severity of the punishments we mete out. Utilitarians would impose severe punishments when the extra harm to the criminal brings a larger reduction in the harm done by crime. Utilitarians might then impose a very severe punishment for a very slight crime, so long as this punishment has a dramatic impact on the incidence of this crime. An extreme example: imposing the death penalty for not wearing seat belts might cause a good number of executions annually. But it would also terrify millions of current scofflaws into reliably wearing their seat belts, thus saving perhaps many more persons than get executed from dying in accidents. If this were so, utilitarians might approve the death penalty in this case, while it would strike the rest of us as insanely disproportionate.