Retributivist justifications of punishment

[Music] Hi, I’m Barry Lam, associate professor of philosophy at Vassar College, and the producer of Hi-Phi Nation, a show about philosophy that turns stories into ideas. In this video, we’ll examine the idea that the reason the state is justified in punishing people who commit crimes is simply that this gives them what they deserve. Imprisonment for a crime -- what many of us think of when we think of punishment -- is actually a very recent way of punishing people. For much longer, punishment took the form of public shaming like the pillory, or being tarred and feathered. We’ve also had corporal punishments, like canings and whippings, and many forms of capital punishment, like hangings and lethal injections. Some societies today still have versions of those punishments, but the dominant form is now incarceration for weeks, months, or years. What all of these punishments have in common is that they’re purposely violent, harsh, and harmful ways to treat people. Now, lots of things the government does are harmful, like taxing people or building a highway through your neighborhood. Though they’re a burden for people, these harmful measures are not punishment. They aren’t enacted by the state in response to a crime you committed. They’re done for other reasons entirely. So, when we talk about punishment, we’re talking about the state imposing hardships on someone as a response to a crime they committed. This raises an interesting question: How is it that harmful acts that would normally be considered immoral, like imprisonment or even killing someone, often seem appropriate when a state does it? What justifies punishment? According to retributivism, punishment is not only justified -- it’s required! Dishing out punishment is a basic function of the state. Retributivist justifications of punishment claim that culpable wrongdoings in a society are injustices, and whenever an injustice happens, the state is obliged to respond. Punishment is a form of justice. There are also other accounts for what justifies punishment. Some say punishments are good or bad, right or wrong, depending on whether they help to educate or rehabilitate the wrongdoer, or deter future wrongs of this kind. Others say that the justification of punishment depends on the interests of the victim. Retibutivists disagree. In their view, if inflicting a particular hardship on a wrongdoer is something that person deserves, then that’s a good punishment, even if it doesn't do well along the other dimensions. Payback for injustices is a kind of good in itself -- a central part of justice. Advocates of retributivist justice see just punishments as intrinsically morally good responses to wrongdoing. Other moral goods like rehabilitation or deterrence, even victim satisfaction, may be of independent importance, but they aren’t themselves justifications for punishment. The concept of desert, or giving someone what they deserve, is central to retributivist justice. And the concept of desert determines what kind of punishment, and how much of it, is just. According to retributivism, when a person engages in blameworthy wrongdoing, they incur a kind of debt -- to the victim, to society, or maybe even to a cosmic balance of justices and injustices in the world. This wrongdoer has unfairly taken advantage of a person or their society to incur some unfair benefit through their wrong act. The job of the state is to be almost a kind of moral accountant, to take stock of how much unfair benefit this wrongdoer has acquired, and to impose a fair penalty to even the score, pay off the debt, balance the cosmic scale. This balancing out of the cosmic scale by imposing punishments on the wrongdoer is grounded in giving them what they deserve -- their just deserts. The justification for punishing people, then, comes from the intrinsic good of making sure the scales of justice are balanced, and fair for everyone. Retributivism is an intuitively powerful justification of punishment. However, retributivists don’t have a unifying account of how punishments should interact with the other goods we want in society, like rehabilitation, reintegration into society, or deterrence of future crimes. Because sometimes giving people punishments they deserve can undermine these things. What if it turns out that the kind of punishment someone deserves might actually make that person even more likely to offend again, or make it harder for them to reintegrate into society? What if it actually increases the risk of others committing future crimes? Does that still mean we should proceed with the punishment, because justice demands it? This isn’t merely a theoretical issue. Incarceration, the primary form of punishment we have today, is well-documented to undermine many other social goals. Meanwhile, other interventions, like providing college education to inmates, are strongly objected to on the grounds that inmates do not deserve it, even if they are empirically shown to advance these other social goods. So a question that retributivists need to answer is: To what extent should a government pursue justice as desert when it may undermine other important social goods? What do you think? [Music]