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Course: Wireless Philosophy > Unit 8
Lesson 6: Retributivist justifications of punishmentRetributivist justifications of punishment
In this wireless philosophy video, Barry Lam (Vassar College, Hi-Phi Nation podcast) examines the claim that the reason the state is justified in punishing people who commit crimes is simply that this gives the offenders what they deserve.
View our punishment learning module and other videos in this series here: https://www.wi-phi.com/modules/punishment/. Created by Gaurav Vazirani.
Video transcript
[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]