Punishment, reward and theistic natural law

I’ve always found punishment and (to a lesser extent) reward puzzling. Why is it that when someone does something wrong is there moral reason to impose a harsh treatment on them, and why is it that when someone does something right—and especially supererogatory—is there moral reason to do something nice for them?

Of course, it’s easy to explain why it’s good for our species that there be a practice of reward and punishment: such a practice in obvious ways helps to maintain a cooperative society. But what makes it morally appropriate to impose a sacrifice on the individual for the good of the species in this way, whether the good of the person receiving the punishment or the good of the person giving the reward when the reward has a cost?

Punishment and reward thus fit into a schema where we would like to be able to make use of this argument form:

1. It would be good (respectively, bad) for humans if moral fact F did (did not) obtain.

2. Thus, probably, moral fact F does obtain.

(The argument form is better on the parenthetical negative version.) It would be bad for humans if we did not have distinctive moral reasons to reward and punish, since our cooperative society would be more liable to fall apart due to cheating, freeriding and neglect of others. So we have such moral reasons.

As I have said on a number of occasions, we want a metaethics on which this is a good argument. Rule-utilitarianism is such a metaethics. So is Adams’ divine command theory with a loving God. And so is theistic natural law, where God chooses which natures to exemplify because of the good features in these natures. I want to say something about this last option in our case, and why it is superior to the others.

Human nature encodes what is right and wrong for. Thus, it can encode that it is right for us to punish and reward. An answer as to why it’s right for us to reward and punish, then, is that God wanted to make cooperative creatures, and chose a nature of cooperative creatures that have moral reasons to punish and reward, since that improves the cooperation.

But there is a way that the theistic natural law solution stands out from the others: it can incorporate Boethius’ insight that it is intrinsically bad for one to get away unpunished with wrongdoing. For our nature not only encodes what is right and wrong for us to do, but also what is good or bad for us. And so it can encode that it is bad for us to get away unpunished. It is good for us that it be bad for us to get away unpunished, since its being bad for us to get away unpunished means that we have additional reason to avoid wrongdoing—if we do wrong, we either get punished or we get away unpunished, and both options are bad for us.

The rule-utilitarian and divine-command options only explain what is right and wrong, not what is good and bad, and so they don’t give us Boethius’ insight.