Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
- Mortimer Adler's
- Syntopicon
Essays
Punishment:
Editor's
1-minute essay
History's view offers us the general definition:
- Punishment is the infliction of pain with a purpose.
There are, of course, different kinds of pain:
- pain of sense: this would include all forms of physical pain (torture);
- pain of loss: the most common example would be imprisonment, the loss of
freedom.
The principle of "cruel and unusual punishment," a phrase from the U.S.
Constitution, turns on these two kinds of pain with the Founding Fathers decrying torture
as an unbefitting penal method.
However, the great debate of antiquity regarding this idea spotlights:
- the central problem: what is punishment's purpose?
Here we have two major camps of thought:
(1) retribution: this view conceives
punishment as strict justice -- a crime has been committed, and someone must pay. And he
must pay just simply because he did it -- not to reform him, not to deter others,
but to extract a pound of flesh. Punishment, here, in itself, rights a wrong,
and, as such, the punishment must fit the crime; that is, the degree of
punishment will equal the severity of the offense. Those of this persuasion tend to see
life as a grand courtroom drama -- Lady Justice must ever balance her scales of equity,
and it is punishment itself which restores that balance to a moral universe.
(2) prevention: some of the great teachers
reject the above notion and say that punishment is not meant to fit the crime per se but
should fit the criminal. According to Plato, this is "rational
punishment" and its disciples operate only with a regard "to the future."
Punishment, here, never an expression of hostility, becomes a means to make a better
person of the criminal; to reformation; and the deterring of other potential criminals.
This central problem of punishment is not one easily addressed. It may even be
difficult for one to know exactly where one stands on these issues.
The following questions may help one to sort out these various positions:
- If a person were guilty of murder -- but only you had knowledge of this
crime -- and if that person had thoroughly repented of his or her vile deed, would you
punish that person?
- If a person were accused of a crime -- but only you possessed the
knowledge that he or she was, in fact, not guilty -- and if the punishment of
that person would deter many others from crime, thereby saving many innocent ones, would
you punish that person?
- Would you punish someone guilty of a crime if you knew that such (severe)
punishment would, at the end, make him or her a more hardened criminal?
- Two men are guilty of misdeeds, one, a minor offense, the other, major. If you knew
that the one of the minor offense would be better helped by a more severe punishment, and,
contrariwise, the other with a lighter punishment, would you punish them in this
"unequal" manner?
- Editor's special note: the great idea of Punishment is closely
related to mainstream Christianity's understanding of Christ's death and, to a lesser
extent, the meaning of suffering in the world (the reader is directed to Dr. Weatherhead's
works, The Meaning of the Cross and Why Do Men Suffer?). The traditional
significance associated with Christ's death, but only during the last 1000 years, a view
unsupported by Scripture, is one conforming to Punishment's "retribution"; under
this paradigm, a false one, Christ, like a cosmic CPA, "balanced the books" of a
morally deficient humankind.
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