Punishment, criticism and authority

It is always unjust to punish without the right kind of authority over those that one punishes.

Sometimes that authority may be given to us by them (as in the case of a University’s authority over adult students, or maybe even in the case of mutual authority in friendship) and sometimes it may come from some other relationship (as in the case of the state’s authority over us). But in any case, such authority is sparse. The number of entities and persons that have this sort of authority over us is several orders of magnitude smaller than the number of people in society.

This means that typically when we learn that someone is behaving badly, we do not have the authority to punish them. I wonder what this does or does not entail.

Clearly, it does not mean that we are not permitted to criticize them. Criticism as such is not punishment, but the offering of evaluative information. We do not need any authority to state a truth to a random person (though there may be constraints of manners, confidentiality, etc.), including an evaluative truth. But what if that truth is foreseen to hurt? If it is merely foreseen but not intended to hurt, this is still not punishment (it’s more like a Double Effect case). But what if it is also intended to hurt?

Well, not every imposition of pain is a punishment. Nor does every imposition of pain require authority. Suppose I see that you are asleep a hundred meters from me, and I see a deadly snake, for whose bite there is no cure, approaching you. I pull out an air rifle and shoot you in the leg, intending to cause you pain that wakes you up and allows you to escape the snake. Likewise, it could be permissible to offer intentionally hurtful criticism in order to change someone’s behavior without any need for authority (though it may not be often advisable).

But there is a difference between imposing a hurt and doing so punitively. In the air rifle case, the imposition of pain is not punitive. But in the case of criticism, it is psychologically very easy to veer from imposing the criticism for the sake of reformation to a retributive intention. And to impose pain retributively—even in part, and even by truthful words—without proper authority is a violation of justice.

There are two interesting corollaries of the above considerations.

First, we get an apparently new argument against purely reformatory views of punishment. For it seems that the imposition of pain through accurate criticism in order to reform someone’s behavior would count as punishment on a purely reformatory view, and hence would have to require proper authority (unless we deny the thesis I started with, that punishment without authority is unjust).

Second, we get an interesting asymmetry between punishment and reward that I never noticed before. There is nothing unjust about rewarding someone whom we have no authority over when they have done a good thing (though in particular cases it could violate manners, be paternalistic, etc.) In particular, there need be nothing wrong with what one might call retributive praise even in the absence of authority: praise intended to give a pleasure to the person praised as a reward for their good deeds. But for punishment, things are different. This is no surprise, because in general harsh treatment is harder to justify than pleasant treatment.

Separation from God

The worst part of being in hell is separation from God. But Jesus did not become separated from God. So how could his suffering atone in place of our deserved punishment of eternity in hell?

Some theologians, perhaps of a kenotic sort, may hold that Jesus did become separated from God. But this is heterodox.

Here is perhaps a solution: separation from God in hell is the worst part of being in hell, but it’s not a punishment.

As it stands, this would contradict the Catechism of the Catholic Church which states: “The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God” (1035).

But perhaps we can distinguish two senses of punishment: retributive and non-retributive. Suppose that I am vain, and vanity leads to a fall, namely that I become a plagiarist. My plagiarism, then, is a kind of punishment for my pride. It is fitting. It is just. But it is not a retribution for my vanity. Here is one feature of this kind of non-retributive punishment: its lack is not an injustice. Suppose I am vain and instead of this leading to further vice, people notice my ridiculous vanity and start laughing at me, which hurts my feelings badly. In this case, I am much better off than in the case where my vanity led me to plagiarism, since I did not become more vicious. But notice that even though becoming more vicious would have been quite fair, my not becoming more vicious isn’t itself unjust. For it is the omission of due retributive punishment that is unjust.

This distinction in hand, we might say that separation from God in hell is non-retributive punishment. Many authors in the 20th century have argued that hell is a kind of choice one makes rather than a retribution. But with the distinction, we can say that this is true of the separation from God: that is what the wicked have chosen, and it is just that they get it, but it is not retributive punishment. There is, however, retributive punishment in hell, the chief part of which is the pain of separation from God. This pain, however, Christ could be said to suffer, for while not himself actually separated from God, he could take on himself the pain of separation on behalf of others, through perfect empathy.

Third party vengeance

You cannot forgive someone who hasn’t wronged you, and it should follow that likewise you cannot take vengeance on someone who hasn’t wronged you.

But certainly there are actions that look very much like vengeance but that aren’t perpetrated by the victim. The treatment that pedophiles are said to receive in prison is a particularly awful example, but there are also various forms of mob justice on the Internet.

This kind of third party “vengeance” seems worse than ordinary vengeance. Ordinary vengeance is a failure to fulfill the Christian duty of forgiveness, sometimes a violation of procedural justice and sometimes a violation of retributive justice by being disproportionate to the offense. Third party vengeance, however, adds to the wrong-making features of ordinary vengeance one more ingredient: that one lacks the standing for vengeance.

At the same time, third party vengeance looks more like justice than ordinary vengeance due to the unselfish disinterestedness. Moreover, because there is no place for a non-aggrieved party to forgive, third party vengeance is not opposed to forgiveness in the way that ordinary vengeance is. These features only make third party vengeance look better, but in fact make it be worse. The reason for the disinterestedness is that one does not even have any standing for vengeance while the reason for the lack of opposition to forgiveness is that the paradigmatic attitudes that forgiveness forgoes shouldn’t be there in the first place.

It seems to me that just as forgiveness is opposed to ordinary vengeance, there needs to be something opposed to third party vengeance. But this something will be different from forgiveness. While true forgiveness is probably only a duty in the context of Christianity and is otherwise a supererogatory renunciation of certain (hard to specify) attitudes, “third party forgiveness” is something that is demanded by the fact that one lacks the standing for these attitudes. This “third party forgiveness” is akin to one’s duty to “forgive” those who one realizes not to be guilty (whether through lack of culpability or through simply not having done the deed). Thus, failure of third party forgiveness is more serious—even though it may feel more righteous!—than failure of ordinary forgiveness.

A complicating factor, however, is that there is a grain of truth in mob justice: No man is an island. A harm to one member of society is a harm to each. Nonetheless, typical cases of mob justice involve insufficient standing given the degree of harm. Yes, a pedophile by gravely harming a stranger derivatively harms me. But while the grave harm to the child deserves grave penalties, the derivative harm to a stranger is much less, and calls for very little in the way of penalty. (Quick but perhaps not very good argument: We don’t want to say that criminals in Tokyo deserve much, much greater punishments than those in Lichtenstein to account for the Tokyo community having over 200 times more derivative third party victims.)

Avoiding double counting of culpabilities

Here’s an interesting double-counting problem for wrongdoing. Alice stands to inherit a lot of money from a rich uncle in Australia. Bob thinks he stands to inherit a lot of money from a rich uncle in New Zealand. Both of them know that it’s wrong to kill rich uncles for their inheritance, but each of them nonetheless hires a hitman with the instruction to kill the rich uncle. Both hitmen run off with the money and do nothing. But Bob in fact has no uncles—he was misinformed.

Here are some plausible observations:

1. Alice culpably committed two wrongs: she violated her conscience and she wronged her uncle by hiring a hitman to kill him.

2. Bob culpably committed only one of these wrongs: he violated his conscience.

3. Bob is just as morally culpable as Alice.

Here is one way to reconcile these observations. We should distinguish between something like moral failings of the will, on the one hand, and wrongdoings, on the other. It is the moral failings of the will that result in culpability. This culpability then will qualify one or more wrongdoings. But the amount of culpability is not accounted by looking at the culpable wrongdoings, but at the moral failings of the will. A being that executes unalloyed perfect justice will look only at these failings of the will. Alice and Bob each morally failed in the same way and to the same degree (as far as the stories go), and so they are equally culpable. But, nonetheless, Alice has two culpable wrongdoings—culpable through the same moral failing of the will, which should not be double counted for purposes of just punishment.

Van Inwagen on evil

Peter van Inwagen argues that because a little less evil would always serve God’s ends just as well, there is no minimum to the amount of evil needed to achieve God’s ends, and hence the arguer from evil cannot complain that God could have achieved his ends with less evil. Van Inwagen gives a nice analogy of a 10-year prison sentence: clearly, he thinks, a 10-year sentence can be just even if 10 years less a day would achieve all the purposes of the punishment just as well.

I am not convinced about either the punishment or the evil case. Perhaps the judge really shouldn’t choose a punishment where a day less would serve the purposes just as well. I imagine that if we graph the satisfaction of the purposes of punishment against the amount of punishment, we initially get an increase, then a level area, and then eventually a drop-off. Van Inwagen is thinking that the judge is choosing a punishment in the level area. But maybe instead the judge should choose a punishment in the increase area, since only then will it be the case that a lower punishment would serve the purposes of the punishment less well. The down-side of choosing the punishment in that area is that a higher punishment would serve the purposes of the punishment better. But perhaps there is a moral imperative to sacrifice the purposes of punishment to some degree, in the name of not punishing more than is necessary. Mercy is more important than retribution, etc.

Similarly, perhaps, God should choose to permit an amount of evil that sacrifices some of his ends (ends other than the minimization of evil), in order to ensure that the amount of evil that he permits is such that any decrease in the evil would result in a decrease in the satisfaction of God’s other ends. If van Inwagen is right about there not being sharp cut-offs, then this may require God to choose to permit an amount of evil such that more evil would have served God’s other ends better.

The above fits with a picture on which decrease of evil takes a certain priority over the increase of good.

Defeaters and the death penalty

I want to argue that one can at least somewhat reasonably hold this paradoxical thesis:

• The best retributive justice arguments in favor of the death penalty are sound and there are no cases where the death penalty is permissible.

Here is one way in which one could hold the thesis: One could simply think that nobody commits the sorts of crimes that call for the death penalty. For instance, one could hold that nobody commits murder, etc. But it’s pretty hard to be reasonable in thinking that: one would have to deny vast amounts of data. A little less crazily, one could think that the mens rea conditions for the crimes that call for the death penalty are so strict that nobody actually meets them. Perhaps every murderer is innocent by reason of insanity. That’s an improvement over the vast amount of denial that would be involved in saying there are no murders, but it’s still really implausible.

But now notice that the best retributive justice arguments in favor of the death penalty had better not establish that there are crimes such that it is absolutely morally required that one execute the criminal. First, no matter how great the crime, there are circumstances which could morally require us to let the criminal go. If aliens were to come and threaten to destroy all life on earth with the exception of a mass murderer, we would surely have to just leave the mass murderer to divine justice. Second, if the arguments in favor of the death penalty are to be plausible, they had better be compatible with the possibility of clemency.

Thus, the most the best of the arguments can be expected to establish is that there are crimes which generate strong moral reasons of justice to execute the criminal, but the reasons had better be defeasible. One could, however, think that there defeaters occur in all actual cases. Of course, some stories about defeaters are unlikely to be reasonable: one is not likely to reasonably hold that aliens will destroy all of us if we execute someone.

But there could be defeaters that could be more reasonably believed in. Here are some such things that one could believe:

• God commanded us to show a clemency to criminals that in fact precludes the death penalty.

• Criminals being executed are helpless, and killing helpless people—even justly—causes a harm to the killer’s soul that is a defeater for the reasons for the death penalty.

• We are all guilty of offenses that deserve the death penalty—say, mortal sins—and executing someone when one oneself deserves the death penalty is harmful to one’s character in a way that is a defeater for the reasons for the death penalty.

(I myself am open to the possibility that the first of these could actually be the case in New Testament times.)

Two sources of discomfort with substitutionary views of atonement

On one family of theories of the atonement, the harsh treatment that justice called for in the light of our sins is imposed on Christ and thereby satisfies retributive justice. Pretty much everybody who thinks about this is at least a little bit uncomfortable with it—some uncomfortable to the point of moral outrage.

It’s useful, I think, to make explicit two primary sources of discomfort:

1. It seems unjust to Christ that he bear the pain that our sins deserve.

2. It seems unjust that we are left unpunished.

And it’s also useful to note that these two sources of discomfort are largely independent of one another.

I think that those who are uncomfortable to the point of moral outrage are likely to focus on (1). But it is not hard to resolve (1) given orthodox Christology and Trinitarianism. The burden imposed on Christ is imposed by the will of the Father. But the will of the Father in orthodox theology is numerically identical with the will of the Son. Thus, the burden is imposed on Christ by his own divine will, which he then obeys in his own human will. It is thus technically a burden coming from Christ’s own will, and a burden coming from one’s own will for the sake of others does not threaten injustice.

While (2) is also a source of discomfort, I think it is less commonly a discomfort that rises to the level of moral outrage. Maybe some people do feel outrage at the idea that a mass murderer could be left unpunished if she repentantly accepted Christ into her life and were baptised. But I think it tends to be a moral fault if one feels much outrage at leniency shown to a repentant malefactor.

I also think (2) is the much harder problem. Note, for instance, that the considerations of consent that dissolve (1) seem to do little to help with (2). Imagine that I was a filthy rich CEO of a corporation that was knowingly dumping effluent that caused the deaths of dozens of people and I was justly sentenced to twenty years imprisonment. It would clearly be a failure of justice if I were permitted to find someone else and pay her a hundred million dollars to go to prison in place—even though there would no doubt be a number of people who would be very eager, of their own free will, to do that for the price.

It would be nice if I could now go on to solve (2). But my main point was to separate out the two sources of discomfort and note their independence.

That said, I did just now have a thought about (2) while talking to a student. Suppose that you do me a very good turn. I say: “How can I ever repay you?” And you say: “Pass it on. Maybe one day you’ll have a chance to do this for someone else. That will be repayment enough.” If I one day pass on the blessing that I’ve received from you, justice has been done to you. The beneficiary of my passing on the blessing rightly substitutes for you. Maybe there is a mirror version of this on the side of punishment?

Sentencing to time served

Sometimes people are sentenced to “time served”: the time they spent in jail prior to trial is retroactively counted as their sentence. But doesn’t justice call for harsh treatment to be imposed as a punishment? The jail time, however, was not imposed on the malefactor as a punishment—it was imposed on a person presumed innocent to negate a probability of flight. How can it turn into a punishment retroactively?

Well, one solution is to reject a retributive account of punishment. Another is to say that justice is served by such punishment.

But I think there is a less revisionary approach. Instead of saying that justice calls for harsh treatment to be imposed, say that justice calls for one to ensure something harsh happening as a result of the crime. Sometimes, one ensures a state of affairs by causally imposing it. But one can also ensure a state of affairs by verifying the occurrence of the state of affairs while being committed to causing the state of affairs if that were to fail.

This provides a way for a retributivist to accept the intuition that if someone is paralyzed for life as a result of trying to blow a bank vault, there need be no further call to send them to prison—one may be able to ensure more than sufficient punishment simply by verifying that the paralysis occurred as a result of the crime. Another way for the retributivist to accept that intuition would be to say that while we didn’t impose the paralysis on the robber as a punishment, God did. But the move from imposing to ensuring allows the retributivist to avoid mixing up God in human justice here.

Retributive punishment and Christian forgiveness

Start with this argument:

1. Christians ought to forgive all wrongdoing.
2. Forgiving includes foregoing retribution.
3. All ought to forego retribution in the absence of wrongdoing.
4. Therefore, Christians ought in all cases to forego retribution.

And, yet the following also seem true:

5. Retributive justice is central to the concept of punishment.

and:

6. Punishment is often needed for the public good.

What is the Christian to do? Well, one thought is that we should weaken (1). Thomas Aquinas in his sermons on the Lord's Prayer says that we are only required to forgive those who ask us for forgiveness. (After all, Christ tells us to expect God to forgive us as we forgive others; but we do ask God for forgiveness.) Forgiving the unrepentant is supererogatory, he says. That weakens the conflict between the displayed claims. Nonetheless, there are times when the criminal justice system needs to punish someone who we have good reason to think is repentant, because the risks to society of letting her go free may be unacceptably high. Furthermore, Aquinas's modification of (1) doesn't help all that much because the supererogatory is by definition always right. So even with Aquinas's modification of (1), we still seem to get a conflict between forgiveness and the needs of the public good.

Another move, and it may be the most promising, is to distinguish between the individual and the community. Forgiveness is the individual Christian's duty (or at least supererogation--but for brevity I won't consider that option any more), but there are wrongs that, on account of the public good, the community should not forgive. I think this is a quite promising option, but I am not completely convinced. One reason I am not convinced is that Catholic social teaching allows for the possibility of a Christian state, with Vatican City being an example. And there is some plausibility in thinking that the Christian state should behave rather like the Christian individual, but a Christian state has need of punishment for safeguarding the public good. Now maybe forgiveness and punishment are one of the things that varies between the Christian individual and the Christian state, so that the individual should forgive while the state sometimes is not permitted to do so. But it would be good to have another approach.

Think about sports and victory. The very concept of a fencing match cannot be understood apart from seeing it as a practice whose internal end is getting to a score of five before the opponent does. Nonetheless, it is possible to have a friendly and honorable match where no one is intentionally pursuing victory. Rather, the players are exercising their skills in excellent ways that tend to promote victory without actually seeking victory. (The clearest case may be a parent fencing with a child and hoping that the child's skills are so good that the parent will be defeated; but one can have cases where each wants the other to win.)

Similarly, perhaps, just as sports cannot be understood apart from victory, punishment cannot be understood apart from retribution. But just as there are reasons besides victory to play, there are reasons apart from retribution to punish. In those cases, punishment is not intended by the agent. (Another example: I have argued that sex cannot be understood apart from its reproductive end; however, agents can permissibly refrain from pursuing reproduction in particular cases of sex.) This suggests that perhaps we should weaken premise (2) of the initial argument to:

7. Forgiving includes refraining from pursuit of retribution.

The weakened argument only yields the conclusion that Christians ought to refrain from pursuing retribution. But refraining from pursuit of retribution may well be compatible with punishment. And the public goods that render punishment necessary need not include retribution--retribution can be left to the God who says: "Vengeance is mine".

This may be a part of why John Paul II says in Evangelium Vitae that for the death penalty to be justified in some particular (and presumably very rare) case it must be justified on grounds of protection of society. In other words, it is the protection of society, rather than retribution, that is to be sought.

Another start on the problem of evil

According to Socrates the greatest goods and evils are moral ones. Call this the "Socratic thesis". On the Socratic thesis, the worst thing that can befall one is to act culpably wrongly. Now, we may divide up the evils of the world into three classes:

1. Culpable wrongdoings.
2. Harms other than culpable wrongdoings resulting from culpable wrongdoings.
3. Harms neither identical with culpable wrongdoings nor resulting from them.

For instance, if Jones tortures Smith, then Jones suffers a Class 1 evil while Smith suffers a Class 2 evil.

Each of these three classes of evils is very large. I think we can say that if we confine ourselves to evils happening to humans (bracketing the problems of animal suffering and angelic fall): Class 1 is roughly as large as the Class 2 (granted, some culpable wrongdoings result in many harms; but many culpable wrongdoings stay at the level of an evil thought that leads to no harmful action) and also roughly at least as large as Class 3. So roughly, about a third of the evils of the world are in Class 1.

Next notice that we have a theodicy for Class 1 evils: the free will theodicy, in its different versions (straight free will theodicy, soul-building, autonomy, need for love to be a free response, etc.) By the Socratic thesis, we thus have a theodicy for the greatest evils that occur, and these evils are roughly a third of all the evils that occur to humans. This provides us with some inductive reason to think that there is a theodicy for the rest of the evils: if a theodicy can be found for the greatest evils, and indeed for about a third of the evils happening to humans, then the existence of a theodicy for the rest seems more plausible.

Moreover, some versions of the theodicy for Class 1 evils extend to theodicies for many Class 2 evils. First, our free will would be a bit of a sham if it wasn't effective—if evil choices never resulted in in the chosen state of affairs. (This is less plausible for the worst Class 2 evils.) Second, while terribly harms do befall undeserving people, most of the evils that befall are, I suspect, quite deserved. Those evils, then have a justice theodicy, given a freedom theodicy for the actions that deserved them. (This might shift our count of some evils from Class 3 to Class 2, though we might also say that there are evils in Class 3 that do not result from our culpable wrongdoings, but that on account of our culpable wrongdoings weren't prevented by God.)

Speculations on imitation, reflection, symmetry, truth, justice and value

Beartooth Butte / USDA/Forest Service

Imitation is a kind of reflection, and reflection seems to introduce a new symmetry into the world.  Symmetry has value, aesthetic value.  Therefore imitation seems to introduce value.

Wikipedia

Plato thought that the value of an imitation was derivative from the value of what was imitated.  That may be true if one considers the imitation in and of itself.  If the water is perfectly still, an ugly building will have an ugly reflection (if the water is not perfectly still, the natural beauty of the water may improve on the building).  But when one considers the imitation together with the imitated, the resultant symmetry can produce new, additional beauty.  The kaleidoscope is the most obvious example, where beauty arises by reflection from a jumble of shapes.

Thus the revelation of ugliness, as in Picasso's Guernica, when taken together with the horror that it reflects is a greater whole with a kind of grim beauty of symmetry.  This kind of symmetry is a case of truth.  It is aesthetically crucial for Guernica that the horrors it reflects are real.  Truth can have a beauty to it when it is a form of symmetry.  Thus at least sometimes we should take truth to correspond to reality.  

Symmetry, thus, is one way in which the bad and the ugly can become a constituent part of a good, a good that defeats the ugly and moves in the direction of defeating the bad.  Justice, in fitting reward and punishment, provides a further symmetry, a symmetry that also exhibits the aesthetic value of symmetry--we admire this aesthetic value when enjoy works of literature and film that exhibit poetic justice.  But justice has a value going beyond the aesthetic, as surely does truth.

The above show how one can derive an aesthetic value in imitation from the value of symmetry.  One could try to run the derivation in the opposite direction.  Could symmetry just be a form of imitation, and hence take its value from imitation?  First of all, only non-naturalists like theists and Platonists can say this, because a "chance" arrangement of pebbles can exhibit a genuinely beautiful symmetry without there being any imitation there.  The theist can say that Providence is behind the chance arrangement, and hence each symmetric segment of the arrangement can be imitating God in an infinitely imperfect way, while the Platonist can say that both symmetric segments reflect some Form.  But this would put the imitation in the wrong place.  For in the "chance" symmetric arrangement, what is beautiful is not just that each symmetric segment imitates God or the Forms, but that they are symmetric to one another.  This symmetry is not just a mirroring, because mirroring has an essential distinction between the mirror image and reality, with the reality being explanatorily prior, while the segments of an artistically planned symmetric arrangement do not need to have one of them be explanatorily prior to the others.

But, nonetheless, the theist needs to affirm that there is a value in imitation that does not come from the value of symmetry and, further, that there can be cases where imitation has no value of symmetry.  For all creation imitates God, but it does not thereby produce a greater God-and-creation whole (even an ontologically innocent) that exhibits the value of symmetry.  For nothing can add anything to God.  There is no holistic value of which God is component.  God perfectly exhibits the symmetry of three Persons with precisely one essence, and creation's imperfect imitation adds nothing to this perfection.  There is no new valuable symmetry of "God and creation".  Thus while symmetry is valuable in and of itself, imitation can have a value over and beyond the value of symmetry: the imitation of God only highlights the infinite gulf between God and creation rather than creating symmetry.

And so we come back to seeing that Plato may have been right.  The value (aesthetic and otherwise) of the imitation qua imitation, rather than of the imitation qua producer of symmetry, depends on the value of what is being imitated.  Creation as imitation of God exhibits that value, but does not as imitation of God exhibit the value of symmetry.  On the other hand, Guernica has no additional value of imitation qua imitation beyond symmetry, since the horrors of war that are being imitated are ugly and evil.  But at the same time, revelatory imitation of evil can have an additional value qua revelatory, namely the value of truth.

Thus, while there is a tie between imitation and symmetry, and within creation imitation produces a kind of symmetry, we should not derive the value of imitation from that of symmetry nor that of symmetry from that of imitation.  Likewise, truth and retributive justice have values independent of symmetry, though truth about creatures and retribution, whether positive or negative, to creatures seems to always exhibit the value of symmetry as well.

Retributive punishment is good for the evildoer

Everything that God does, he does for the sake of some good.  But to be a good is to be a good for one or more entities.  Thus, everything that God does, he does for the sake of some good for one or more entities.

One of the things God does is retributively punish some sinners.  This is controversial, but I think true, and I shall assume it.  If you don't buy it, then take the following to be an exploration of what would have to be true if God were to punish retributively.

It follows that he does this for the sake of some good for one or more entities that I will call the intended beneficiaries of the punishment.

God cannot be the only intended beneficiary.  For God is transcendent.  His intrinsic well-being is not affected by what happens in the creaturely realm.  If God is a beneficiary of the retributive punishment, it is only in the derivative sense in which anything that benefits someone one loves counts as benefiting oneself.

What are the remaining options for the intended beneficiary?  I think the only plausible ones are: the sinners themselves, the victims of the sin, and bystanders.

But the sin need have no victim beside the sinner.  It could, for instance, be a sin of blasphemy against God (and while the sin is against God, God is not victimized).  And God is not the only intended beneficiary.  So the victims of the sin cannot be the only beneficiaries.

How about bystanders?  Tertullian suggested that the saints in heaven will rejoice at the suffering of the wicked.  But a virtuous person rejoices only at something that is good for reasons independent of the rejoicing.  Hence the primary good of the punishment of the wicked cannot be that it enables rejoicing by the righteous.  Moreover, it would surely be possible for God to punish someone without there being any bystanders--for instance, God could have chosen to create only one person, and if this person sinned, God could have punished this person.

That leaves the sinner.

Of course, sometimes punishment benefits the person being punished by leading her to repentance.  But if that was the only good being pursued by God in punishing the sinner, then that would not be a case of retributive punishment.

I think the only remaining option is that retributive punishment is simply good in and of itself for the person receiving it.  It is good for one to get what one deserves, be it punishment or reward.  Think of the case of reward.  If you have done something good, and I reward you for it by giving you a gift, the value of the reward for you is not just the value of the item that I've given you--it is the value of the item as a reward from me for your good deeds.  Likewise, if you have done something wicked, and I have the authority to punish you for it by imposing harsh treatment on you, while the harsh treatment as mere harsh treatment has a disvalue, the fact that it is harsh treatment given as a punishment from me for your wicked deeds has a value, and it is a value for you (it's surely not a value for me, nor necessarily for the victims or bystanders).

Of course it is possible to receive something of value without appreciating its value.  The repentant sinner appreciates the value of justly deserved harsh treatment--that is, in fact, one of the signs of a criminal's repentance--but the unrepentant sinner does not appreciate it.  But it has a value, nonetheless.  If it didn't, it wouldn't be a sign of vice that one does not appreciate it.

Crime and punishment

Consider this valid argument:

1. If you deserve F from me, then F is owed[note 1] by me to you. (Premise)
2. If I owe F to you, then F is good for you. (Premise)
3. Therefore, if you deserve punishment from me, then punishment is good for you. (By 1 and 2)

Are the premises true? Where F is a reward or praise, (1) is true. There is some plausibility to the idea that the structure of punishment mirrors that of praise, and if so then (1) is true at least in the case where F is punishment, which is all I need for the argument.

Premise (2) has something plausible about it. How could I owe you a negative debt—that would be a case of your owing me something?

Here is another argument. Start with the following assumption:

4. It is wrong to intentionally impose an overall harm on another when nobody has a non-Cambridge benefit from this harm. (Premise)

Now suppose George, Jeff and Philippa are the only persons in existence (this is a per impossibile supposition since God exists necessarily), and suppose that they are persons who have no afterlife (death is the end of existence). Suppose George murders Jeff. Then it is appropriate for Philippa to punish George. Moreover, it is appropriate for her to do so on retributive grounds—she has strong reason to punish George even if George poses no danger to her and even if George is unlikely to repent of the crime due tot he punishment. Punishing George imposes a harm on George, and does not benefit Philippa (unless punishing George is good for independent reasons, in which case she is benefited by doing a virtuous action, virtue being its own reward; however, this benefit cannot be one that is cited in justification of the action, since that would be viciously circular). But the punishment is not wrong. Hence, George must also be receiving a benefit from the punishment, besides the harm.

I do incline to the view that retributive punishment is non-instrumentally good for the person punished. I am suspicious of the first argument—it's too easy—and the second might be question-begging against many opponents. But I wanted to put these arguments out there.

Frustrating the designs of the wicked

Here is an account of retributive punishment. We have a prima facie duty of justice to disrupt wicked plans. Now, a typical wicked plan does not have evil as its end, but as one of the means towards that end—"Embezzle in order to have more money." The best option is to disrupt evil plans before the evil means has been implemented. But even if the evil means has already been implemented, the plan may not be complete, since the good end has yet to be reached. And so while it is not possible to stop the evil, it still is possible to frustrate the wicked plan, by ensuring that a desired end does not flow from the evil means.

Suppose the thesis that when people act wickedly, they do so at least in part to contribute to their own satisfaction. Then, satisfaction is one of the ends in the wicked action (there may be others), and by making the evildoer miserable (e.g., by putting her in jail or requiring that she write out "I will not embezzle money from my employer" once for every dollar stolen), we are frustrating her plan—we are ensuring that at least one of the ends does not follow from her evil means.

But notice that here the frustrating of the designs goes beyond just ensuring the designs are not successful. In punishment, we frustrate the designs by turning them upside-down—not just by making sure that the evildoer is actually not satisfied, but by ensuring she is dissatisfied. But why is this right? The mere idea of frustrating the designs of the wicked does not seem to require this. Yet it seems just.